CrossTech

Was outraged (outraged, I tell you) that one of my favorite online comics, PhD, didn't include DOIs in their recent bibliography of Christmas-related citations.. So I've compiled them below.

We care about these things so that you don't have to. Bet you will sleep better at night knowing this.

Or perhaps not...

A Christmas Reading List... with DOIs.

Citation:  Biggs, R, Douglas, A, Macfarlane, R, Dacie, J, Pitney, W, Merskey, C & O'Brien, J, 1952, 'Christmas Disease', BMJ, vol. 2, no. 4799, pp. 1378-1382.
CrossRef DOI:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.2.4799.1378

Title:  More Than a Labor of Love: Gender Roles and Christmas Gift Shopping
Citation:  Fischer, E & Arnold, S, 1990, 'More Than a Labor of Love: Gender Roles and Christmas Gift Shopping', Journal of Consumer Research, vol. 17, no. 3, p. 333.
CrossRef DOI:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/208561

Title:  Looking at Christmas trees in the nucleolus
Citation:  Scheer, U, Xia, B, Merkert, H & Weisenberger, D, 1997, 'Looking at Christmas trees in the nucleolus', Chromosoma, vol. 105, no. 7-8, pp. 470-480.
CrossRef DOI:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s004120050209

Title:  The Vela glitch of Christmas 1988
Citation:  McCulloch, P, Hamilton, P, McConnell, D & King, E, 1990, 'The Vela glitch of Christmas 1988', Nature, vol. 346, no. 6287, pp. 822-824.
CrossRef DOI:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/346822a0

Title:  Cardiac Mortality Is Higher Around Christmas and New Year's Than at Any Other Time: The Holidays as a Risk Factor for Death
Citation:  Phillips, D, 2004, 'Cardiac Mortality Is Higher Around Christmas and New Year's Than at Any Other Time: The Holidays as a Risk Factor for Death', Circulation, vol. 110, no. 25, pp. 3781-3788.
CrossRef DOI:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1161/01.CIR.0000151424.02045.F7

Title:  Red Crabs in Rain Forest, Christmas Island: Biotic Resistance to Invasion by an Exotic Snail
Citation:  Lake, P & O'Dowd, D, 1991, 'Red Crabs in Rain Forest, Christmas Island: Biotic Resistance to Invasion by an Exotic Snail', Oikos, vol. 62, no. 1, p. 25.
CrossRef DOI:  http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3545442

Title:  The Carvedilol Hibernation Reversible Ischaemia Trial, Marker of Success (CHRISTMAS) study Methodology of a randomised, placebo controlled, multicentre study of carvedilol in hibernation and heart failure
Citation:  Pennell, D, 2000, 'The Carvedilol Hibernation Reversible Ischaemia Trial, Marker of Success (CHRISTMAS) study Methodology of a randomised, placebo controlled, multicentre study of carvedilol in hibernation and heart failure', International Journal of Cardiology, vol. 72, no. 3, pp. 265-274.
CrossRef DOI:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0167-5273(99)00198-9

Posted by Geoffrey Bilder at 06:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Inspired by Google's recent promotion of QR Codes, I thought it might be fun to experiment with encoding a CrossRef DOI and a bit of metadata into one of the critters. I've put a short write-up of the experiment on the CrossRef Labs site, which includes a demonstration of how you can generate a QR Code for any given CrossRef DOI.

Put them on postcards and send them to your friends for the holidays. Tattoo them on your pets. The possibilities are endless.

Posted by Geoffrey Bilder at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I was happy to read David Shotton's recent Learned Publishing article, Semantic Publishing: The Coming Revolution in scientific journal publishing, and see that he and his team have drafted a Citation Typing Ontology.^*

Anybody who has seen me speak at conferences knows that I often like to proselytize about the concept of the "typed link", a notion that hypertext pioneer, Randy Trigg, discussed extensively in his 1983 Ph.D. thesis.. Basically, Trigg points out something that should be fairly obvious- a citation (i.e. "a link") is not always a "vote" in favor of the thing being cited.

In fact, there are all sorts of reasons that an author might want to cite something. They might be elaborating on the item cited, they might be critiquing the item cited, they might even be trying to refute the item cited (For an exhaustive and entertaining survey of the use and abuse of citations in the humanities, Anthony Grafton's, The Footnote: A Curious History, is a rich source of examples)

Unfortunately, the naive assumption that a citation is tantamount to a vote of confidence has become inshrined in everything from the way in which we measure scholarly reputation, to the way in which we fund universities and the way in which search engines rank their results. The distorting affect of this assumption is profound. If nothing else, it leads to a perverse situation in which people will often discuss books, articles, and blog postings that they disagree with without actually citing the relevant content, just so that they can avoid inadvertently conferring "wuffie" on the item being discussed. This can't be right.

