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Ed Pentz

Ed Pentz became Crossref’s first Executive Director when the organization was founded in 2000 and manages all aspects of the organization to ensure that it fulfills its mission to make research outputs easy to find, cite, link and assess. Ed was Chair of the ORCID board of directors from 2014-2017 and is current Treasurer of the International DOI Foundation. Prior to joining Crossref, Ed held electronic publishing, editorial and sales positions at Harcourt Brace in the US and UK and managed the launch of Academic Press’s first online journal, the Journal of Molecular Biology, in 1995. Ed has a degree in English Literature from Princeton University and lives in Oxford, England.

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Revised Crossref DOI display guidelines are now active

Crossref DOI Display

We have updated our DOI display guidelines as of March 2017, this month! I described the what and the why in my previous blog post New Crossref DOI display guidelines are on the way and in an email I wrote to all our members in September 2016. I’m pleased to say that the updated Crossref DOI display guidelines are available via this fantastic new website and are now active. Here is the URL of the full set of guidelines in case you want to bookmark it (https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.13003/5jchdy) and a shareable image to spread the word on social media.

Call for participation: Membership & Fees Committee

Crossref was founded to enable collaboration between publishers.  As our membership has grown and diversified over recent years, it’s becoming even more vital that we take input from a representative cross-section of the membership. This is especially important when considering how fees and policies will affect our diverse members in different ways.

The Organization Identifier Project: a way forward

The scholarly communications sector has built and adopted a series of open identifier and metadata infrastructure systems to great success.  Content identifiers (through Crossref and DataCite) and contributor identifiers (through ORCID) have become foundational infrastructure to the industry.  

New Crossref DOI display guidelines are on the way

TL;DR

Crossref will be updating its DOI Display Guidelines within the next couple of weeks.  This is a big deal.  We last made a change in 2011 so it’s not something that happens often or that we take lightly.  In short, the changes are to drop “dx” from DOI links and to use “https:” rather than “http:”.  An example of the new best practice in displaying a Crossref DOI link is: https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1629/22161

Dr Norman Paskin

Ed Pentz

Ed Pentz – 2016 April 06

In DOI Foundation

Dr Norman Paskin It was with great sadness and shock that I learned that Dr Norman Paskin had passed away unexpectedly on the 27th March. This is a big loss to the DOI, Crossref and digital information communities. Norman was the driving force behind the DOI System and was a key supporter and ally of Crossref from the start. Norman founded the International DOI Foundation in 1998 and ran it successfully until the end of 2015 when he moved to a strategic role as an Independent Board Member.

Knols and Citations Part II

Ed Pentz

Ed Pentz – 2008 July 24

In Discussion

Tony’s post highlights Knol’s “service” URIs. Another issue is that many Knol entries have nice long lists of unlinked references. The HTML code behind the references is very sparse. Might the DOI be of use in linking out from these references? I think so. Then, of course, there’s the issue of DOIs for Knols…

PubMed Central Links to Publisher Full Text

Ed Pentz

Ed Pentz – 2008 June 12

In Member Briefing

A Crossref Member Briefing is available that explains how PubMed Central (PMC) links to publisher full text, how PMC uses DOIs and how PMC should be using DOIs. The briefing is entitled “Linking to Publisher Full Text from PubMed Central” (PDF 85k). Crossref considers it very important the PMC uses DOIs as the main means to link to the publisher version of record for an article and we are recommending that publishers try to convince PMC to use DOIs in an automated way.

DOIs and PubMed Central - why no links?

Ed Pentz

Ed Pentz – 2008 May 14

In PubMedDOIs

Further to my previous post “NIH Mandate and PMCIDs” we’ve been looking into linking to articles on publishers’ sites from PubMed Central (PMC). There are a couple of ways this happens currently (see details below) but these are complicated and will lead to broken links and more difficulty for PMC and publishers in managing the links. Crossref is going to be putting together a briefing note for its members on this soon.

The main issue we are raising with PMC, and that we will encourage publishers to raise too, is why doesn’t PMC just automatically link DOIs? Most of the articles in PMC have DOIs so this would require very little effort from PMC and no effort from publishers and would give readers a perisistent link to the publisher’s version of an article.

NIH Mandate and PMCIDs

Ed Pentz

Ed Pentz – 2008 April 15

In Identifiers

The NIH Public Access Policy says “When citing their NIH-funded articles in NIH applications, proposals or progress reports, authors must include the PubMed Central reference number for each article” and the FAQ provides some examples of this: Examples: Varmus H, Klausner R, Zerhouni E, Acharya T, Daar A, Singer P. 2003. PUBLIC HEALTH: Grand Challenges in Global Health. Science 302(5644): 398-399. PMCID: 243493 Zerhouni, EA. (2003) A New Vision for the National Institutes of Health.

BISG Paper on Identifying Digital Book Content

Ed Pentz

Ed Pentz – 2008 January 14

In Identifiers

BISG and BIC have published a discussion paper called “The identification of digital book content” - https://web.archive.org/web/20090920075334/http://www.bisg.org/docs/DigitalIdentifiers_07Jan08.pdf. The paper discusses ISBN, ISTC and DOI amongst other things and makes a series of recommendations which basically say to consider applying DOI, ISBN and ISTC to digital book content. The paper highlights in a positive way that DOI and ISBN are different but can work together (the idea of the “actionable ISBN” and aiding discovery of content).