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Martin Eve
2024 April 03

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.

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Joe Wass
2024 March 18

Mending Chesterton's Fence: Open Source Decision-making

When each line of code is written it is surrounded by a sea of context: who in the community this is for, what problem we’re trying to solve, what technical assumptions we’re making, what we already tried but didn’t work, how much coffee we’ve had today. All of these have an effect on the software we write. By the time the next person looks at that code, some of that context will have evaporated.

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Martin Eve
2024 March 15

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.

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Patrick Polischuk
2024 March 13

Subject codes, incomplete and unreliable, have got to go

Subject classifications have been available via the REST API for many years but have not been complete or reliable from the start and will soon be deprecated. dfdfd The subject metadata element was born out of a Labs experiment intended to enrich the metadata returned via Crossref Metadata Search with All Subject Journal Classification codes from Scopus. This feature was developed when the REST API was still fairly new, and we now recognize that the initial implementation worked its way into the service prematurely.

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Warnings, Caveats and Weasel Words

Most of the experiments linked to here are running on R&D equipment in a non-production environment. They may disappear without warning and/or perform erratically. If one of them isn’t working for some reason, come back later and try again.

QR Code Generator

 2 minute read.
Note: This experiment has been retired. This description has been kept for reference, but many of the links and/or services that appear below no longer work.

You might also be interested in this handy resource for determining if you should be using QR Codes.

QR Codes are a form of barcode that can be easily scanned and used by mobile phones, web-cams, etc. A QR code can include encoded data, so, for instance, they are often used in Japan and other countries to encode URLs for display in magazines, on billboards, on packaging, etc.

For example, the following is the QR Code for the article “Strategic Reading, Ontologies, and the Future of Scientific Publishing” by Allen Renear and Carole Palmer.

Sample QR code

API

Crossref has created a sample API that will take a Crossref DOI and turn it into a QR Code. The QR Code will include the title of the document pointed to by the Crossref DOI as well as the “htttp://dx.doi.org” URL of that will allow you to link to that item. Most mobile phone QR Code readers will allow you to bookmark, share or link to the URLs thus encoded.

The API is pretty straight-forward and is of the form:

http://0-qrcode-labs-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/[doi]

So the URL to generate the above QR Code was:

http://0-qrcode-labs-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.1126/science.1157784

If you want to try out this technology, you might try installing the iPhone application QuickMark from the Apple app store.

Note that the API doesn’t currently let you vary the size or encoding level of the QR Code. If there is enough interest in this functionality, we might add it.

Applications

So what can the qr-encoded Crossref DOI be used for? Damn if we know. Minimally, they could be added to the cover pages of PDFs so that researchers could easily bookmark a link to any paper articles they are reading. Perhaps they could also be added to the posters on poster sessions at conferences? Heck, maybe we could persuade researchers to print the QR-codes of their publications on t-shirts that they could then wear to conferences…

Or maybe not.

But seriously, we did this because it was easy and pretty cool. We’re not sure of the applications yet, so that’s why we thought we should release it and see what people can think of.

Page owner: Crossref   |   Last updated 2013-January-20