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The act of registering a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) for scholarly content is sometimes conflated with the notion of conferring a seal of approval or other mark of good quality upon an item of content.  This is a fundamental misunderstanding.

A DOI is a tool, not a badge of honor.  

The presence of a Crossref DOI on content sends a signal that:

1. The owner of the content would like to be formally cited if the content is used in a scholarly context.
2. The owner of the content considers that it is worthy of being made persistent.

Beyond the DOI

Last week a bunch of Crossref’s staff traveled to the 2016 Society for Scholarly Publishing Annual Meeting in Vancouver, BC.  After we returned en masse, all nine of us put our heads together to share some of our personal memories of the event.   

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

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

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

Having this data tells us, amongst other things:

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

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

It’s here. After years of hard work and with a huge cast of characters involved, I am delighted to announce that you will now be able to instantly link to all published articles related to an individual clinical trial through the Crossmark dialogue box. Linked Clinical Trials are here!

In practice, this means that anyone reading an article will be able to pull a list of both clinical trials relating to that article and all other articles related to those clinical trials – be it the protocol, statistical analysis plan, results articles or others – all at the click of a button.

TL;DR

By August 2016, Crossref will enable its members to assign Crossref DOIs to preprints. Preprint DOIs will be assigned by the Crossref member responsible for the preprint and that DOI will be different from the DOI assigned by the publisher to the accepted manuscript and version of record. Crossref’s display guidelines, tools and APIs will be modified in order to enable researchers to easily identify and link to the best available version of a document (BAV). We are doing this in order to support the changing publishing models of our members and in order to clarify the scholarly citation record.

Background

It can be a pain when companies rebrand as it usually requires some coordinated updating of wording and logos on websites, handouts, and slides. Nevermind changing habits and remembering to use the new names verbally in presentations.

Why bother?

As our infrastructure and services expanded, we sometimes branded services with no reference to Crossref. As explained in our The Logo Has Landed post last November, this has led to confusion, and it was not scalable nor sustainable. 

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

Test out the early preview of Event Data while we continue to develop it. Share your thoughts. And be warned: we may break a few eggs from time to time!

Want to discover which research works are being shared, liked and commented on? What about the number of times a scholarly item is referenced? Starting today, you can whet your appetite with an early preview of the forthcoming Crossref Event Data service. We invite you to start exploring the activity of DOIs as they permeate and interact with the world after publication.

As of this week, there are 80,000,000 scholarly items registered with Crossref!

By the way, we update these interesting Crossref stats regularly and you can search the metadata.

The 80 millionth scholarly item is [drumroll…] Management Approaches in Beihagi History from the journal Oman Chapter of Arabian Journal of Business and Management Review, published by Al Manhal in the United Arab Emirates.

There have been loads of changes since Wiley registered “Designer selves: Construction of technologically mediated identity within graphical, multiuser virtual environments” with the DOI https://doi-org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(1999)50:10<855::AID-ASI3>3.0.CO;2-6), which happens to have been Crossref’s first official DOI (after many prototype deposits).