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The act of registering a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) for scholarly content is sometimes conflated with the notion of conferring a seal of approval or other mark of good quality upon an item of content. This is a fundamental misunderstanding. A DOI is a tool, not a badge of honor. The presence of a Crossref DOI on content sends a signal that: The owner of the content would like to be formally cited if the content is used in a scholarly context.

This is a joint blog post with Dario Taraborelli, coming from WikiCite 2016.

In 2014 we were taking our first steps along the path that would lead us to Crossref Event Data. At this time I started looking into the DOI resolution logs to see if we could get any interesting information out of them. This project, which became Chronograph, showed which domains were driving traffic to Crossref DOIs.

You can read about the latest results from this analysis in the “Where do DOI Clicks Come From” blog post.

Having this data tells us, amongst other things:

• where people are using DOIs in unexpected places
• where people are using DOIs in unexpected ways
• where we knew people were using DOIs but the links are more popular than we realised

As part of our Event Data work we’ve been investigating where DOI resolutions come from. A resolution could be someone clicking a DOI hyperlink, or a search engine spider gathering data or a publisher’s system performing its duties. Our server logs tell us every time a DOI was resolved and, if it was by someone using a web browser, which website they were on when they clicked the DOI. This is called a referral.

I had a great chat with Danielle Padula of Scholastica, a journals platform with an integrated peer-review process that was founded in 2011. We talked about how journals get started with Crossref, and she turned our conversation into a blog post that describes the steps to begin registering content and depositing metadata with us. Since the result is a really useful description of our new member on-boarding process, I want to share it with you here as well.

Back in 2014, Geoffrey Bilder blogged about the kick-off of an initiative between Crossref and Wikimedia to better integrate scholarly literature into the world’s largest knowledge space, Wikipedia. Since then, Crossref has been working to coordinate activities with Wikimedia: Joe Wass has worked with them to create a live stream of content being cited in Wikipedia; and we’re including Wikipedia in Event Data, a new service to launch later this year.

TL;DR: We will proceed with implementing the proposed support for registering content before online availability. Adopting the workflow will be optional and will involve no extra fees. Background At the end of January, Crossref issued a “request for community comment” on a proposed new process to support the registration of content including DOIs before online availability. We promised that we would summarize the results of the survey once we had received and analyzed all the responses.

Crossref is proposing a process to support the registration of content—including DOIs and other metadata—prior to that content being made available, or published, online. We’ve drafted a paper providing background on the reasons we want to support this and highlighting the use cases. One of the main needs is in journal publishing to support registration of Accepted Manuscripts immediately on or shortly after acceptance, and dealing with press embargoes. Proposal doc for community comment

Background

On January 20th, 2015 the main DOI HTTP proxy at doi.org experienced a partial, rolling global outage. The system was never completely down, but for at least part of the subsequent 48 hours, up to 50% of DOI resolution traffic was effectively broken. This was true for almost all DOI registration agencies, including Crossref, DataCite and mEDRA.

At the time we kept people updated on what we knew via Twitter, mailing lists and our technical blog at CrossTech. We also promised that, once we’d done a thorough investigation, we’d report back. Well, we haven’t finished investigating all implications of the outage. There are both substantial technical and governance issues to investigate. But last week we provided a preliminary report to the Crossref board on the basic technical issues, and we thought we’d share that publicly now.

PHD Comics has posted its Valentine’s Day Reading list. Without DOIs!    So in order to preserve the scholarly citation record, we’ve resolved those that have DOIs…. Title:  The St. Valentine’s Day Frontal Passage Citation:  Sassen, K, 1980, ‘The St. Valentine’s Day Frontal Passage’, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, vol. 61, no. 2, p. 122. Crossref DOI:  http://0-dx-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1175/1520-0477(1980)061<0122:TSVDFP>2.0.CO;2 Title:  SUICIDE AND HOMICIDE ON ST. VALENTINE’S DAY Citation:  LESTER, D, 1990, ‘SUICIDE AND HOMICIDE ON ST.

Today two new record types were added to dx.doi.org resolution for Crossref DOIs. These allow anyone to retrieve DOI bibliographic metadata as formatted bibliographic entries. To perform the formatting we’re using the citation style language processor, citeproc-js which supports a shed load of citation styles and locales. In fact, all the styles and locales found in the CSL repositories, including many common styles such as bibtex, apa, ieee, harvard, vancouver and chicago are supported.