CrossRef Blog

2 August 2011, Lynnfield, MA USA--CrossRef, the association of scholarly publishers that provides reference linking, today announced an update to its Digital Object Identifier (DOI) online display guidelines.

The new guidelines encourage CrossRef member publishers, affiliates, and others in the scholarly community to display CrossRef DOIs as full URLs in the online environment. (A CrossRef DOI is a persistent link to scholarly content.) To create a DOI URL, anyone can simply prepend http://dx.doi.org/ to any DOI.

"The new format will make it easier for researchers to know what to do with a CrossRef DOI wherever they encounter it," according to CrossRef Executive Director Ed Pentz. "Whether or not they know what CrossRef is, or what a DOI is, they will be able to simply click on the link."

This change will allow users to copy permanent CrossRef DOI links from HTML pages to emails, blogs, reference management software and other applications. In addition, mobile device users will be able to take advantage of the citation linking system already in place for scholarly publications on the web.

"Displaying CrossRef DOIs as links simplifies navigation in scholarly publications for humans and machines alike. Though these guidelines are recommendations, and not requirements, we encourage everyone who uses CrossRef DOIs in online content and applications to adopt them," Pentz added.

The guidelines supersede the previous practice of displaying "doi:" in front of CrossRef DOIs. Early DOI adopters had anticipated that "doi:" would become a formal URI scheme so that WWW browsers would link CrossRef DOIs in this form, which has not happened.

"The old format was confusing for users, since it did not automatically become a link in web browsers," noted Pentz.

The revised guidelines also include several examples of how CrossRef DOIs should be displayed in reference lists.

"We understand that different publishers have different publications styles and different usability concerns, so we have made the guidelines flexible enough to accommodate these varying needs. A group of publishers and other organizations have given careful thought to this change to ensure that CrossRef DOIs are as useful as possible to scholars," Pentz explained.

The complete CrossRef DOI Display Guidelines can be found on the CrossRef web site.

About CrossRef
CrossRef (http://www.crossref.org) is a not-for-profit membership association of publishers. Since its founding in 2000, CrossRef has provided reference linking services for nearly 48 million content items, including journal articles, books and book chapters, conference proceedings, reference entries, technical reports, standards, and data sets. CrossRef's goal is to be a trusted collaborative organization with broad community connections; authoritative and innovative in support of a persistent, sustainable infrastructure for scholarly communication.

CONTACT: Carol Anne Meyer, info@crossref.org, +1 781-295-0072 x23, Fax: +1 781-295-0077, www.crossref.org, twitter: @CrossRefNews

Posted by Anna Tolwinska at 4:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

20 April 2011, Lynnfield, MA USA-CrossRef and the International DOI Foundation (IDF) have announced that all 46 million CrossRef Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) are now enabled for use in linked data applications, effective immediately.

The term "linked data" describes a set of best practices for exposing data in machine-readable form using the standard HTTP web protocol. These best practices support the development of tools to link and make use of data from multiple web sources without the need to deal with many different proprietary and incompatible application programming interfaces (APIs).

"We are delighted with this collaboration," says Geoffrey Bilder, Director of Strategic Initiatives at CrossRef. "By making sure that CrossRef DOIs can be used according to linked data principles, we hope to encourage linked data applications to make use of CrossRef DOIs as the basis for standard, persistent citations to the content our members publish on the web. We look forward to other DOI Registration Agencies (RAs) enabling similar functionality so that their members' content also be persistently linked to by linked data tools."

Norman Paskin of the IDF commented, "We feel that a significant advantage of applying Linked Data principles and technologies to DOI-registered material is that it is 'data worth linking to': it is curated, value-added, data, which is managed, corrected, updated and consistently maintained by Registration Agencies. It is also persistent, so avoiding 'bit-rot'. This significant announcement by CrossRef is part of improvements the International DOI Foundation is continuing to make to facilitate more sophisticated uses of a DOI."

