ORCID on Crossref

Org ID: a recap and a hint of things to come

John Chodacki — Thu, 02 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Cross-posted on the blogs of University of California (UC3), ORCID, and DataCite: https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.5438/67sj-4y05.

Over the past couple of years, a group of organisations with a shared purpose—California Digital Library, Crossref, DataCite, and ORCID—invested our time and energy into launching the Org ID initiative, with the goal of defining requirements for an open, community-led organisation identifier registry. The goal of our initiative has been to offer a transparent, accessible process that builds a better system for all of our communities. As the working group chair, I wanted to provide an update on this initiative and let you know where our efforts are headed.

Community-led effort

First, I would like to summarize all of the work that has gone into this project, a truly community-driven initiative, over the last two years:

A series of collaborative workshops were held at the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) meeting in San Antonio TX (2016), the FORCE11 conference in Portland OR (2016), and at PIDapalooza in Reykjavik (2016).
Findings from these workshops were summarized in three documents, which we made openly available to the community for public comment:
organisation Identifier Project: A Way Forward (PDF)
organisation Identifier Provider Landscape (PDF)
Technical Considerations for an organisation Identifier Registry (PDF)
A Working Group worked throughout 2017 and voted to approve a set of recommendations and principles for ‘governance’ and ‘product’:
Governance Recommendations
Product Principles and Recommendations
We then put out a Request for Information that sought expressions of interest from organisations to be involved in implementing and running an organisation identifier registry.
There was a really good response to the RFI; reviewing the responses and thinking about next steps led to our most recent stakeholder meeting in Girona in January 2018, where ORCID, DataCite, and Crossref were tasked with drafting a proposal that meets the Working Group’s requirements for a community-led, organisational identifier registry.

Thank you

I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has contributed to this effort so far. We’ve been able to make good progress with the initiative because of the time and expertise many of you have volunteered. We have truly benefited from the support of the community, with representatives from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; American Physical Society, California Digital Library, Cornell University, Crossref, DataCite, Digital Science, Editeur, Elsevier, Foundation for Earth Sciences, Hindawi, Jisc, ORCID, Ringgold, Springer Nature, The IP Registry, and U.S. Geological Survey involved throughout this initiative. And we couldn’t have done any of it without the help and guidance of our consultants, Helen Szigeti and Kristen Ratan.

The way forward

The recommendations from our initiative have been converted into a concrete plan for building a registry for research organisations. This plan will be posted in the coming weeks.

The initiative’s leadership group has already secured start-up resourcing and is getting ready to announce the launch plan—more details coming soon.

We hope that all stakeholders will continue to support the next phase of our work – look for announcements in the coming weeks about how to get involved.

As always, we welcome your feedback and involvement as this effort continues. Please contact me directly with any questions or comments at john.chodacki@ucop.edu. And thanks again for your help bringing an open organisation identifier registry to fruition!

References

Bilder, G., Brown, J., & Demeranville, T. (2016). Organisation identifiers: current provider survey. ORCID. https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.5438/4716

Cruse, P., Haak, L., & Pentz, E. (2016). organisation Identifier Project: A Way Forward. ORCID. https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.5438/2906

Fenner, M., Paglione, L., Demeranville, T., & Bilder, G. (2016). Technical Considerations for an organisation Identifier Registry. https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.5438/7885

Laurel, H., Bilder, G., Brown, C., Cruse, P., Devenport, T., Fenner, M., … Smith, A. (2017). ORG ID WG Product Principles and Recommendations. https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.23640/07243.5402047

Laurel, H., Pentz, E., Cruse, P., & Chodacki, J. (2017). organisation Identifier Project: Request for Information. https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.23640/07243.5458162

Pentz, E., Cruse, P., Laurel, H., & Warner, S. (2017). ORG ID WG Governance Principles and Recommendations. https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.23640/07243.5402002

Celebrating ORCID at five

Ed Pentz — Mon, 16 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Happy birthday, ORCID! It’s their fifth birthday today and it’s gratifying to me—as a founding board member and former Chair of the board—to see how successful it has become. ORCID has a great staff, over 700 members from 41 countries and is quickly approaching 4 million ORCID iDs. Crossref—it’s board, staff, and members—has been an ORCID supporter from the start. One example of this support is that we seconded Geoffrey Bilder to be ORCID’s interim CTO for about eight months.

Actually, Crossref has been involved with ORCID even before the start.

ORCID’s birthday recognizes when the registry went live in 2012 but the origins of what became ORCID stretch back to a meeting that Crossref organized back in February 2007 on “Author IDs”. After this meeting there were many follow on discussions but it was clear that as an association of scholarly publishers Crossref didn’t have suitable governance for an researcher identifier registry which needed support from a broader group of stakeholders.

Subsequent discussions between Nature and Thomson Reuters (represented by Howard Ratner Dave Kochalko) led—after many more meetings—to ORCID being set up as a new organisation. ORCID was incorporated in September 2010 and the first meeting of the board of directors of ORCID was on October 8th, 2010.

A lot of people and organisations have contributed to getting ORCID to where it is today and it’s been great to be a part of it and continue to contribute to their future.

Reflecting on the creation of ORCID: it has shown the power of collaboration in improving scholarly research, and in making life easier and better for researchers.

Today they celebrate in a number of fun ways and, in particular, mark the occasion with the release of a new set of educational resources.

From everyone in the Crossref community, here’s to ORCID’s continuing success!

Organisation Identifier Working Group Update

Ed Pentz — Mon, 18 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

About 1 year ago, Crossref, DataCite and ORCID [announced a joint initiative] (https://orcid.org/blog/2016/10/31/organisation-identifier-project-way-forward) to launch and sustain an open, independent, non-profit organisation identifier registry to facilitate the disambiguation of researcher affiliations. Today we publish governance recommendations and product principles and requirements for the creation of an open, independent organisation identifier registry and invite community feedback.

The organisation Identifier (OrgID) Working Group was established as a joint effort by Crossref, DataCite and ORCID in January 2017. The members of the group bring a broad range of experience and perspectives, including expertise in research data discovery, data management, persistent identifiers, economics research, funding, archiving, non-profit membership organisations, academia, publishing, and metadata development.

The Working Group was charged with refining the structure, principles, and technology specifications for an open, independent, non-profit organisation identifier registry to facilitate the disambiguation of researcher affiliations.

The group has been working in three interdependent areas: Governance, Registry Product Definition, and Business Model & Funding, and today releases for public comment its findings and recommendations for governance and product requirements.

We invite your feedback!

Please send comments by October 15th, 2017.

Crossref and colleagues in South Korea

Ginny Hendricks — Fri, 30 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Connecting Crossref, ORCID, DataCite, and our communities

Q: What do you get if you combine our three organisations for a week to catch up with our Korean community - publishers, librarians, universities, researchers, and service providers? A: Two events, plenty of meetings, great conversations and feedback, fabulous Korean hospitality, and a little jet-lag.

Over the past few years, Crossref has seen huge growth in our members in Korea. We have nine Sponsoring Affiliates (who look after nearly 1,000 members between them), two Sponsoring Members and nearly 80 Library members. With the International DOI Foundation (IDF) strategy meeting taking place in Daejon, it seemed sensible to combine that with our own events and meetings with key organisations. This also fitted nicely with some plans that ORCID and DataCite had, so we combined forces.

We (that’s me, Rachael Lammey, Ed Pentz, and Geoffrey Bilder) hosted a Crossref LIVE local event on Monday 12th June for around 80 members and affiliates. We were joined by Alice Meadows and Nobuko Maiyairi (ORCID), Martin Fenner (DataCite), and Professor Sun-Tae Hong (Seoul National University) as co-presenters. We looked at the global reach of Korean research, and how registering content with Crossref and participating in services like Reference Linking helps create valuable connections between research outputs. With so many established members in Korea, we were able to go beyond the basics and emphasize the importance of metadata input, metadata delivery, and preview our upcoming Event Data service. We also talked data-sharing and the value of integrating ORCID iDs into publisher and institution workflows.

_Growth in research outputs in Asia Pacific 2009-2017. Source: Web of Science databases SCI-E, SSCI and AHCI only, downloaded 19/4/2017. Data provided by Wiley (thank you!)_

Later in the week we took a multi-pronged approach to highlight the many shared principles of our organisations and discuss the specific initiatives we’re collaborating on. We held the Joint Global Infrastructure Conference covering the global nature of what we do and the connections/interoperability between ORCID, DataCite and Crossref. This interoperability and our governance structures lend themselves to cooperation on other initiatives such as Metadata 2020 and The OI Project, which we were able to share.

