Spaced-OoooO-Out ::

I attended the CrossRef annual meeting yesterday (see previous post). It’s the first time it’s been held outside the USA and London was certainly a fitting venue. Hosted at One Great George Street just opposite the Treasury, it was very good day. Day 1 (which I didn’t attend) was based upon technical sessions, whilst Day 2 gave an overview of current “status” and up and coming developments, followed by invited speakers in the afternoon. It was an excellent balance of presentations in a relaxed setting. All credit to CrossRef, they got the pitch just right.

So what is happening at CrossRef?? Well clearly the biggest service is as a clearinghouse for academic publishers to lodge DOIs… and they are very reasonable priced, but they are now starting to produce lots of value added services, which include:

• DOI Resolver: resolve a DOI to a landing page
• DOI Lookup: you know the reference but not the DOI (and the excellent Simple Text Query)
• CrossMark: soon to launch service identifying changes to the “status” of an article. Due to the nature of publisher, once a PDF is “published” it is a permanent record, but how do you inform readers of changes to the status of the article?? Corrections, addendum, erratum, letters etc?? Simple, more metadata linked to the article.
• CrossCheck: plagiarism detection service using the iParadigms service which also forms the TurnItIn service. Publishers need to submit the full text of all articles for this to be good.
• Cited-By Linking: count the number of citations any article receive. In an academic world which success is (at least in part) measured by the number of citations this is a service that aims to “compete” with Scopus and Web of Knowledge. It is a different service though and again relies upon publishers to deposit all there metadata correctly. So it really sits between Scopus, Web of Knowledge and other citation services. The big benefit being that it counts citations to all DOIs… so content not indexed by Web of Knowledge (e.g. data, books) or in places where there is no Impact Factor will be counted. Very useful!! Publishers need to deposits all references in all articles: a lot more work for small publishers!!
• ORCID: this links very closely to the previous item. ORCID is an open version of ResearcherID and intends to provide researchers worldwide with a single ID which could be used by institutions and funders to identify individuals and their outputs. They are finalising the funding model and setup and have a beta underway based upon the ResearcherID setup.
• CrossRef Labs: experimental work at CrossRef, including interesting items such as encoding DOIs as QR codes, TOI DOIs (tiny DOIs for tweeting etc), metadata search, PDFStamp and PDFMark. All interesting and useful.