How It Works
The Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), the IDF, and CrossRef have enabled the DOI web proxy (which is located at http://dx.doi.org) to support content negotiation for DOIs. In the early days of the web, human beings were following most URLs, and it made sense that the DOI web proxy only resolved CrossRef DOIs to human-readable web pages. Now, however, a program is just as likely to follow a URL as a person is. The program may have to scrape the HTML landing page that was designed for humans for data that it needs. This aproach is suboptimal and error-prone. The solution for this problem until now has been that CrossRef and other RAs have provided a variety of APIs that allow programs to query for DOIs and receive machine-readable content in return. Some examples of these APIs include OpenURL and piped queries.

The problem with these APIs is that they require programmers to familiarize themselves with sometimes extensive API documentation that varies from one data provider to the next. This approach is not scalable when dealing with many sources of information. Content negotiation helps because it is a standard part of the HTTP protocol that underlies the web. A program can now resolve a DOI through the standard web proxy and specify that the data should be returned in a machine-readable format, and the programmer can use the same methods they use for querying for data on any linked-data-enabled site.

Current users will notice no difference in the behavior of the DOI resolver system unless they explicitly start using content negotiation, thus ensuring backwards compatibility.

An important feature of the implementation is that either the RA responsible for the DOI or the organization to whom the content identified by the DOI belongs can respond to any content negotiation request. Initially, programs requesting machine-readable data from CrossRef DOIs using content negotiation will receive the metadata that the CrossRef member publisher has registered at CrossRef. As publishers start to implement content negotiation on their own sites, they may want to return richer and more complete representations of their content, at which point CrossRef can direct content-negotiated requests directly to the publishers' sites.

For further detail and examples please visit
http://www.crossref.org/CrossTech/2011/04/content_negotiation_for_crossr.html
About CrossRef
CrossRef (http://www.crossref.org) is a not-for-profit membership association of publishers. Since its founding in 1999, CrossRef has provided reference linking services for more than 46 million content items, including journal articles, conference proceedings, books, book chapters, reference entries, technical reports, standards, and data sets. CrossRef's goal is to be a trusted collaborative organization with broad community connections; authoritative and innovative in support of a persistant, sustainable infrastructure for scholarly communication.

CONTACT: Carol Anne Meyer, info@crossref.org, +1 781-295-0072 x23, Fax: +1 781-295-0077, www.crossref.org, twitter: @CrossRefNews

Posted by Carol Anne Meyer at 9:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

CrossRef Reaches 1000 Member Milestone.
Learn more.

Posted by Anna Tolwinska at 4:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

11 September 2009, Lynnfield, MA USA—CrossRef has collaborated with archiving organizations and publishers to ensure that several journals that have ceased publication remain linkable with the CrossRef DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) originally assigned to the articles. The titles include Auto/Biography and Graft from SAGE and Brief Treatment and Crisis Intervention from Oxford University Press (OUP). All three titles are now available through both CLOCKSS and Portico.

An archive "trigger event" occurs when a published journal or other content is no longer available from the publisher. Trigger events can occur for a variety of reasons. Both SAGE and OUP have had agreements in place with archive organizations for several years, but the discontinuation of these titles marked the first time those arrangements had been implemented with real-world cases.

Continue reading "CrossRef Collaborates with SAGE, OUP, CLOCKSS and Portico to Light Up Archive for Discontinued Journal Articles" »

Posted by Anna Tolwinska at 9:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

29 July 2009, Lynnfield, MA USA—For the second year in a row CrossRef deposits for books are growing faster than any other content type in the reference linking system. As of July 2009, more than 1.8 million CrossRef Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) have been assigned for books.

Continue reading "CrossRef Hits the Books—Deposits Grow, Guidelines Released" »

Posted by Anna Tolwinska at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From the news release:

“CrossCheck has, in a very short space of time, become an invaluable editorial tool in BMJ Group's content acquisition processes, enabling both pre- and post-publication content checking,” said Phil Caisley, Head of Information Services, BMJ Group. “It’s used across our business, providing the means by which we can protect our reputation as a publisher of original content, protect our published content from potential downstream misuse, and protect our authors' reputations. CrossCheck's value increases with each additional publisher who joins the community, and BMJ Group is proud to be a mem

See the CrossCheck web page for more information.

Posted by Carol Anne Meyer at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Council of Science Editors (CSE) bestowed its Meritorious Achievement Award on CrossRef at its annual meeting in Pittsburgh last week.

CrossRef Staff in Lynnfield, Massachusetts display the CSE Award for Meritorious Achievement.