Check out all #jgic_seoul tweets.

Guest speakers volunteered to talk about how they work with our organisations - we were joined by Choon Shil Lee from the Korean Association of Medical Journal Editors (KAMJE) to demonstrate their ORCID integrations, and Hideaki Takeda from the Japan Link Centre (JaLC) who discussed the infrastructure and services they use to register and disseminate content globally. User stories like this are great - they highlight how people work with our services, give others ideas, and also flag up where we can do more.

Part of doing more involved providing clarification on Crossref’s position alongside other DOI Registration Agencies. With a new Registration Agency in Korea, we needed to communicate the global nature of what we do to help our members achieve their discoverability goals, as not all DOIs are made equal. Through working with ORCID and DataCite colleagues we were able to place great importance both on our work worldwide, and on the benefits to Korean societies in collaborating outside national boundaries.

Combining talks from our three organisations was a great opportunity to emphasize the importance of shared global infrastructure. Geoffrey Bilder’s plug socket analogy is apt - services that work cross-border, cross-language, and cross-subject areas streamline processes for all of our different communities and enable research to travel beyond national boundaries and help it be found, linked, cited and assessed.

Want to find out more? Slides from both meetings are available here and here, and watch out for further collaborative events.

The OI Project gets underway planning an open organisation identifier registry

Ed Pentz — Tue, 28 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

At the end of October 2016, Crossref, DataCite, and ORCID reported on collaboration in the area of organisation identifiers. We issued three papers for community comment and after input we subsequently announced the formation of The OI Project, along with a call for expressions of interest from people interested in serving on the working group.

We had a great response and are happy to report that the Working Group has now been established, and is already underway with work to develop a plan for an open, independent, not-for-profit, sustainable, organisation identifier registry.

There is information about the OI Project Working Group on the ORCID website including a list of the 17 working group members. They represent a broad range of scholarly communications stakeholders. Our scope of work includes three separate but interdependent areas:

Governance;
Registry Product Definition; and
Business Model & Funding.

The initial goal of the Working Group is to create a thorough and robust implementation plan by the end of 2017.

Please take a look at the website for more information and we’ll provide updates as things progress throughout the course of the year.

Please contact us with any questions.

The Organisation Identifier Project: a way forward

Ed Pentz — Mon, 31 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

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.

But there still seems to be one piece of the infrastructure that is missing. There is as yet no open, stakeholder-governed infrastructure for organisation identifiers and associated metadata.

In order to understand this gap, Crossref, DataCite and ORCID have been collaborating to:

Explore the current landscape of organisational identifiers;
Collect the use-cases that would benefit our respective stakeholders in scholarly communications industry;
Identify those use-cases that can be more feasibly addressed in the near term; and
Explore how the three organisations can collaborate (with each other and with others) to practically address this key missing piece of scholarly infrastructure.

The result of this work is in three related papers being released by Crossref, DataCite and ORCID for community review and feedback. The three papers are:

organisation Identifier Project: A Way Forward (PDF; GDoc)
organisation Identifier Provider Landscape (PDF; GDoc)
Technical Considerations for an organisation Identifier Registry (PDF; GDoc)

We invite the community to comment on these papers both via email (oi-project@orcid.org) and at PIDapalooza on November 9th and 10th and at Crossref LIVE16 on November 1st and 2nd. To move The OI Project forward, we will be forming a Community Working Group with the goal of holding an initial meeting before the end of 2016. The Working Group’s main charge is to develop a plan to launch and sustain an open, independent, non-profit organisation identifier registry to facilitate the disambiguation of researcher affiliations.

Crossref Use Cases

Crossref has also been discussing the needs of its members over the last year and there is value in focusing on the affiliation name ambiguity problem with research outputs and contributors. In terms of the metadata that Crossref collects, something that is missing has been affiliations for the authors of publications. Over the last couple of years, Crossref has been expanding what it collects - for example, funding and licensing data and ORCID iDs - and this enables a fuller picture of what we are calling the article nexus. In order to continue to fill out the metadata we collect - and for our members to use in their own systems and publications - we need an organisation identifier.

Another use case for Crossref is identifying funders as part of collecting funder data to enable connecting funding sources with the published scholarly literature. In order to enable the reliable identification of funders in the Crossref system we created the Open Funder Registry that now has over 15,000 funders available as Open Data under a CC0 waiver. While this has been very successful, it is a very narrowly focused registry and is not suitable for a broad, community-run organisation identifier registry that addresses the affiliation use case. In future, our goal will be to merge the Open Funder Registry into the identifier registry that the organisation Identifier Working Group will work on.

By working collaboratively we can define a pragmatic and cost-effective service that will meet a fundamental need of all scholarly communication stakeholders.

Geoffrey Bilder will be focusing his talk at Crossref LIVE16 this week on this initiative, dubbed The OI Project. The talk is scheduled for 2pm UK time and will be live streamed along with the rest of that day’s program.

Using the Crossref Metadata API. Part 2 (with PaperHive)

Rachael Lammey — Thu, 08 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

We first met the team from PaperHive at SSP in June, pointed them in the direction of the Crossref Metadata API and let things progress from there. That’s the nice thing about having an API - because it’s a common and easy way for developers to access and use metadata, it makes it possible to use with lots of diverse systems and services.

So how are things going? Alexander Naydenov, PaperHive’s Co-founder gives us an update on how they’re working with the Crossref metadata:

PaperHive

PaperHive is a web-platform for collaborative reading and a cross-publisher layer of interaction on top of research documents. It lets researchers communicate in published documents in a productive and time-saving way. PaperHive thus puts academic literature, which is integrated with the platform, in the limelight and increases content usage and reader engagement.

Transforming reading into a process of collaboration gives researchers a reason to return to the content and discover new enrichments they can benefit from. Functionality like hiving, deep linking, and the PaperHive browser extension embeds communication in the researcher’s workflow. PaperHive is free to use!

How is the Crossref API used within PaperHive?

PaperHive extends the concept of a living document and offers an innovative way of displaying content without hosting it. Instead, academic documents are dynamically pulled from the publisher’s servers thus ensuring compliance with content licensing. It enables readers to stay in touch with the articles of interest beyond just saving them in an offline folder.

Crossref is the common ground on which third party companies and initiatives can build valuable services for publishers and researchers. It facilitates the integration of content into PaperHive by providing the metadata of articles and books from numerous publishers independent of the technology behind their content platforms. Moreover, if the publishers provide ORCID identifiers of authors in the Crossref metadata, researchers can immediately interact with the readers of their works.

What are the future plans for PaperHive?

In addition to integrating further publishers’ content and extending PaperHive’s feature set for readers, we also plan to extend our partnerships with other technology providers.

As far as our cooperation with Crossref is concerned, we are looking forward to the implementation of the Crossref Event Data API.

What else would you like to see in Crossref metadata?

- The quality of the existing metadata should be improved significantly. We noticed that important fields such as author or title are missing in the metadata of many documents. PaperHive ignores articles and books with incomplete metadata because it impairs the user experience. Publishers, authors and readers can only benefit from the wider and more active usage of content, so we hope that more publishers will improve the data their provide Crossref with.

- Since researchers are working with full texts on PaperHive, it would be great if links to the full text are provided in the metadata of all articles and books. The metadata should also contain information about the format of the full text (e.g., PDF, EPUB, HTML).

Thanks Alex!

Just getting started with the API or what to know more? Get in touch via feedback@crossref.org and pass on your questions and comments.

Announcing PIDapalooza - a festival of identifiers

Ginny Hendricks — Tue, 30 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The buzz is building around PIDapalooza - the first open festival of scholarly research persistent identifiers (PID), to be held at the Radisson Blu Saga Hotel Reykjavikon November 9-10, 2016.

PIDapalooza will bring together creators and users of PIDs from around the world to shape the future PID landscape through the development of tools and services for the research community. PIDs support proper attribution and credit, promote collaboration and reuse, enable reproducibility of findings, foster faster and more efficient progress, and facilitate effective sharing, dissemination, and linking of scholarly works.

We believe that by bringing together everyone who’s working with PIDs for two days of discussions, demos, workshops, brainstorming, updates on the state of the art, and more, we can make this happen faster. And you can help by giving us your input on which sessions would be most valuable. Please send us your ideas, using this form by September 18. We will send session proposal notifications the first week of October with the festival lineup.

Register to attend

Registration is now open — come join the festival with a crowd of like-minded innovators. And please help us spread the word about PIDapalooza in your community!

