Blog

Markup for DOIs

Tony Hammond – 2007 March 29

In Linking

Following up on his earlier post (which was also blogged to CrossTech here), Leigh Dodds is now [Following up on his earlier post (which was also blogged to CrossTech here), Leigh Dodds is now]3 the possibility of using machine-readable auto-discovery type links for DOIs of the form

These LINK tags are placed in the document HEAD section and could be used by crawlers and agents to recognize the work represented by the current document. This sounds like a great idea and we’d like to hear feedback on it.

Concurrently at Nature we have also been considering how best to mark up in a machine-readable way DOIs appearing within a document page BODY. Current thinking is to do something along the following lines:

doi:
10.1038/nprot.2007.43

which allows the DOI to be presented in the preferred Crossref citation format (doi:10.1038/nprot.2007.43), to be hyperlinked to the handle proxy server (<a href="https://doi-org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/10.1038/nprot.2007.43">https://doi-org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/10.1038/nprot.2007.43</a>), and to refer to a validly registered URI form for the DOI (info:doi/10.1038/nprot.2007.43). Again, we would be real interested to hear any opinions on this proposal for inline DOI markup as well as on Leigh’s proposal for document-level DOI markup.

(Oh, and btw many congrats to Leigh on his recent promotion to CTO, Ingenta.)