Read the news release.

Posted by Carol Anne Meyer at 5:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Two big CrossCheck announcements broke this week. First, the plagiarism screening service powered by iThenticate, has surpassed 50 publisher participants with the addition of the American Psychological Association. See the news release for more details.

ALso, Lippincott Williams & Wilkins announced their partnership with CrossRef to fight plagiarism and ensure authenticity of medical literature. More information is available from the LWW news release.

Posted by Carol Anne Meyer at 9:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

LYNNFIELD MA, June 19, 2008. – CrossRef announced today the official launch of CrossCheck, a new initiative to aid publishers in verifying the originality of scholarly content. Following on the success of CrossRef’s recent pilot of CrossCheck, this service is now open to all CrossRef member publishers.

Continue reading "CROSSCHECK PLAGIARISM SCREENING SERVICE LAUNCHES TODAY" »

Posted by Anna Tolwinska at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Earlier this week CrossRef announced an agreement with iParadigms, LLC to launch the CrossCheck service to aid in verifying the originality of scholarly content. Following on the success of CrossRef’s recent pilot of CrossCheck, the service is scheduled to go live in June.

CrossRef is partnering with iParadigms, LLC to offer our members the opportunity to verify the originality of works submitted for publication using the iThenticate service to check against a vast database of proprietary as well as open web content. Until now, there was no automated way to check submissions against previous publications because the published literature had not been indexed and “text fingerprinted” for this purpose. The CrossCheck database will include the full-text journals of leading academic publishers, and is expected to grow very rapidly over the coming months as CrossRef member publishers sign up for the service.

CrossCheck will be available to all CrossRef members who opt to contribute their content to the database. For more information, see the press release. Or contact CrossRef's new product manager, Gabe Boucher, at gboucher@crossref.org.

Posted by Amy Brand at 2:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

CrossRef announced on March 12th that Mekentosj (http://mekentosj.com), creator of Papers, had signed on as a CrossRef affiliate in order to integrate DOIs and CrossRef metadata into its services. Papers is an award-winning application for researchers that improves their Mac-based workflow for searching, downloading, and managing PDF articles.

Papers already uses the DOI as a standard way to identify and lookup scientific articles. With the new partnership, Papers will add a tighter integration with Crossref's OpenURL service to facilitate the discovery of both new and existing scientific publications. As a result of the CrossRef integration, Papers can recognize the DOI in PDF files and on web-pages, and automatically retrieve the available bibliographic information, including title, authors and journal names, from Crossref's metadata database. With one click, this information is then added to the researcher's personal library, making scientific articles more accessible and manageable.

Papers' creator, Alexander Griekspoor, reports: “In future releases we plan on expanding the integration of the OpenURL and various other Crossref services -- including the new blogger tool -- to give researchers full access to the rich metadata that is available and add innovative ways to take full advantage of this information.”

Posted by Amy Brand at 2:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

LYNNFIELD MA, March 7, 2008. -- CrossRef, the publisher linking service, announced today that it has entered into a strategic partnership with Sermo (http://www.sermo.com), the largest online physician community. Through this new partnership, Sermo will make use of the DOI® (Digital Object Identifier) to link real-time physician discussions about current research to the source medical journal articles.

DOIs enhance Sermo's "Discuss on Sermo" initiative, which facilitates post publication discussion of thousands of medical research articles. Through this program, publishers can:

. Capture a "collective letter to the editor" with input from hundreds or thousands of readers.
. Promote medical journal content to the most active online audience of US physicians.
. Leverage collective discussions of medical content to augment and inform original research.

Continue reading "SERMO PARTNERS WITH CROSSREF TO USE DOIS AS LINKING STANDARD FOR PHYSICIAN DISCUSSION OF MEDICAL RESEARCH" »

Posted by Anna Tolwinska at 1:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lynnfield, MA. February 12, 2008. -- CrossRef, the association behind the well-known publisher linking network, announced today that it had launched the beta version of a new plug-in that allows bloggers to look up and insert DOI®-enabled citations in the course of authoring a blog.