Stay updated with the latest news on on the PIDapalooza website and on Twitter (@PIDapalooza) in the coming weeks.

Looking forward to seeing you in November!

Crossref & the Art of Cartography: an Open Map for Scholarly Communications

Jennifer Lin — Fri, 08 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

In the 2015 Crossref Annual Meeting, I introduced a metaphor for the work that we do at Crossref. I re-present it here for broader discussion as this narrative continues to play a guiding role in the development of products and services this year.

Metadata enable connections

At Crossref, we make research outputs easy to find, cite, link, and assess through DOIs. Publishers register their publications and deposit metadata through a variety of channels (XML, CSV, PDF, manual entry), which we process and transform into Crossref XML for inclusion into our corpus. This data infrastructure which makes possible scholarly communications without restrictions on publisher, subject area, geography, etc. is far more than a reference list, index or directory.

If research builds on what came before, one could claim that the process of knowledge production is partly the story of the very relationships between results disseminated (i.e., publications). So let’s consider each publication as a node in a graph where each has a coordinate and is connected by its citations to other publications (as well those that cite it). Additionally, each is associated with a set of people and places, along with a whole host of elements involved in the research and dissemination process.

But take a wider berth, and we begin to capture relationships between all such contributing agents and objects involved in the research process. Here we find an array of entities belonging to the scholarly graph, including different types of research artifacts, publisher and journal, funders, ORCIDs, peer reviews, publication status updates (corrections, retractions, etc.), citations, license information, additional URLs (machine destinations, hosting platforms, etc.), underlying data, software and protocols, materials, discussions and blog posts, recommendations, reference work mentions, etc. The entities on the graph multiply at an even higher rate as researchers share more outputs across more channels. And over time, the graph expands exponentially, producing a webbing that is far more dense and far more vast than we can currently imagine. Perhaps even to the point we realize Borges’ story where a cartographer builds a map so large it replicates the territory itself (On Exactitude in Science)!

From graph to cartography

At the heart of Borges’s poignant story is the map. Crossref’s graph of scholarly communications could be seen in the same light. It has a representational aspect, which is not purely abstract and can be visualized. Here, a map becomes an incredibly potent metaphor. Each link enabled by publisher-deposited metadata is a new street, bridge, or highway that takes us to a particular place (i.e., entity) of interest. These roads lead to articles, researchers, funders, institutions, etc., and in doing so, make them discoverable. They tell a story about the roles of each in the broader research in the landscape dotted with a plethora of places.

The scholarly web has a growing corpus of more than 78 million publications at this very moment registered with Crossref. On average ten to fifteen thousand new objects appear every day. Maps are all the more essential for getting around in a bewildering environment of new and unfamiliar places, even for known ones in areas of exploding growth. They are critical for orienteering, discovering relationships, identifying sets of associated objects, naming new neighborhoods that emerge (i.e., new research specialties), etc. And if each connection on the map is seen as an event, maps can also represent micro-narratives about the research process and the agents involved. A multi-dimensional map containing all these entities, which serves as an evolving representation of spacetime that is constantly updated and always available, would finally begin to depict the process of scholarly activity as a dynamic, evolving, almost living system.

An open map for scholarly communication

Crossref builds such a scholarly map of the research enterprise and makes it openly available for the entire research ecosystem. Call this a meta map or, more recently, call it metastructure. No matter what name it goes by we call it infrastructure at Crossref.

Crossref’s open map for scholarly communications is a core part of the open information infrastructure for scholarly research. Crossref map data are open, portable, as well as licensed and provisioned for maximum reuse to serve the whole community. This open resource has two entrances: one for humans, another for machines. The Crossref REST API enables machines to traverse this environment and mine it in equal measure to the humans behind them. It is configured so that a robot can learn, a phone can access, and platforms can be built.

OpenStreetMap and Google Maps, both widely used and mature infrastructure maps, are instructive examples when we consider a map of this kind for scholarly communications. Map data can be represented in unlimited ways, depending on any variety of needs and users. Third parties can add content via interactive layers that tell different stories such as health expenditure by country based on GDP and coral reefs at risk. They have a broad base of users across business models from philanthropic services aimed at disaster relief (Refugeemaps.eu) to commercial entities providing drivers with locations on open parking spaces (AppyParking on Google Map, PocketParker on OpenStreetMap). They power platforms and services that build maps for others (MapQuest, MapBox). They have applications far beyond the business of maps. For example, Place picker is a Google Maps widget that supports easy auto-complete the entry of any place or location on a mobile app where typing is a chore. And as far use cases close to home, the two have served as raw data for academic research (ex: workflow for generating multi-agent traffic simulation scenarios, automatic classification of GPS trajectories for transportation modes, etc.).

In kind, the Crossref infrastructure map also supports: the development of any variety of new maps which re-present the data, the makers of map platforms that power the research enterprise, tools that use map data, as well as academic research (bibliometrics). We extract slices of data of common interest from the map and add them as additional layers by which anyone can access and create applications on or across these bands of data:

Contributors (authors, editors, reviewers)
Funding information (funding body, grant number)
Trial & study information (clinical trials registry number, registered report, replication study)
Publication history (versions, updates, revisions, corrections, retractions, dates received/accepted/published)
Peer review (status, type, reviews)
Access indicators (publication license for text & data mining, machine mining URLs)
Resources & associated research artifacts (preprints, figures & tables, datasets, software, protocols, research resource IDs)
Activity surrounding the publication (peer reviews, comments & discussions, bookmarks, social shares, recommendations).

Today, the map powers a host of public and commercial organisations alike for a wide range of scholarly and non-scholarly purposes:

<td style="border: 1px solid #ffffff;">
<ul>
<li>
<span >Indexing services</span>
</li>
<li>
<span >Publishing vendors</span>
</li>
<li>
<span >Peer review systems</span>
</li>
<li>
<span >Reference manager systems</span>
</li>
<li>
<span >Lab & diagnostics suppliers</span>
</li>
<li>
<span >Info management systems</span>
</li>
<li>
<span >Educational tools</span>
</li>
<li>
<span >Data analytics systems</span>
</li>
<li>
<span >Literature discovery services</span>
</li>
</ul>
</td>

Publishers
Funders
Research institutions
Archives & repositories
Research councils
Data centres
Professional networks
Patent offices
Registration Agencies

We will follow up this post to highlight a cross-section of these consumers in the Crossref map ecosystem and elaborate on what & how they have built from our data. An infrastructure map offers endless potential to third parties across publishers, funders, research institutions, and vendors working to serve the scholarly research enterprise.

The art of cartography

In the Crossref Product Management team, we have ambitious plans for map enhancements this year. They focus on expanding information density and ease of access to the data. In the former case, we will introduce a new class of locations where activity surrounding the publications are occurring when we launch the DOI Event Tracker. We will also initiate an extensive publisher campaign to achieve full metadata deposit completeness across our membership. No one can keep pace with the sheer volume of research activity happening online nor wander the Lonely Web of research alone. The more metadata publishers provide for a publication, the more roads lead to its map location. After all, discoverability is closely associated with connectedness on a map. And finally, in the latter case, we will refresh and enhance the user interface to make it more powerful for humans to traverse the ever-changing landscape (as easily as the REST API enables machines!).

I gratefully acknowledge the feedback received from the following who served as generous and insightful sounding boards: Virginia Barbour, Theo Bloom, Martin Eve, Daniel S. Katz, Amye Kenall, Catriona MacCullum, Cameron Neylon, Mark Patterson, Kristen Ratan, Carly Strasser, and Kaitlin Thaney.

ORCID tipping point?

Ginny Hendricks — Thu, 07 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Today eight publishers have presented an open letter that sets out the rationale for making ORCID iDs a requirement for all corresponding authors, a move that is being backed by even more publishers and researchers as the news spreads on twitter with #publishORCID. Crossref is a founding organisation of ORCID and an ongoing supporter so it’s great to see further uptake and even more benefit for the research community.

We encourage all our members to strive for complete metadata and that should include ORCID iDs, whether their workflows are able to require them at submission or not. Since we launched the ORCID auto-update process a couple of months ago, over 10,000 authors have given Crossref permission to automatically update their ORCID records.

The open letter—signed by eLife, PLOS, The Royal Society, AGU, EMBO, Hindawi, IEEE, and Science—also offers minimum implementation guidelines for the process:

Require. ORCID iDs are required for corresponding authors of published papers, ideally at submission.
Collect. The collection of ORCID iDs is done via the ORCID API, so authors are not asked to type in or search for their iD.
Auto-update. Crossref metadata is updated to include ORCID iDs for authors, so this information can automatically populate ORCID records.
Publish. Author/co-author ORCID iDs are embedded into article metadata.