Having said that, there has been a half-hearted attempt to introduce a gross level of link typology with the introduction of the "nofollow" link attribute- an initiative started by Google in order to try to address the increasing problem of "Spamdexing". But this is a pretty ham-fisted form of link typing- particularly in the way it is implemented by the Wikipedia where CrossRef DOI links to formally published scholarly literature have a "nofollow" attribute attached to them but, inexplicably, items with a PMID are not so hobbled (view the HTML source of this page, for example). Essentially, this means that, the Wikipedia is a black-hole of reputation. That is, it absorbs reputation (through links too the Wikipedia), but it doesn't let reputation back out again. Hell, I feel dirty for even linking to it here ;-).

Anyway, scholarly publishers should certainly read Shotton's article because it is full of good, and practical ideas about what can can be done with today's technology in order to help us move beyond the "digital incunabula" that the industry is currently churning out. The sample semantic article that Shotton's team created is inspirational and I particularly encourage people to look at the source file for the ontology-enhanced bibliography which reveals just how much more useful metadata can be associated with the humble citation.

And now I wonder whether CiteULike, Connotea, 2Collab or Zotero will consider adding support for the CItation Typing Ontology into their respective services?

* Disclosure:

a) I am on the editorial board of Learned Publishing
b) CrossRef has consulted with David Shotton on the subject of semantically enhancing journal articles

Posted by Geoffrey Bilder at 06:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Very cool to see Alexander Griekspoor releasing an iPhone version of his award-winning Papers application. A while ago Alex intigrated DOI metadata lookup into the Mac version of papers and now I can get a silly thrill from seeing CrossRef DOIs integrated in an iPhone app. Alex has just posted a preview video of the iPhone application and it includes a cameo appearance by a DOI. Yay.

Posted by Geoffrey Bilder at 09:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I wanted to make some remarks about the "Ease of use" and "Learn curve" ratings which I gave in the ORE/POWDER comparison table that I blogged about here the other day. It may seem that I came out a little harsh on ORE and a little easy on POWDER. I just wanted to rationalize the justification for calling it that way. (By the way, the revised comparison table includes a qualification to those ratings.)

My primary interest was from the perspective of a data provider rather than a data consumer. What does it take to get a resource description document ("resource map", "description resource" or "sitemap") ready for publication?

(Continues)

Continue reading "ORE/POWDER: Remarks on Ratings" »

Posted by Tony Hammond at 08:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Following right on from yesterday's post on ORE and POWDER, I've attempted to map the worked examples in the ORE User Guide for RDF/XML (specifically Sect. 3) to POWDER to show that POWDER can be used to model ORE, see

Resource Maps Encoded in POWDER

This could just all be sheer doolally or might possibly turn out to have a modicum of instructional value – I don't know. (It would be real good to get some feedback here.) There are, however, a couple points to note in mapping ORE to POWDER:

1. The POWDER form is actually more long-winded because it splits the RDF triples into subject and predicate/object divisions, with the first listed within an <iriset> and the second within a <descriptorset>. The net effect, however, may be somewhat cleaner since POWDER uses a simple XML format rather than RDF/XML.
   
2. POWDER only supports simple object types (literals or resources) so the blank nodes in the RDF/XML examples for <dcterms:creator> cannot be mapped as such. I have chosen here to use either <foaf:name> or <foaf:page> value.
   
3. Likewise, and as far as I am aware, POWDER does not support datatyping but I could be wrong on this. I have thus dropped the datatypes on <dcterms:created> and <dcterms:modified>.
   

Posted by Tony Hammond at 07:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I've been reading up on POWDER recently (the W3C Protocol for Web Description Resources) which is currently in last call status (with comments due in tomorrow). This is an effort to describe groups of Web resources and as such has clear similarities to the Open Archives Initiative ORE data model, which has been blogged about here before.

In an attempt to better understand the similarities (and differences) between the two data models, I've put up the table

A Comparison of Description Mechanisms for URI Collections

This is very much a draft document and I will aim to update the table based on my own further reading and on any feedback that I may get (contributions gratefully received). I'm all too aware that my understanding of the respective data models is painfully limited and I, for one, hope to profit through this exercise. There will be certainly errors which I will aim to fix as soon as I get wind of them. :)

By the way, the ORE work especially is of interest to CrossRef members and has obvious synergies with the multiple resolution potential that DOI has long promised but not quite delivered on.