The plug-in, which is available for download at: https://sourceforge.net/projects/crossref-cite/, allows the blogger to use a widget-based interface to search CrossRef metadata using citations or partial citations. The results of the search, with multiple hits, are displayed and the author can then either click on a hit to follow the DOI to the publisher’s site, or click on an icon next to the hit to insert the citation into their blog entry (as either a full citation or as a short “op. cit.”).

Continue reading "CROSSREF LAUNCHES FREE CITATION LOOK-UP TOOL FOR BLOGGERS" »

Posted by Anna Tolwinska at 8:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

LYNNFIELD MA, January 2, 2008. -- CrossRef, the well known linking service, announced today that it had recently registered its 30 millionth DOI. While the majority of CrossRef’s Digital Object Identifiers® (DOIs)® are assigned to online journal articles, there are now over 2.5 million DOI names assigned to other types of publications, including conference proceedings, dissertations, books, datasets, and technical reports. CrossRef’s dues-paying membership exceeds 500, with over 2,400 publishers and societies participating in CrossRef linking.

The 30 millionth DOI, doi:10.1103/PhysRevE.76.055201 was registered by The American Physical Society for their journal Physical Review E.

Continue reading "CROSSREF SURPASSES 30 MILLION DOI MARK" »

Posted by Anna Tolwinska at 5:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

LYNNFIELD MA, October 9, 2007. -- CrossRef is pleased to announce that BSI British Standards (http://www.bsigroup.com/britishstandards) has joined as a new CrossRef member. As a member, subject to the creation of an appropriate protocol, BSI will be able to register standards with CrossRef and implement interlinking with other scholarly and scientific publications. This will be achieved through use of the DOI® (Digital Object Identifier) System for which CrossRef provides content registration services. CrossRef includes hundreds of publishers and societies, with 28.9 million content items registered to date. BSI British Standards has 27,000 current standards.

Continue reading "BSI BRITISH STANDARDS JOINS CROSSREF" »

Posted by Anna Tolwinska at 6:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

LYNNFIELD, MA. June 4, 2007. -- The U.S. Department of Energy and CrossRef are very pleased to announce that the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) has completed DOI ® registrations for more than 86,000 DOE technical reports with CrossRef, the earliest report dating from 1933.

Continue reading "DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY GRAY LITERATURE NOW REGISTERED WITH CROSSREF" »

Posted by Anna Tolwinska at 4:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

LYNNFIELD MA, February 13, 2007. -- CrossRef, the citation linking service, announced today that over 25 million content items had been registered in the CrossRef system since its inception in early 2000. Although the majority of these Digital Object Identifiers® (DOIs)® are assigned to online journal articles, there are over 2 million DOI strings assigned to conference proceedings, components and books, at the chapter as well as title level. CrossRef has also been supporting assignment of DOIs to technical reports, working papers, dissertations, standards, and data elements.

Continue reading "CROSSREF SURPASSES 25 MILLION DOI MARK" »

Posted by Anna Tolwinska at 3:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

LYNNFIELD, MA -- January 22, 2007. CrossRef, the reference-linking service for scholarly and professional literature, is pleased to announce that The Royal Society has registered all of its historical back-file content with CrossRef. The Oldenburg Epistle Dedicatory, dating from 1665 and published in the first volume of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, is now the earliest publication linkable via CrossRef DOI.

Continue reading "THE ROYAL SOCIETY DIGITAL ARCHIVE NOW REGISTERED IN CROSSREF" »

Posted by Anna Tolwinska at 4:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lynnfield, MA. December 05, 2006. -- CrossRef, the publisher linking association, is extremely pleased to announce the addition of Geoffrey Bilder to its management team. Bilder will assume the newly created role of Director of Strategic Initiatives at CrossRef in January of 2007.

Continue reading "GEOFFREY BILDER TO JOIN CROSSREF" »

Posted by Anna Tolwinska at 3:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lynnfield, MA. December 5, 2006. -- CrossRef, the multi-publisher linking association, announced today that it had reached agreement with three new partners to include journals from Africa and Asia in its linking network

Continue reading "CROSSREF TO ADD HUNDREDS OF JOURNALS FROM AFRICA AND ASIA" »

Posted by Anna Tolwinska at 3:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

LYNNFIELD, MA – October 30, 2006. CrossRef, the reference-linking network for scholarly and professional publishers, is pleased to announce the launch of its freely available Simple-Text Query service to facilitate DOI look-up for researchers and publishers. In partnership with Inera, CrossRef has deployed a custom version of Inera’s eXtyles refXpress™ that parses unstructured, simple-text references into granular and valid XML and returns any matching DOIs for those references. The interface has been running on a more limited, trial basis since February of this year.