ORCID’s own announcement gives further background and describes the benefits for researchers, such as single sign-on across journals and ultimately, increased discovery of their works. Everybody wins.

Auto-Update Has Arrived! ORCID Records Move to the Next Level

Rachael Lammey — Mon, 26 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Crossref goes live in tandem with DataCite to push both publication and dataset information to ORCID profiles automatically. All organisations that deposit ORCID iDs with Crossref and/or DataCite will see this information going further, automatically updating author records.

We’re cross-posting ORCID’s blog below with all the details:

Since ORCID’s inception, our key goal has been to unambiguously identify researchers and provide tools to automate the connection between researchers and their creative works. We are taking a big step towards achieving this goal today, with the launch of Auto-Update functionality in collaboration with Crossref and [DataCite](https://www.datacite.org/.

There’s already been a lot of excitement about Auto-Update: Crossref’s recent announcement about the imminent launch generated a flurry of discussion and celebration on social media. Our own tweet on the topic was viewed over 10,500 times and retweeted by 60 other accounts.

So why all the fuss? We think Auto-Update will transform the way researchers manage their scholarly record. Until now, researchers have had to manually maintain their record, connecting new activities as they are made public. In ORCID, that meant using Search & Link tools developed by our member organisations to claim works manually. Researchers frequently ask, “Why, if I include my ORCID iD when I submit a manuscript or dataset, isn’t my ORCID record “automagically” updated when the work is published?”

With the launch of Auto-Update, that is just what will happen.

It might seem like magic but there are a few steps to make it work:

Researchers. You need to do two things: (1) use your ORCID iD when submitting a paper or dataset, and (2) authorize Crossref and DataCite to update your ORCID record. In keeping with our commitment to ensuring that researchers maintain full control of their ORCID record, you may revoke this permission at any time, and may also choose privacy settings for the information posted on your record.

Publishers and data centers. These organisations also have two things to do: (1) collect ORCID identifiers during the submission workflow, using a process that involves authentication (not a type-in field!), and (2) embed the iD in the published paper and include the iD when submitting information to Crossref or DataCite.

Crossref and DataCite. Upon receipt of data from a publisher or data center with a valid identifier, Crossref or DataCite can automatically push that information to the researcher’s ORCID record.

More information about how to opt out of this service can be found here: the ORCID Inbox.

Why is this so revolutionary?

A bit of background, first. Crossref and DataCite, both non-profit organisations, are leaders in minting DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) for research publications and datasets. A DOI is a unique alphanumeric string assigned to a digital object – in this case, an electronic journal article, book chapter, or a dataset. Each DOI is associated with a set of basic metadata and a URL pointer to the full text, so that it uniquely identifies the content item and provides a persistent link to its location on the internet.

Crossref, working with over a thousand scholarly publishers, has generated well over 75 million DOIs for journal articles and book chapters. DataCite works with nearly 600 data centers worldwide and has generated over 6.5 million DOIs to date. Between them, Crossref and DataCite have already received almost a half a million works from publishers and data centers that include an ORCID iD validated by the author/contributor. With Auto-Update functionality in place, information about these articles can transit (with the author’s permission) to the author’s ORCID record.

Auto-Update doesn’t stop at a researcher’s ORCID record. Systems that have integrated ORCID APIs and have a researcher’s ORCID record connected to that system — their faculty profile system, library repository, webpage, funder reporting system — can receive alerts from ORCID. Information can move easily and unambiguously across systems.

This is the beginning of the end for the endless rekeying of information that plagues researchers — and anyone involved in research reporting. Surely something to celebrate!

Questions you may have:

Q. What do I need to do to sign up for auto-update?

You need to grant permission to Crossref and DataCite to post information to your ORCID record. You can do this today by using the Search and Link wizard for DataCite available through the ORCID Registry or the DataCite Metadata Search page. We also have added a new ORCID Inbox, so that you can receive a message from Crossref or DataCite if they receive a datafile with your iD, and you can grant permission directly. See More on the ORCID Inbox.

Q. Will Crossref and DataCite be able to update my ORCID record with already published works for which I did not use my ORCID iD?

No. The auto-update process only applies to those works that these organisations receive that include your ORCID iD. For previous works that did not include your ORCID iD, you will need to use the DataCite and Crossref Search and Link wizards to connect information with your iD.

Q. What information will be posted to my record?

With your permission, basic information about the article (such as title, list of contributors, journal or publisher) or dataset (such as data center name and date of publication) will be posted, along with a DOI that allows users to navigate to the source paper or dataset landing page.

Q. What if my journal or data center doesn’t collect ORCID iDs?

Ask them to! This simple step can be accomplished using either the Public or Member ORCID APIs. Information about integrating ORCID iDs in publishing and repository workflows is publicly available.

Crossref to Auto-Update ORCID Records

Ginny Hendricks — Thu, 24 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

In the next few weeks, authors with an ORCID iD will be able to have Crossref automatically push information about their published work to their ORCID record. It’s something that ORCID users have been asking for and we’re pleased to be the first to develop the integration. 230 publishers already include ORCID iDs in their metadata deposits with us, and currently there are 248,000 DOIs that include ORCID iDs.

What this means for researchers

More visibility for your work! Crossref represents over 5000 scholarly publishers and many of them ask authors for their ORCID iD and include it in the publication information they send us. Also it will mean less manual searching and adding; you’ve always been able to search crossref metadata for your name and/or publications and manually add them to your ORCID record, this auto-update simply means that when your publishers include the info we can update and add work(s) to your ORCID record automatically for you. You can still choose to hide/show whatever works you choose, and, of course, you’ll have the opportunity to authorize or switch off the integration completely (though future publications may trigger a new request). Overall, you’ll benefit from a more complete and up-to-date ORCID record to showcase your work.

What this means for publishers

If you’re one of the 230 Crossref publishers who already supply ORCID iDs along with the usual metadata submissions, then you’re all good. If you don’t offer this yet, you might want to think about starting - it’s beneficial for funders, publishers, other researchers, libraries, and universities to be able to integrate with complete researcher records. You can ask for ORCIDs upon manuscript submission or acceptance and tag it in your metadata deposits with Crossref. We’ll ensure the rest.

Various caveats and important details to be aware of

Apparently not all publishers are members of Crossref (we know, crazy), and in addition only a subset of Crossref publishers (230 in total) are asking authors for ORCID iDs and/or including them in their metadata deposits.
Some publishers may choose to opt out of passing through the details to ORCID using the Crossref auto-update (perhaps they plan to send this directly at some point) but if you’ve included your ORCID with your submission and it isn’t automatically updated, then check with your publisher.
We have a “backlog” of almost 250,000 DOIs that include ORCID iDs so that may mean we do some bulk updates at a later date where authors will receive an email with a long list of works to add. Even if the works have been listed before, it’s worth accepting as it will add the most up-to-date metadata to ensure the most accurate record.

Any questions can be directed to our support team.

♫ Researchers just wanna have funds ♫

Geoffrey Bilder — Thu, 10 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

photo credit

Summary

You can use a new Crossref API to query all sorts of interesting things about who funded the research behind the content Crossref members publish.

Background

Back in May 2013 we launched Crossref’s FundRef service. It can be summarized like this:

Crossref keeps and manages a canonical list of Funder Names (ephemeral) and associated identifiers (persistent).
We encourage our members (or anybody, really- the list is available under A CC-Zero license waiver) to use this list for collecting information on who funded the research behind the content that our members publish.
We then ask that our members deposit this data in their normal Crossref metadata deposits.

And that was cool.

But then people started asking us awkward questions. Questions like “what can I do with the funder data?” and “how do I query it?”.

Stoopit people.

Can’t you just let us bask for a few minutes in the sunny glow of actually conceiving of and launching a project within a year?

But seriously, funders, were interested to see how they could use the funder metadata being collected in Crossref. In particular, some funding agencies were interested in being able to measure Key Performance Indicators (“KPIs” to management wonks) related to recent mandates such as the February 22nd 2013 OSTP memo, Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research. Two groups also approached us, CHORUS and SHARE. Both are interested in exploring how to build reporting tools for funders, institutions and researchers and each brought us a gigantic hairball of use-cases they were hoping we would be able to meet.

