CrossRef
I attended a talk about CrossRef by director of business development Amy Brand, a scholarly and professional publishers association that works to provide reference links in and out of their electronic content. “Our primary mission is to serve as the citation linking backbone for all scholarly literature online.”
The talk gave an overview of CrossRef and digital object identifiers (DOI) and discussed how both can benefit librarians and researchers. Brand also summarized the larger issues impacting the scholarly publishing world.
Brand opened by talking about how she learned to appreciate the skills and expertise librarians have. Then, she outlined a recent history of scholarly publishing, focusing on the alternate publishing efforts.
Brand wonders: “Does proprietary ownership of scholarly content necessarily impede access to knowledge?” Many scholarly publishing models work around these issues, she says.
Next, she outlines some trends in publishing, like virtual integration (federated search systems, open archives) and publishers trying to remain commercially viable while opening content.
She predicts publishers may develop better pay-per-article models and that smaller, distributed content aggregations might work better than large-scale efforts.
She considers the author-pays publishing model to be a paradox.
An article in Science in 2003 (”Going, going, gone“) found that 13% of Internet references used in scholarly publishing go bad within about two years of the publication date of the article. (The amount of references citing an Internet source is actually only about 2.6% of all references.) Digital object identifiers might help relieve the problem by providing a persistent tag through the life of an article.
The main purpose of CrossRef is to link searchers to publishers. The publisher controls access to the articles.
A variety of publishers have registered content with CrossRef. They represent a range of topics and come from all areas of publishing.
Brand shared some examples from Nature journals showing how they display DOIs in print and electronic formats and include them in references.
CrossRef has about twelve million registered items, more than 10,000 journals, and 850,000 books and proceedings. An issue of The Lancet from 1823 might be their oldest content. CrossRef adds about 9,000 DOIs daily.
DOI linking allows someone to follow a DOI link to get to the object. DOI redirection means CrossRef members become part of OpenURL.
CrossRef offers citation searching across publisher boundaries.
Clicking on a link in CrossRef shows several options, like connecting to the publisher or connecting to a local source with that journal.
Twenty-nine publishers are participating in a pilot project with Google to provide searching of scholarly content, including Nature. CrossRef works behind the scenes to facilitate the links to scholarly content. User feedback so far shows very positive results and positive experiences when searching.
