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We’re putting the final touches on the changes that will allow preprint publishers to register their metadata with Crossref and assign DOIs. These changes support Crossref’s CitedBy linking between the preprint and other scholarly publications (journal articles, books, conference proceedings). Full preprint support will be released over the next few weeks.

If you ever see me in the checkout line at some store do not ever get in the line I’m in. It is always the absolute slowest.

Crossref’s metadata system has a sort of checkout line, when members send in their data they got processed essentially in a first come first served basis. It’s called the deposit queue. We had controls to prevent anyone from monopolizing the queue and ways to jump forward in the queue but our primary goal was to give everyone a fair shot at getting processed as soon as possible. With many different behaviors by our members this could often be a challenge and at times some folks were not 100% happy.

A new version of our OpenURL resolver was deployed July 2 which should handle higher traffic (e.g. we have re-enable the LibX plug-in ) Unfortunately there were a few hick ups with the new version which I believe are now corrected (a character encoding bug and a XML structure translation problem).

Sorry for any inconvenience.

Over the past two weeks we’ve focused on our OpenURL query interface with the goal being to improve its reliability. I’d like to mention some things we’ve done.

1. We now require an OpenURL account to use this interface (see the registration page) . This account is still free, there are no fixed usage limits, and the terms of use have been greatly simplified.

2. Resources have been re-arranged dedicating more horse-power to the OpenURL function.

On March 3rd the Open Archives Initiative held a roll out meeting of the first alpha release of the ORE specification (http://www.openarchives.org/ore/) . According to Herbert Van de Sompel a beta release is planned for late March / early April and a 1.0 release targeted for September. The presentations focused on the aggregation concepts behind ORE and described an ATOM based implementation. ORE is the second project from the OAI but unlike its sibling PMH it is not exclusively a repository technology. ORE provides machine readable manifests for related Web resources in any context. For instance, DOI landing pages (aka splash page) are human readable resources containing links to any number of resources related to the work identified by the DOI. An ORE instance for the DOI (called a Rem or resource map) would describe the same set of resources in a machine friendly format. A standardized form of redirection understood by the DOI proxy would yield the Rem instead of normal page e.g.

From the beginning our OpenURL resolver has had a non standard feature of returning metadata in response to a request instead of redirecting to the referrent. This feature returned one of our older XML formats which is a bit limited as to the fields it contains.

Sometime after our resolver was deployed we introduced a more verbose XML format for DOI metadata called ‘UNIXREF”. This was always available to regular queries against the Crossref system but was never introduced to the OpenURL resolver (for no particular reason).