Conveniently, we were in the process of creating a revised, modern Crossref API that is entirely buzzword-compliant, and so we set to work…

We thought people might be interested in seeing what you can do with the Crossref REST API in relation to funding information and the expectations that are increasingly being attached to them. CHORUS is already using the Crossref REST API heavily and we expect that SHARE will soon start making use of it as well. The feedback from both groups has been very useful, but we are looking for broader feedback as well. The API is still in development, so now is your chance to help us shape it.

Brief Examples

Please note, the following are APIs calls, although you can copy and paste the URIs into your browser, the data is returned in a machine readable representation called JSON. If you want the results to look a little more presentable, we advise you install the JSONView plugin:

Firefox Users: JSONView
Chrome Users: JSONView

Also note that publishers have only just started to deposit the metadata needed for these APIs to work, so the data is currently sparse. We know that many of our members are working feverishly to populate more of the needed metadata, but this requires updates to the their manuscript tracking systems, production systems and hosting systems. It takes time.

But for now you can paste the relevant URIs below into your browser and see the results that we do have. Expect these numbers to increase sharply over the next few months

To start with, you might want to know how many articles in Crossref have FundRef metadata:

https://api-crossref-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/v1/works?filter=has-funder:true&rows=0

You could then be interested in knowing how many works in Crossref use FundRef to credit the United States’ National Science Foundation (NSF) for funding their research? First you need to find out what the FundRef identifier is for the NSF:

https://api-crossref-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/v1/funders?query=NSF

You can see that there are several entries that match “NSF”, and that the one we are looking for has the identifier http://dx.doi.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.13039/100000001. Remember, funding agency names can change frequently, the ID provides a persistent link to the funder even if their name changes.

If you are curious, you can see the details for the NSF entry, including its location, parent and child organisations:

https://api-crossref-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/v1/funders/10.13039/100000001

Notice that the results also lists the work-count. This is the number of works in the Crossref metadata that list the US NSF as having funded the research.

So perhaps you would like to see the list of works. The following will list the first twenty:

https://api-crossref-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/v1/funders/10.13039/100000001/works

You can page through the results with the offset argument:

https://api-crossref-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/v1/funders/10.13039/100000001/works?offset=20
https://api-crossref-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/v1/funders/10.13039/100000001/works?offset=40
...

How many works that have listed the NSF as a funder have license information:

https://api-crossref-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/v1/funders/10.13039/100000001/works?filter=has-license:true&rows=0

Lets see the first batch that have license information:

https://api-crossref-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/v1/funders/10.13039/100000001/works?filter=has-license:true

Lets look at the metadata for one of the DOIs returned:

https://api-crossref-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/v1/works/10.1063/1.3593378

Interesting, the metadata shows an article published by AIP. It includes license information (CC-BY 3.0) as well as a link to the full text. If you follow the link to the full text, you can retrieve it:

http://link.aip.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/link/applab/v98/i21/p216101/pdf/CHORUS

Wow- A pretty short article. But you can see that it does credit the NSF and that the award number recorded in the text is the same as the award number recorded in the FundRef section of the Crossref metadata. Yay.

You can see in the brief examples above that there is a lot of other metadata you may want to query on and explore. It can include ORCIDS, information about archiving arrangements- even abstracts. It all depends on what the Crossref member has decided to provide.

You can get a simple overview of what a Crossref member has provided by looking at a member summary. Here is an example for Hindawi:

https://api-crossref-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/v1/members?query=hindawi

Note again that names are fickle, so the above query can also be accomplished using the member identifier like this:

https://api-crossref-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/v1/members/98

Groovy init?

If you want more pointers on where you can learn how to use the API, read on…

The Future of the Crossref REST API.

Our aim is for the Crossref REST API to go into production this Summer (2014). As with most of our newer APIs, there will be a free API for public use and a paid for API for professional use. The only difference between the two will be that the professional version will come with a service level agreement (SLA) covering uptime, response time and support. Naturally, this also means that the professional one will be on dedicated hosting equipment so that we can meet these SLAs, whereas the performance of the free version will be subject to the vicissitudes inherent in using a shared, constrained resource (i.e. the server and network it is running on).

Again, the basics of the API are in place. It should be fairly stable, but we do reserve the right to make changes to it over the next few months. Please send us feedback.

— The Weasel

Many Metrics. Such Data. Wow.

Geoffrey Bilder — Mon, 24 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

[

Crossref Labs loves to be the last to jump on an internet trend, so what better than than to combine the Doge meme with altmetrics?

Note: The API calls below have been superceeded with the development of the Event Data project. See the latest API documentation for equivalent functionality

Want to know how many times a Crossref DOI is cited by the Wikipedia?

http://det.labs.crossref.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/works/doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0086859

Or how many times one has been mentioned in Europe PubMed Central?

http://det.labs.crossref.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/works/doi/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2013.10.021

Or DataCite?

http://det.labs.crossref.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/works/doi/10.1111/jeb.12289

Background

Back in 2011 PLOS released its awesome ALM system as open source software (OSS). At Crossref Labs, we thought it might be interesting to see what would happen if we ran our own instance of the system and loaded it up with a few Crossref DOIs. So we did. And the code fell over. Oops. Somehow it didn’t like dealing with 10 million DOIs. Funny that.

But the beauty of OSS is that we were able to work with PLOS to scale the code to handle our volume of data. Crossref contracted with Cottage Labs and we both worked with PLOS to make changes to the system. These eventually got fed back into the main ALM source on Github. Now everybody benefits from our work. Yay for OSS.

So if you want to know technical details, skip to Details for Propellerheads. But if you want to know why we did this, and what we plan to do with it, read on.

Why?

There are (cough) some problems in our industry that we can best solve with shared infrastructure. When publishers first put scholarly content online, they used to make bilateral reference linking agreements. These agreements allowed them to link citations using each other’s proprietary reference linking APIs. But this system didn’t scale. It was too time-consuming to negotiate all the agreements needed to link to other publishers. And linking through many proprietary citation APIs was too complex and too fragile. So the industry founded Crossref to create a common, cross-publisher citation linking API. Crossref has since obviated the need for bilateral linking arrangements.

So-called altmetrics look like they might have similar characteristics. You have ~4000 Crossref member publishers and N sources (e.g. Twitter, Mendeley, Facebook, CiteULike, etc.) where people use (e.g. discuss, bookmark, annotate, etc.) scholarly publications. Publishers could conceivably each choose to run their own system to collect this information. But if they did, they would face the following problems:

The N sources will be volatile. New ones will emerge. Old ones will vanish.
Each publisher will need to deal with each source’s different APIs, rate limits, T&Cs, data licenses, etc. This is a logistical headache for both the publishers and for the sources.
If publishers use different systems which in turn look at different sources, it will be difficult to compare results across publishers.
If a journal moves from one publisher to another, then how are the metrics for that journal’s articles going to follow the journal? This isn’t a complete list, but it shows that there might be some virtue in publishers sharing an infrastructure for collecting this data. But what about commercial providers? Couldn’t they provide these ALM services? Of course - and some of them currently do. But normally they look on the actual collection of this data as a means to an end. The real value they provide is in the analysis, reporting and tools that they build on top of the data. Crossref has no interest in building front-ends to this data. If there is a role for us to play here, it is simply in the collection and distribution of the data.

No, really, WHY?

Aren’t these altmetrics an ill-conceived and meretricious idea? By providing this kind of information, isn’t Crossref just encouraging feckless, neoliberal university administrators to hasten academia’s slide into a Stakhanovite dystopia? Can’t these systems be gamed?

FOR THE LOVE OF FSM, WHY IS CROSSREF DABBLING IN SOMETHING OF SUCH QUESTIONABLE VALUE?

takes deep breath. wipes spittle from beard

These are all serious concerns. Goodhart’s Law and all that… If a university’s appointments and promotion committee is largely swayed by Impact Factor, it won’t improve a thing if they substitute or supplement Impact Factor with altmetrics. Amy Brand has repeatedly pointed out, the best institutions simply don’t use metrics this way at all (PowerPoint presentation). They know better.

But yes, it is still likely that some powerful people will come to lazy conclusions based on altmetrics. And following that, other lazy, unscrupulous and opportunistic people will attempt to game said metrics. We may even see an industry emerge to exploit this mess and provide the scholarly equivalent of SEO. Feh. Now I’m depressed and I need a drink.

So again, why is Crossref doing this? Though we have our doubts about how effective altmetrics will be in evaluating the quality of content, we do believe that they are a useful tool for understanding how scholarly content is used and interpreted. The most eloquent arguments against altmetrics for measuring quality, inadvertently make the case for altmetrics as a tool for monitoring attention.