Continue reading "CROSSREF SIMPLE-TEXT QUERY SERVICE OFFICIALLY LAUNCHES" »

Posted by Anna Tolwinska at 12:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You may view this press release by following this link –

http://www.info.scirus.com/news/inthenews/archive_pr/2006/24_oct_06.htm
or on our website
http://www.crossref.org/01company/09press_releases.html.

Posted by Anna Tolwinska at 12:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lynnfield MA, July 12, 2006. CrossRef, the cross-publisher linking network with over 1,600 participating publishers, announced today that it had reached an agreement with Microsoft Corp. who will become the first official CrossRef Web Services Search Partner. CrossRef will provide Microsoft with a bulk feed of metadata from hundreds of participating CrossRef member publishers.

Continue reading "CROSSREF ANNOUNCES WEB SERVICES AGREEMENT WITH MICROSOFT" »

Posted by Anna Tolwinska at 1:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lynnfield, MA June 1, 2006. CrossRef, the reference-linking service for scholarly and professional content, announced today that it had surpassed the half-million mark in the number of book title and chapter DOIs registered in its database. By virtue of being in CrossRef, these books and chapters are readily inter-linkable with the 20 million-plus other content items (mainly journal articles) publishers have registered. This enables the reader of online works to go directly from a journal article to a cited book chapter, or vice versa, just by clicking on a reference.

Continue reading "OVER HALF A MILLION BOOK DOIS NOW REGISTERED IN CROSSREF" »

Posted by Anna Tolwinska at 2:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

LYNNFIELD, MA, April 26th, 2006. -- CrossRef, the citation linking service, announced today that over 20 million content entities had been registered in the CrossRef system since its inception in early 2000. The majority of these Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) are assigned to online journal articles. However, over 1.6 million DOIs are assigned to conference proceedings and books, at the chapter as well as title level.

Within the past year, CrossRef began supporting assignment of DOIs to technical reports, working papers, dissertations, standards, and data elements. Among the DOIs most recently registered in CrossRef are persistent identifiers for 38,000 protein description pages within the Protein Data Bank, and 27,000 working papers published by the Social Science Research Network.

Continue reading "CROSSREF SURPASSES 20 MILLION DOI MARK" »

Posted by Anna Tolwinska at 12:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Microsoft has issued a press release announcing the launch of Microsoft Live Academic Search http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/apr06/04-11WLAcademicSearchPR.mspx - the new service is available at http://academic.live.com/ . Ten CrossRef member publishers are participating in the beta service and CrossRef is providing metadata and DOIs from these ten publishers (however, Microsoft is indexing the full text directly with the publishers). In addition, CrossRef coordinated setting the standard terms and conditions for publisher participation.

The long term goal is to open participation in the service to all CrossRef member publishers on standard terms and conditions. In the short term, Microsoft will be adding publishers and content in stages based on subject areas. CrossRef will provide more information about this soon.

Posted by Anna Tolwinska at 9:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

CrossRef, the reference-linking service for scholarly and professional content, is pleased to announce the launch of a freely available OpenURL resolver to facilitate navigation to the 17+ million items now registered in CrossRef. The resolver, described at http://www.crossref.org/openurll, allows users to enter an OpenURL as one way to be directed to publications from the hundreds of publishers and societies that participate in CrossRef by registering Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for their content.

CrossRef’s OpenURL resolver is offered at no charge for individual use, and thus functions as a DOI look-up resource for the public. It is fully compliant with the recently approved NISO Z38.88 - 2004 standard entitled “OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services.” The CrossRef resolver accepts URLs structured according to the 0.1 or 1.0 NISO specifications, as well as some common deviations, and it supports the features outlined in the San Antonio Profile (SAP) #1 community profile, including in-line, by-value, and by-reference URLs.

Continue reading "FREE OPENURL RESOLVER" »

Posted by Ed Pentz at 12:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)