Was outraged (outraged, I tell you) that one of my favorite online comics, PhD, didnât include DOIs in their recent bibliography of Christmas-related citations.. So Iâve compiled them below.
We care about these things so that you donât have to. Bet you will sleep better at night knowing this.
Or perhaps notâŚ
Citation:Â Biggs, R, Douglas, A, Macfarlane, R, Dacie, J, Pitney, W, Merskey, C & OâBrien, J, 1952, âChristmas Diseaseâ, BMJ, vol. 2, no. 4799, pp. 1378-1382.
In order to encourage publishers and other content producers to embed metadata into their PDFs, we have released an experimental tool called âpdfmarkâ, This open source tool allows you to add XMP metadata to a PDF. Whatâs really cool, is that if you give the tool a Crossref DOI, it will lookup the metadata in Crossref and then apply said metadata to the PDF. More detail can be found on the pdfmark page on the Crossref Labs site. The usual weasels words and excuses about âexperimentsâ apply.
Inspired by Googleâs recent promotion of QR Codes, I thought it might be fun to experiment with encoding a Crossref DOI and a bit of metadata into one of the critters. Iâve put a short write-up of the experiment on the Crossref Labs site, which includes a demonstration of how you can generate a QR Code for any given Crossref DOI. Put them on postcards and send them to your friends for the holidays. Tattoo them on your pets. The possibilities are endless.
[See this link if youâre short on time: facets search client. Only tested on Firefox at this point. Caveat: At time of writing the Crossref Metadata Search was being very slow but was still functional. Previously it was just slow.]
Following on from Geoffâs announcement last month of a prototype Crossref Metadata OpenSearch on labs.crossref.org, I wanted to show what typical OpenSearch responses might look like in a more mature implementation.
I have taken the liberty of modelling these on the response formats that we are already providing in our nature.com OpenSearch service which in turn are based on the draft syndication formats that I blogged here earlier.
Following on from my recent post about our shiny new nature.com OpenSearch service we just put up a cheatsheet for users. Iâm posting about this here as this may also be of interest especially to those exploring how SRU and OpenSearch intersect.
The cheatsheet can be downloaded from our nature.com OpenSearch test page and is available in two forms:
Weâre pleased to announce that a Crossref working group has released a set of best practice recommendations for scholarly publishers producing RSS feeds.
Variations in practice amongst publisher feeds can be irritating for end-users, but they can be insurmountable for automated processes. RSS feeds are increasingly being consumed by knowledge discovery and data mining services. In these cases, variations in date formats, the practice of lumping all authors together in one <dc:creator> element, or generating invalid XML can render the RSS feed useless to the service accessing it.
The other day Noel OâBoyle wrote to tell me that he had updated the Ubiquity plug-in that we had developed in order to to make it work with the latest version of Firefox. The problem was, I had *also* updated the Ubiquity plug-in, but I hadnât really indicated to anybody how they could find updates to the plug-in. /me=embarrassed. So it seemed time to provide a home for some of the prototypes and experiments that weâve been developing at Crossref. To that end, we have created a Crossref Labs site. Here you can find links to various tools and services that either make it easier to use Crossref services (e.g. Blog/Ubiquity plugins and OpenSearch Description files) or that serve to illustrate a concept that has been of interest to our members (InChI lookup, TOI-DOIs). Oh, yeah- and when we update these experiments, you should be able to find the updates on their respective pages. Sorry about that Noel⌠Finally, I will quote from the Crossref Labs home page:
(Click panels in figure to read related posts.)
Following up on my earlier posts here about the structured search technologies OpenSearch and SRU, I wanted to reference three recent posts on our web publishing blog Nascent which discuss our new nature.com OpenSearch service:
We hope that this new search service will prove to be useful and may also provide a model for other implementations.
Crossref Technical Meeting*
The Charles Hotel, Cambridge, MA
Monday, November 9th, 2009
2:00 pm - 5:00 pm
We also encourage you to register for our 10th Anniversary Celebration Dinner, which will take place Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 6:30 pm following the Crossref Technical Meeting at the Museum of Science in Boston, MA. Transportation from the Charles Hotel to the Museum of Science will be provided. Our 2009 Annual Meeting will take place on Tuesday, November 10th at 9:00 am in the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, MA and we urge you to register soon (if you havenât already done so)
OK, so this has nothing to do with any Crossref projects- but there is an interesting new PRC report out by Mark Ware in which he explores how SMEs (small/medium-sized enterprises) make use of scholarly articles and whether the scholarly publishing industry is doing anything to make their lives easier. This is a topic that is close to my heart. For the past few years Iâve been saying (most recently at SSP09) that I think scholarly publishers are much too quick to dismiss the possibility of creating an iTunes-like service for scholarly publications (aka âiPubâ). The report certainly seems to indicate that there is an important audience that would benefit from such a service (SMEs) and even goes so far as to cite my occasional rants on the subject. The summary of my iPub argument has been that:
2026 March 19
2026 public data file now available
2026 March 17
Reflections from the Crossref Ambassador Community
2026 March 16