Critics of altmetrics point out that much of the attention that research receives outside of formal scholarly communications channels can be ascribed to:

Puffery. Researchers and/or university/publisher “PR wonks” over-promoting research results.
Innocent misinterpretation. A lay audience simply doesn’t understand the research results.
Deliberate misinterpretation. Ideologues misrepresent research results to support their agendas.
Salaciousness. The research appears to be about sex, drugs, crime, video games or other popular bogeymen.
Neurobollocks. A category unto itself these days.

In short, scholarly research might be misinterpreted. Shock horror. Ban all metrics. Whew. That won’t happen again.

Scholarly research has always been discussed outside of formal scholarly venues. Both by scholars themselves and by interested laity. Sometimes these discussions advance the scientific cause. Sometimes they undermine it. The University of Utah didn’t depend on widespread Internet access or social networks to promote yet-to-be peer-reviewed claims about cold fusion. That was just old-fashioned analogue puffery. And the Internet played no role in the Laetrile or DMSO crazes of the 1980s. You see, there were once these things called “newspapers.” And another thing called “television.” And a sophisticated meatspace-based social network called a “town square.”

But there are critical differences between then and now. As citizens get more access to the scholarly literature, it is far more likely that research is going to be discussed outside of formal scholarly venues. Now we can build tools to help researchers track these discussions. Now researchers can, if they need to, engage in the conversations as well. One would think that conscientious researchers would see it as their responsibility to remain engaged, to know how their research is being used. And especially to know when it is being misused.

That isn’t to say that we expect researchers will welcome this task. We are no Pollyannas. Researchers are already famously overstretched. They barely have time to keep up with the formally published literature. It seems cruel to expect them to keep up with the firehose of the Internet as well.

Which gets us back to the value of altmetrics tools. Our hope is that, as altmetrics tools evolve, they will provide publishers and researchers with an efficient mechanism for monitoring the use of their content in non-traditional venues. Just in the way that citations were used before they were distorted into proxies for credit and kudos.

We don’t think altmetrics are there yet. Partly because some parties are still tantalized by the prospect of usurping one metric for another. But mostly because the entire field is still nascent. People don’t yet know how the information can be combined and used effectively. So we still make naive assumptions such as “link=like” and “more=better.” Surely it will eventually occur to somebody that, instead, there may be a connection between repeated headline-grabbing research and academic fraud. A neuroscientist might be interested in a tool that alerts them if the MRI scans in their research paper are being misinterpreted on the web to promote neurobollocks. An immunologist may want to know if their research is being misused by the anti-vaccination movement. Perhaps the real value in gathering this data will be seen when somebody builds tools to help researchers DETECT puffery, social-citation cabals, and misinterpretation of research results?

But Crossref won’t be building those tools. What we might be able to do is help others overcome another hurdle that blocks the development of more sophisticated tools; getting hold of the needed data in the first place. This is why we are dabbling in altmetrics.

Wikipedia is already the 8th largest referrer of Crossref DOIs. Note that this doesn’t just mean that the Wikipedia cites lots of Crossref DOIs, it means that people actually click on and follow those DOIs to the scholarly literature. As scholarly communication transcends traditional outlets and as the audience for scholarly research broadens, we think that it will be more important for publishers and researcher to be aware of how their research is being discussed and used. They may even need to engage more with non-scholarly audiences. In order to do this, they need to be aware of the conversations. Crossref is providing this experimental data source in the hope that we can spur the development of more sophisticated tools for detecting and analyzing these conversations. Thankfully, this is an inexpensive experiment to conduct - largely thanks to the decision on the part of PLOS to open source its ALM code.

What Now?

Crossref’s instance of PLOS’s ALM code is an experiment. We mentioned that we had encountered scalability problems and that we had resolved some of them. But there are still big scalability issues to address. For example, assuming a response time of 1 second, if we wanted to poll the English-language version of the Wikipedia to see what had cited each of the 65 million DOIs held in Crossref, the process would take years to complete. But this is how the system is designed to work at the moment. It polls various source APIs to see if a particular DOI is “mentioned”. Parallelizing the queries might reduce the amount of time it takes to poll the Wikipedia, but it doesn’t reduce the work. Another obvious way in which we could improve the scalability of the system is to add a push mechanism to supplement the pull mechanism. Instead of going out and polling the Wikipedia 65 million times, we could establish a “scholarly linkback” mechanism that would allow third parties to alert us when DOIs and other scholarly identifiers are referenced (e.g. cited, bookmarked, shared). If the Wikipedia used this, then even in an extreme case scenario (i.e. everything in Wikipedia cites at least one Crossref DOI), this would mean that we would only need to process ~ 4 million trackbacks.

The other significant advantage of adding a push API is that it would take the burden off of Crossref to know what sources we want to poll. At the moment, if a new source comes online, we’d need to know about it and build a custom plugin to poll their data. This needlessly disadvantages new tools and services as it means that their data will not be gathered until they are big enough for us to pay attention to. If the service in question addresses a niche of the scholarly ecosystem, they may never become big enough. But if we allow sources to push data to us using a common infrastructure, then new sources do not need to wait for us to take notice before they can participate in the system.

Supporting (potentially) many new sources will raise another technical issue- tracking and maintaining the provenance of the data that we gather. The current ALM system does a pretty good job of keeping data, but if we ever want third parties to be able to rely on the system, we probably need to extend the provenance information so that the data is cheaply and easily auditable.

Perhaps the most important thing we want to learn from running this experimental ALM instance is: what it would take to run the system as a production service? What technical resources would it require? How could they be supported? And from this we hope to gain enough information to decide whether the service is worth running and, if so, by whom. Crossref is just one of several organisations that could run such a service, but it is not clear if it would be the best one. We hope that as we work with PLOS, our members and the rest of the scholarly community, we’ll get a better idea of how such a service should be governed and sustained.

Details for Propellerheads

Warning, Caveats and Weasel Words

The Crossref ALM instance is a Crossref Labs project. It is running on R&D equipment in a non-production environment administered by an orangutang on a diet of Redbulls and vodka.

So what is working?

The system has been initially loaded with 317,500+ Crossref DOIs representing publications from 2014. We will load more DOIs in reverse chronological order until we get bored or until the system falls over again.

We have activated the following sources:

PubMed

DataCite

PubMedCentral Europe Citations and Usage

We have data from the following sources but will need some work to achieve stability:

Facebook

Wikipedia

CiteULike

Twitter

Some of them are faster than others. Some are more temperamental than others. WordPress, for example, seems to go into a sulk and shut itself off after approximately 1,300 API calls.

In any case, we will be monitoring and tweaking the sources as we gather data. We will also add new sources as we get requested API keys. We will probably even create one or two new sources ourselves. Watch this blog and we’ll update you as we add/tweak sources.

Dammit, shut up already and tell me how to query stuff.

You can login to the Crossref ALM instance simply using a Mozilla Persona (yes, we’d eventually like to support ORCID too). Once logged-in, your account page will list an API key. Using the API key, you can do things like:

http://det.labs.crossref.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/api/v5/articles?ids=10.1038/nature12990

And you will see that (as of this writing), said Nature article has been cited by the Wikipedia article here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HE0107-5240#cite_ref-Keller2014_4-0;

PLOS has provided lovely detailed instructions for using the API- So, please, play with the API and see what you make of it. On our side we will be looking at how we can improve performance and expand coverage. We don’t promise much- the logistics here are formidable. As we said above, once you start working with millions of documents, the polling process starts to hit API walls quickly. But that is all part of the experiment. We appreciate your helping us and would like your feedback. We can be contacted at:

DOIs unambiguously and persistently identify published, trustworthy, citable online scholarly literature. Right?

