Blog

Martin Eve

Martin Paul Eve is Principal R&D Developer at Crossref, working on experimental research and development projects for Labs. Martin is also the Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at the University of London’s Birkbeck College.

Read more about Martin Eve on their team page.

Testing times

One of the challenges that we face in Labs and Research at Crossref is that, as we prototype various tools, we need the community to be able to test them. Often, this involves asking for deposit to a different endpoint or changing the way that a platform works to incorporate a prototype. The problem is that our community is hugely varied in its technical capacity and level of ability when it comes to modifying their platform.

Credential Checking at Crossref

It turns out that one of the things that is really difficult at Crossref is checking whether a set of Crossref credentials has permission to act on a specific DOI prefix. This is the result of many legacy systems storing various mappings in various different software components, from our Content System through to our CRM. To this end, I wrote a basic application, credcheck, that will allow you to test a Crossref credential against an API.

What do we know about DOIs

Martin Eve

Martin Eve – 2024 February 29

In CommunityStaff

Crossref holds metadata for approximately 150 million scholarly artifacts. These range from peer reviewed journal articles through to scholarly books through to scientific blog posts. In fact, amid such heterogeneity, the only singular factor that unites such items is that they have been assigned a document object identifier (DOI); a unique identification string that can be used to resolve to a resource pertaining to said metadata (often, but not always, a copy of the work identified by the metadata).

Increasing Crossref Data Reusability With Format Experiments

Martin Eve

Martin Eve – 2024 January 19

In MetadataCommunityAPIs

Every year, Crossref releases a full public data file of all of our metadata. This is partly a commitment to POSI and partly just what we do. We want the community to re-use our metadata and to find interesting ends to which they can be put! However, we have also recognized, for some time, that 170GB of compressed .tar.gz files, spread over 27,000 items, is not the easiest of formats with which to work.

Feedback on automatic digital preservation and self-healing DOIs

Martin Eve

Martin Eve – 2023 September 28

In Crossref LabsPreservation

Thank you to everyone who responded with feedback on the Op Cit proposal. This post clarifies, defends, and amends the original proposal in light of the responses that have been sent. We have endeavoured to respond to every point that was raised, either here or in the document comments themselves. We strongly prefer for this to be developed in collaboration with CLOCKSS, LOCKSS, and/or Portico, i.e. through established preservation services that already have existing arrangements in place, are properly funded, and understand the problem space.

A Request for Comment - Automatic Digital Preservation and Self-Healing DOIs

Martin Eve

Martin Eve – 2023 June 29

In LabsTechnology

Digital preservation is crucial to the “persistence” of persistent identifiers. Without a reliable archival solution, if a Crossref member ceases operations or there is a technical disaster, the identifier will no longer resolve. This is why the Crossref member terms insist that publishers make best efforts to ensure deposit in a reputable archive service. This means that, if there is a system failure, the DOI will continue to resolve and the content will remain accessible.

Crossref Research and Development: Releasing our Tools from the Ground Up

This is the first post in a series designed to showcase what we do in the Crossref R&D group, also known as Crossref Labs, which over the last few years has been strengthened, first with Dominika Tkaczyk and Esha Datta, last year with part of Paul Davis’s time, and more recently, yours truly. Research and development are, obviously, crucial for any organization that doesn’t want to stand still. The R&D group builds prototypes, experimental solutions, and data-mining applications that can help us to understand our member base, in the service of future evolution of the organization.