Posted by Tony Hammond at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

So the other day Noel O'Boyle made me feel guilty when he pinged me and asked about the possibility using one of the CrossRef APIs for creating a Ubiquity extension. You see, I had played with the idea myself and had not gotten around to doing much about it. This seemed inexcusable- particularly given how easy it is to build such extensions using the API we developed for the WordPress and Moveable Type plugins that we announced earlier in the year. So I dug up my half-finished code, cleaned it up a bit and have posted the results.

Note that the back-end that supports the plugins has been moved to more stable machines and the index is now being automatically updated with journal and conference proceeding deposits (sorry, no books yet).

Also note that we are hoping that others will look at the code for the WordPress, Moveable Type and Ubiquity plugins and create more such extensions. If you do, please let us know about them at citation-plugin@crossref.org.

Posted by Geoffrey Bilder at 02:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So, Google's Knol is now live (see this announcement on Google's Blog). There'll be comment aplenty about the merits of this service and how it compares to other user contributed content sites. But one curious detail struck me. In terms of citeability, compare how a Knol contribution (or "knol") may be linked to as may be a corresponding entry in Wikipedia (here I've chosen the subject "Eclipse"):

Knol

http://knol.google.com/k/jay-pasachoff/eclipse/IDZ0Z-SC/wTLUGw

Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eclipse

I am minded of this post on Jeff Young's Q6 which cites this passage from the HTTP spec (see RFC 2616, Sect. 3.2):

"As far as HTTP is concerned, Uniform Resource Identifiers are simply formatted strings which identify--via name, location, or any other characteristic--a resource."

Posted by Tony Hammond at 04:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Roy Tennant in a post to XML4Lib announces a new list of library APIs hosted at

http://techessence.info/apis/

Posted by Tony Hammond at 05:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For anybody interested in the why's and wherefore's of OpenURL, Jeff Young at OCLC has started posting over on his blog Q6: 6 Questions - A simpler way to understand OpenURL 1.0: Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How. He's already amassing quite a collection of thought provoking posts. His latest is The Potential of OpenURL, from which:

"OpenURL has effectively cornered the niche market where Referrers need to be decoupled from Resolvers."

Posted by Tony Hammond at 04:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I just ran across the final report from the CLADDIER project. CLADDIER comes from the JISC and stands for "CITATION, LOCATION, And DEPOSITION IN DISCIPLINE & INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES". I suspect JISC has an entire department dedicated to creating impossible acronyms (the JISC Acronym Preparation Executive?)

Anyhoo- the report describes a distributed citation location and updating service based on the linkback mechanism that is widely used in the blogging community.

I think this is an interesting approach and is one that I talked about briefly (PDF) at the UKSG's Measure for Measure seminar last June. I think that, like most proponents of p2p distributed architectures, they massively underestimate the problem of trust in the network. They fully knowledge the problem of linkback spam, but their hand-wavy-solution(tm) of using whitelists just means the system effectively becomes semi-centralized again (you have to have trusted keepers of the whitelists).

And of course I was mildly exasperated by the report's characterization of one of the perceived "disadvantages" of the CrossRef architectural model being a :

"Centralised service hosting a large persistent store – with the need for a (possibly commercial) business model to justify providing the service."

Though DOI registries like Bowker and Nielsen Bookdata are commercial, CrossRef, the organization that services the industry that the JISC is concerned with, is *not* a commercial service.

Also if you replaced the phrase "justify providing" with the word "sustain", the sentence wouldn't sound like such a "disadvantage."

But aside from these quibbles, the report makes an interesting (if technical) read.

Posted by at 03:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've just returned from Frankfurt Book fair and noticed that there has been some recent popular interest in the The NLM Style Guide for Authors, Editors and Publishers recommendations concerning citing blogs.

Which reminds me of an issue that has periodically been raised here at CrossRef- should we be doing something to try and provide a service for reliably citing more ephemeral content such as blogs, wikis, etc.?

Continue reading "NLM Blog Citation Guidelines" »

Posted by at 05:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

The first thing to note is that this demo (the Acrobat plugin) is an application. And that comes with its own baggage, i.e. this is a Windows only plugin and is targeted at Acrobat Reader 8. On a wider purview the application merely bridges an identifier embedded in the media file and the handle record filed against that identifier and delivers some relevant functionality. The data (or metadata) declared in the PDF and in the associated handle if rich enough and structured openly can also be used by other applications. I think this is a key point worth bearing in mind, that the demo besides showing off new functionalities is also demonstrating how data (or metadata) can be embedded at the respective endpoints (PDF, handle).

Some initial observations follow below.