Geoffrey Bilder — Fri, 20 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The South Park movie , “Bigger, Longer & Uncut” has a DOI:

a) http://dx.doi.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.5240/B1FA-0EEC-C316-3316-3A73-L

So does the pornographic movie, “Young Sex Crazed Nurses”:

b) http://dx.doi.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.5240/4CF3-57AB-2481-651D-D53D-Q

And the following DOI points to a fake article on a “Google-Based Alien Detector”:

c) http://dx.doi.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.6084/m9.figshare.93964

And the following DOI refers to an infamous fake article on literary theory:

d) http://dx.doi.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.2307/466856

This scholarly article discusses the entirely fictitious Australian “Drop Bear”:

e) http://dx.doi.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.1080/00049182.2012.731307

The following two DOIs point to the same article- the first DOI points to the final author version, and the second DOI points to the final published version:

f) https://web.archive.org/web/20160423204031/https://figshare.com/articles/Relating_ion_channel_expression,_bifurcation_structure,_and_diverse_firing_patterns_in_a_model_of_an_identified_motor_neuron/96546

g) http://dx.doi.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.1007/s10827-012-0416-6

This following two DOIs point to the same article- there is no apparent difference between the two copies:

h) http://dx.doi.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.6084/m9.figshare.91541

i) http://dx.doi.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.1038/npre.2012.7151.1

Another example where two DOIs point to the same article and there is no apparent difference between the two copies:

j) http://dx.doi.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.1364/AO.39.005477

k) http://dx.doi.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.3929/ethz-a-005707391

These journals assigned DOIs, but not through Crossref:

l) http://dx.doi.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.3233/BIR-2008-0496

m) https://web.archive.org/web/20160423192452/https://figshare.com/articles/Role_of_brain_glutamic_acid_metabolism_changes_in_neurodegenerative_pathologies/95564

n) http://dx.doi.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.3205/cto000081

These two DOIs are assigned to two different data sets by two different RAs:

o) http://dx.doi.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.1107/S0108767312019034/eo5016sup1.xls

p) http://dx.doi.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.1594/PANGAEA.726855

This DOI appears to have been published, but was not registered until well after it was published. There were 254 unsuccessful attempts to resolve it in September 2012 alone:

q) http://dx.doi.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.4233/uuid:995dd18a-dc5d-4a9a-b9eb-a16a07bfcc6d

The owner of prefix, ‘10.4223,’ who is responsible for the above DOI had 378,790 attempted resolutions in September 2012 of which there were 377,001 failures. The top 10 DOI failures for this prefix each garnered over 200 attempted resolutions. As of November 2012 the prefix had only registered 349 DOIs.

Of the above 16 example DOIs 11 cannot be used for CrossCheck or Crossmark. 3 cannot be used with content negotiation. To search metadata for the above examples, you need to visit four sites:

https://web.archive.org/web/20131229210637/http://search.crossref.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/

https://ui.eidr.org/search

https://www-medra-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/en/search.htm

https://search.datacite.org/

The 14 examples come from just 4 of the 8 existing DOI registration agencies (RAs) It is virtually impossible for somebody without specialized knowledge to tell which DOIs are Crossref DOIs and which ones are not.

Background

So DOIs unambiguously and persistently identify published, trustworthy, citable online scholarly literature. Right? Wrong.

The examples above are useful because they help elucidate some misconceptions about the DOI itself, the nature of the DOI registration agencies and, in particular issues being raised by new RAs and new DOI allocation models.

DOIs are just identifiers

Crossref’s dominance as the primary DOI registration agency makes it easy to assume Crossref’s particular application of the DOI as a scholarly citation identifier is somehow intrinsic to the DOI. The truth is, the DOI has nothing specifically to do with citation or scholarly publishing. It is simply an identifier that can be used for virtually any application. DOIs could be used as serial numbers on car parts, as supply-chain management identifiers for videos and music or as cataloguing numbers for museum artifacts. The first two identifiers listed in the examples (a & b) illustrate this. They both belong to MovieLabs and are part of the EIDR (Entertainment Identifier Registry) effort to create a unique identifier for television and movie assets. At the moment, the DOIs that MoveLabs are assigning are B2B-focused and users are unlikely to see them in the wild. But we should recall that Crossref’s application of DOIs was also initially considered a B2B identifier- but it has since become widely recognized and depended on by researchers, librarians and third parties. The visibility of EIDR DOIs could change rapidly as they become more popular.

Multiple DOIs can be assigned to the same object

There is no International DOI Foundation (IDF) prohibition against assigning multiple DOIs to the same object. At most the IDF suggests that RAs might coordinate to avoid duplicate assignments, but it provides no guidelines on how such cross-RA checks would work.

Crossref, in its particular application of the DOI, attempts to ensure that we don’t assign two different copies of the same article with different DOIs, but that is designed in order to avoid having publishers mistakenly making duplicate submissions. Even then, there are subtle exceptions to this rule- the same article, if legitimately published in two different issues (e.g. a regular issue and a thematic issue) will be assigned different DOIs. This is because, though the actual article content might be identical, the context in which it is cited is also important to record and distinguish. Finally, of course, we assign multiple DOIs to the same “object” when we assign book-level and chapter level DOIs. Or when we assign DOIs to components or reference work entries.

The likelihood of multiple DOIs being assigned to the same object increases as we have multiple RAs. In the future we might legitimately have a monograph that has different Bowker DOIs for different e-book platforms (Kindle, iPad, Kobo.) yet all three might share the same Crossref DOI for citation purposes.

Again, the examples show this already happening. The examples f & g are assigned by DataCite (via FigShare) and Crossref respectively. The first identifies the author version and was presumably assigned by said author. The second identifies the publisher version and was assigned by the publisher.

Although Crossref, as a publisher-focused RA, might have historically proscribed the assignment of Crossref DOIs to archive or author versions, there has never been and could never be any such restrictions on other DOI RAs. These are legitimate applications of two citation identifiers to two versions of the same article.

However, the next set of examples, h, i, j and k show what appears to be a slightly different problem. In these cases articles that appear to be in all aspects identical have been assigned two separate DOIs by different RAs. In one respect this is a logistical or technical problem- although Crossref can check for such potential duplicate assignments within its own system, there is no way for us to do this across different RAs. But this is also a marketing and education problem- how do RAs with similar constituencies (publishers, researchers, librarians) and application of the DOI (scholarly citation) educate and inform their members about best practice in applying DOIs in that particular RAs context?

DOI registration agencies are not focused on record types, they are focused on constituencies and applications

The examples f through k also illustrate another area of fuzzy thinking about RAs- that they are somehow built around particular record types. We routinely hear people mistakenly explain that difference between Crossref and DataCite is that “Crossref assigns DOIs to journal articles” and that “DataCite assigns DOIs to data.” Sometimes this is supplemented with “and Bowker assigns DOIs to books.” This is nonsense. Crossref assigns DOIs to data (example o) as well as conference proceedings, programs, images, tables, books, chapters, reference entries, etc. And DataCite covers a similar breadth of record types including articles (examples c, h, f, l, m ). The difference between Crossref, DataCite and Bowker is their constituencies and applications- not the record types they apply DOIs to. Crossref’s constituency is publishers. DataCite’s constituency is data repositories, archives and national libraries. But even though Crossref and DataCite have different constituencies, they share a similar application of the DOI- that is the use of DOI as citation identifiers. This is in contrast to MovieLabs whose application of the DOI is supply chain management.

DOI registration agency constituencies and applications can overlap or be entirely separate

Although Crossref’s constituency is “publishers”, we are catholic in our definition of “publisher” and have several members who run repositories that also “publish” content such as working papers and other grey literature (e.g. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, University of Michigan Library, University of Illinois Library). DataCite’s constituency is data repositories, archives and national libraries, but this doesn’t stop DataCite (through CDL/FigShare) from working with the publisher, PLoS, on their “Reproducibility Initiative” which requires the archiving of article-related datasets. PloS has announced that they will host all supplemental data sets on FigShare but will assign DOIs to those items through Crossref.

Crossref’s constituency of publishers overlaps heavily with Airiti, JaLC, mEDRA, ISTIC and Bowker. In the case of all but Bowker we also overlap in our application of the DOI in the service of citation identification. Bowker, though it shares Crossref’s constituency, uses DOIs for supply chain management applications.

Meanwhile, EIDR is an outlier, its constituency does not overlap with Crossref’s and its application of the DOI is different as well.

The relationship between RA constituency overlap (e.g. scholarly publishers vs television/movie studios) and application overlap (e.g. citation identification vs. supply chain management) can be visualized as such:

The differences (subtle or large) between the various RAs are not evident to anybody without a fairly sophisticated understanding of the identifier space and the constituencies represented by the various RAs. To the ordinary person these are all just DOIs, which in turn are described as simply being “persistent interoperable identifiers.”

Which of course begs the question, what do we mean by “persistent” and “interoperable?”

DOIs only are as persistent as the registration agency’s application warrants.

The word “persistent” does not mean “permanent.” Andrew Treloar is known to point out that the primary sense of the word “persistent” in the New Oxford American Dictionary is:

Continuing firmly or obstinately in a course of action in spite of difficulty or opposition

Yet presumably the IDF once chose to use the word “persistent” instead of “perpetual” or “permanent” for other reasons. “Persistence” implies longevity, without committing to “forever.”

