Authors, editors, publishers, and librarians all have a vested interest in supporting the widest dissemination of digital scholarship, particularly authoritative and “authorized” copies of scholarly publications. CrossRef, the reference-linking network of the Publishers International Linking Association (PILA), has officially launched a free DOI look-up feature called Simple-Text Query. Users can enter whole bibliographies with citations in almost any bibliographic format and receive back the matching Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for these references to insert into their final bibliographies. The feature involves a customized version of the eXtyles refXpress software from Inera, Inc. The new feature marks the first time CrossRef has produced a service aimed at encouraging end users to contribute to the growth of reference linking.
A limited test of the feature has been running since February. According to Amy Brand, CrossRef’s director of business and product development, the company initiated the feature after noticing that researchers were adding DOIs directly into documents. Initially, the feature was restricted to CrossRef members only. Brand explained, “In the February trial launch, you needed a password, but we quickly removed that when we realized that researchers could handle looking up DOIs at the authoring stage and then cut and paste the references.” ...
I asked Brand if CrossRef could reach open access material. She assured me it could, but it clearly did not give the free and sometimes underdefined material any preference. For open access sources such as institutional repositories, she said: “We have very explicit policies. We put a lot of work into defining what is an original work. For example, a working paper or technical report represents work with a different status coming from an earlier stage of the research process. So we consider them different works. If something is published as a preprint or postprint, we don’t give it a DOI. When we work with institutional repositories, we only accept the material that is not published.” CrossRef actively encourages DSpace repositories to assign DOIs to original, nonduplicative works and register their DOIs with CrossRef, rather than just relying on registration with CNRI.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/06/2006 03:35:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