Continue reading "Handle Plugin: Some Notes" »

Posted by Tony Hammond at 09:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I posted here about an initial meeting of the OAI-ORE Technical WG back in January. ORE is the "Object Reuse and Exchange" initiative which is aiming to provide a formalism for describing scholarly works as complete units (or packages) of information on the Web using resource maps which would be available from public access points. From a DOI perspective this work is intimately connected with multiple resolution. For further updates on this work, see here for a presentation by Herbert Van de Sompel on OAI-ORE at the OAI5 Workshop (5th Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication) held a couple weeks back at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland.

The presentation gives an insight regarding the problem domain in which ORE operates, and in the evolving thinking regarding potential solutions. The presentation was recorded on video and is available for both streaming and download (slides, streaming video, video download).

Note that Michael Nelson of Old Dominion University also presented on behalf of the ORE effort at the recent CNI Task Force Meeting and at the DLF Forum.

Posted by Tony Hammond at 06:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Was just reminded (thanks, Tim) of the possibility of using a special tag in bookmarking services to tag links to documents of interest to a given community. I think this is a fairly well-established practice. Note that e.g. the OAI-ORE project is using Connotea to bookmark pages of interest and tagging them "oaiore" which can then be easily retrieved using the link http://www.connotea.org/tag/oaiore.

I would suggest that CrossRef members might like to consider using the tag "crosstech" in bookmarking pages about publishing technology, so that the following links might be used to retrieve documents of interest to this readership:

• del.icio.us - http://del.icio.us/tag/crosstech
  
• CiteULike - http://www.citeulike.org/tag/crosstech
  
• Connotea - http://www.connotea.org/tag/crosstech
  
• etc.
  

Posted by Tony Hammond at 08:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Following up on his earlier post (which was also blogged to CrossTech here), Leigh Dodds is now proposing the possibility of using machine-readable auto-discovery type links for DOIs of the form

<link rel="bookmark" title="DOI" href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1000/1"/>

These LINK tags are placed in the document HEAD section and could be used by crawlers and agents to recognize the work represented by the current document. This sounds like a great idea and we'd like to hear feedback on it.

Concurrently at Nature we have also been considering how best to mark up in a machine-readable way DOIs appearing within a document page BODY. Current thinking is to do something along the following lines:

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nprot.2007.43">
<abbr title="Digital Object Identifier">doi</abbr>:
<abbr class="uri" id="doi" title="info:doi/10.1038/nprot.2007.43">10.1038/nprot.2007.43</abbr>
</a>

which allows the DOI to be presented in the preferred CrossRef citation format (doi:10.1038/nprot.2007.43), to be hyperlinked to the handle proxy server (http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nprot.2007.43), and to refer to a validly registered URI form for the DOI (info:doi/10.1038/nprot.2007.43). Again, we would be real interested to hear any opinions on this proposal for inline DOI markup as well as on Leigh's proposal for document-level DOI markup.

(Oh, and btw many congrats to Leigh on his recent promotion to CTO, Ingenta.)

Posted by Tony Hammond at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Leigh Dodds proposes in this post some solutions to persistent linking using web crawlers and social bookmarking.

"When I use del.icio.us, CiteULike, or Connotea or other social bookmarking service, I end up bookmarking the URL of the site I'm currently using. Its this specific URL that goes into their database and associated with user-assigned tags, etc.

...

A more generally applicable approach to addressing this issue, one that is not specific to academic publishing, would be to include, in each article page, embedded metadata that indicates the preferred bookmark link. The DOI could again be pressed into service as the preferred bookmarking link."

He's inviting feedback. I'd certainly like to hear what others may think of these suggestions.

Posted by Tony Hammond at 08:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jon Udell interviews Dan Chudnov about OpenURL, see his blog entry: "A conversation with Dan Chudnov about OpenURL, context-sensitive linking, and digital archiving". The podcast of the interview is available here.

Interesting to see these kind of subjects beginning to be covered by a respected technology writer like Jon. As he says in his post:

"I have ventured into this confusing landscape because I think that the issues that libraries and academic publishers are wrestling with — persistent long-term storage, permanent URLs, reliable citation indexing and analysis — are ones that will matter to many businesses and individuals. As we project our corporate, professional, and personal identities onto the web, we’ll start to see that the long-term stability of those projections is valuable and worth paying for."

Posted by Tony Hammond at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Simon Willison has a great piece here about disambiguating URLs. Best practice on creating and publishing URLs is obviously something of interest to any publisher. See this excerpt from Simon's post:

"Here's a random example, plucked from today's del.icio.us popular. convinceme.net is a new online debating site (tag clouds, gradient fills, rounded corners). It's listed in del.icio.us a total of four times!

Combined that's 433 saves; much more impressive, and more likely to end up at the top of a social sharing sites."

Posted by Tony Hammond at 04:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)