It may sound prissy, but it seems reasonable to expect that the useful life-expectancy for the identifier used for managing inventory of the the movie “Young Sex Crazed Nurses” might be different than the life expectancy for the identifier used to cite Henry Oldenburg’s “Epistle Dedicatory” in the first issue of the Philosophical Transactions. In other words, some RAs have a mandate to be more “obstinate” than others and so their definitions of “persistence” may vary. Different RAs have different service level agreements.

The problem is that ordinary users of the “persistent” DOI have no way of distinguishing between those DOIs that are expected to have a useful life of 5 years and those DOIs that are expected to have a useful lifespan of 300+ years. Unfortunately, if one of the more than 6 million non-Crossref DOIs breaks today, it will likely be blamed on Crossref.

Similarly, if a DOI doesn’t work with an existing Crossref service, like CrossCheck, Crossmark or Crossref Metadata Search, it will also be laid at the foot of Crossref. This scenario is likely to become even more complex as different RAs provide different specialized services for their constituencies.

Ironically, the converse doesn’t always apply. Crossref oftentimes does not get credit for services that we instigated at the IDF level. For instance, FigShare has been widely praised for implementing content negotiation for DOIs even though this initiative had nothing to do with FigShare, instead it was implemented by DataCite with the prodding and active help of Crossref (DataCite even used Crossref’s code for a while). To be clear, we don’t begrudge praise for FigShare. We think FigShare is very cool- this just serves as an example of the confusion that is already occurring.

DOIs are only “interoperable” at a least common denominator level of functionality

There is no question that use of Crossref DOIs has enabled the interoperability of citations across scholarly publisher sites. The extra level of indirection built into the DOI means that publishers do not have to worry about negotiating multiple bilateral linking agreements and proprietary APIs. Furthermore, at the mundane technical level of following HTTP links, publishers also don’t have to worry about whether the DOI was registered with mEDRA, DataCite or Crossref as long as the DOI in question was applied with citation linking in mind.

However, what happens if somebody wants to use metadata to search for a particular DOI? What happens if they expect that DOI to work with content negotiation or to enable a CrossCheck analysis or show a Crossmark dialog or carry FundRef data? At this level, the purported interoperability of the DOI system falls apart. A publisher issuing DataCite DOIs cannot use CrossCheck. A user with a mEDRA DOI cannot use it with content negotiation. Somebody searching Crossref Metadata Search or using Crossref’s OpenURL API will not find DataCite records. Somebody depositing metadata in an RA other than Crossref or DataCite will not be able to deposit ORCIDs.

There are no easy or cheap technical solutions to fix this level of incompatibility baring the creation of a superset of all RA functionality at the IDF level. But even if we had a technical solution to this problem- it isn’t clear that such a high-level of interoperability is warranted across all RAs. The degree of interoperability that is desirable between RAs is only in proportion to the degree that they serve overlapping constituencies (e.g. publishers) or use the DOI for overlapping applications (e.g. citation)

DOI Interoperability matters more for some registration agencies than others

This raises the question of what it even means to be “interoperable” between different RAs that share virtually no overlap in constituencies or applications. In what meaningful sense do you make a DOI used for inventory control “interoperable” with a DOI used for identifying citable scholarly works? Do we want to be able to check “Young Sex Crazed Nurses” for plagiarism? Or let somebody know when the South Park movie has been retracted or updated? Do we need to alert somebody when their inventory of citations falls below a certain threshold? Or let them know how many copies of a PDF are left in the warehouse?

The opposite, but equally vexing issue arrises for RAs that actually share constituencies and/or applications. Crossref, DataCIte and mEDRA have all built separate metadata search capabilities, separate deposit APIs, separate OpenURL APIs, and separate stats packages- all geared at handling scholarly citation linking.

Finally, it seems a shame that a third party, like ORCID, who wants to enable researchers to add any DOI and its associated metadata to their ORCID profile, will end up having to interface with 4-5 different RAs.

Summary and closing thoughts

Crossref was founded by publishers who were prescient in understanding that, as scholarly content moved online, there was the potential to add great value to publications by directly linking citations to the documents cited. However, publishers also realized that many of the architectural attributes that made the WWW so successful (decentralization, simple protocols for markup, linking and display, etc.), also made the web a fragile platform for persistent citation.

The Crossref solution to this dilemma was to introduce the use of the DOI identifier as a level of citation indirection in order to layer a persist-able citation infrastructure onto the web. The success of this mechanism has been evident at a number of levels. A first-order effect of the system is that it has allowed publishers to create reliable and persistent links between copies of publisher content. Indeed uptake of the Crossref system by scholarly and professional publishers has been rapid and almost all serious scholarly publishers are now Crossref members.

The second order effects of the Crossref system have also been remarkable. Firstly, just as researchers have long expected that any serious paper-based publication would include citations, now researchers expect that serious online scholarly publications will also support robust online citation linking. Secondly, some have adopted a cargo-cult practice of seeing the mere presence of a DOI on a publication as a putative sign of “citability” or “authority.” Thirdly, interest in use of the DOI as a linking mechanism has started to filter out to researchers themselves, thus potentially extending the use of Crossref DOIs beyond being primarily a B2B citation convention.

The irony is that although the DOI system was almost single-handedly popularized and promoted by Crossref, the DOI brand is better known than Crossref itself. We now find that new RAs like EIDR, DataCite and new services like FigShare are building on the DOI brand and taking it in new directions. As such the first and second order benefits of Crossref’s pioneering work with DOIs are likely to be effected by the increasing activity of the new DOI RAs as well as the introduction of new models for assigning and maintaining DOIs.

How can you trust that a DOI is persistent if different RAs have different conceptions of persistence? How can you expect the presence of a DOI to indicate “authority” or “scholarliness” if DOIs are being assigned to porn movies? How can you expect a DOI to point to the “published” version of an article when authors can upload and assign DOIs to their own copies of articles?

It is precisely because we think that some of the qualities traditionally (and wrongly) accorded to DOIs (e.g. scholarly, published, stewarded, citable, persistent) are going to be diluted in the long term that we have focused so much of our recent attention on new initiatives that have a more direct and unambiguous connection to assessing the trustworthiness of Crossref member’s content. CrossCheck and the CrossCheck logos are designed to highlight the role that publishers play in detecting and preventing academic fraud. The Crossmark identification service will serve as a signal to researchers that publishers are committed to maintaining their scholarly content as well as giving scholars the information they need to verify that they are using the most recent and reliable versions of a document. FundRef is designed to make the funding sources for research and articles transparent and easily accessible. And finally we have been both adjusting Crossref’s branding and display guidelines as well as working with the IDF to refine its branding and display guidelines so as to help clearly differentiate different DOI applications and constituencies.

Whilst it might be worrying to some that DOIs are being applied in ways that Crossref has not expected and may not have historically endorsed, we should celebrate that the broader scholarly community is finally recognizing the importance of persist-able citation identifiers.

These developments also serve to reinforce a strong trend that we have encountered in several guises before. That is, the complete scholarly citation record is made up of more than citations to the formally published literature. Our work on ORCID underscored that researchers, funding agencies, institutions and publishers are interested in developing a more holistic view of the manifold contributions that are integral to research. The “C” in ORCID stands for “contributor” and ORCID profiles are designed to ultimately allow researchers to record “products” which include not only formal publications, but also data sets, patents, software, web pages and other research outputs. Similarly, Crossref’s analysis of the Cited-by references revealed that one in fifteen references in the scholarly literature published in 2012 included a plain, ordinary HTTP URI- clear evidence that researchers need to be able to cite informally published content on the web. If the trend in Cited-by data continues, then in two to three years one in ten citations will be of informally published literature.

The developments that we are seeing are a response to the need that users have to persistently identify and cite the full gamut of record types that make up the scholarly literature. If we can not persistently site these record types, the scholarly citation record will grow increasingly porous and structurally unsound. We can either stand back and let these gaps be filled by other players under their terms and deal reactively with the confusion that is likely to ensue- or we can start working in these areas too and help to make sure that what gets developed interacts with the existing online scholarly citation record in a responsible way.

Easily add publications to your ORCID profile

Geoffrey Bilder — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

You can now easily search for publications and add them to your ORCID profile in the new beta of Crossref Metadata Search (CRMDS). The user interface is pretty self-explanatory, but if you want to read about it before trying it, here is a summary of how it works.

When you go to to CRMDS, you will see that there is now a small ORCID sign-in button on the top right-hand side of the screen.