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If you’re anything like us at Crossref Labs (and we know some of you are) you would have been very excited about the launch of the Raspberry Pi Zero a couple of days ago. In case you missed it, this is a new edition of the tiny low-priced Raspberry Pi computer. Very tiny and very low-priced. At $5 we just had to have one, and ordered one before we knew exactly what we want to do with it. You would have done the same. Bad luck if it was out of stock.

Skimming the headlines on Hacker News yesterday morning, I noticed something exciting. A dump of all the submissions to Reddit since 2006. “How many of those are DOIs?”, I thought. Reddit is a very broad community, but has some very interesting parts, including some great science communication. How much are DOIs used in Reddit?

(There has since been a discussion about this blog post on Hacker News)

We have a whole strategy for DOI Event Tracking, but nothing beats a quick hack or is more irresistible than a data dump.

TL;DR

Watch a real-time stream of DOIs being cited (and “un-cited!” ) in Wikipedia articles across the world: https://live-eventdata-crossref-org.ez.library.latrobe.edu.au/live.html

Background

For years we’ve known that the Wikipedia was a major referrer of Crossref DOIs and about a year ago we confirmed that, in fact, the Wikipedia is the 8th largest refer of Crossref DOIs. We know that people follow the DOIs, too. This despite a fraction of Wikipedia citations to the scholarly literature even using DOIs. So back in August we decided to create a Wikimedia Ambassador programme. The goal of the programme was to promote the use of persistent identifiers in citation and attribution in Wikipedia articles. We would do this through outreach and through the development of better citation-related tools.

TL;DR

Crossref’s “DOI Event Tracker Pilot”- 11 million+ DOIs & 64 million+ events. You can play with it at: http://goo.gl/OxImJa

Tracking DOI Events

So have you been wondering what we’ve been doing since we posted about the experiments we were conducting using PLOS’s open source ALM code? A lot, it turns out. About a week after our post, we were contacted by a group of our members from OASPA who expressed an interest in working with the system. Apparently they were all about to conduct similar experiments using the ALM code, and they thought that it might be more efficient and interesting if they did so together using our installation. Yippee. Publishers working together. That’s what we’re all about.

tl;dr http://chronograph.labs.crossref.org.ez.library.latrobe.edu.au

At Crossref we mint DOIs for publications and send them out into the world, but we like to hear how they’re getting on out there. Obviously, DOIs are used heavily within the formal scholarly literature and for citations, but they’re increasingly being used outside of formal publications in places we didn’t expect. With our DOI Event Tracking / ALM pilot project we’re collecting information about how DOIs are mentioned on the open web to try and build a picture about new methods of citation.

Remember when I said that the Wikipedia was the 8th largest referrer of DOI links to published research? This despite only a fraction of eligible references in the free encyclopaedia using DOIs.

We aim to fix that. Crossref and Wikimedia are launching a new initiative to better integrate scholarly literature in the world’s largest public knowledge space, Wikipedia.

This work will help promote standard links to scholarly references within Wikipedia, which persist over time by ensuring consistent use of DOIs and other citation identifiers in Wikipedia references. Crossref will support the development and maintenance of Wikipedia’s citation tools on Wikipedia. This work will include bug fixes and performance improvements for existing tools, extending the tools to enable Wikipedia contributors to more easily look up and insert DOIs, and providing a “linkback” mechanism that alerts relevant parties when a persistent identifier is used in a Wikipedia reference.

photo credit

Summary

You can use a new Crossref API to query all sorts of interesting things about who funded the research behind the content Crossref members publish.

Background

Back in May 2013 we launched Crossref’s FundRef service. It can be summarized like this:

• Crossref keeps and manages a canonical list of Funder Names (ephemeral) and associated identifiers (persistent).
• We encourage our members (or anybody, really- the list is available under A CC-Zero license waiver) to use this list for collecting information on who funded the research behind the content that our members publish.
• We then ask that our members deposit this data in their normal Crossref metadata deposits.

And that was cool.

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Crossref Labs loves to be the last to jump on an internet trend, so what better than than to combine the Doge meme with altmetrics?

Note: The API calls below have been superceeded with the development of the Event Data project. See the latest API documentation for equivalent functionality

Want to know how many times a Crossref DOI is cited by the Wikipedia?

You can now easily search for publications and add them to your ORCID profile in the new beta of Crossref Metadata Search (CRMDS). The user interface is pretty self-explanatory, but if you want to read about it before trying it, here is a summary of how it works.

When you go to to CRMDS, you will see that there is now a small ORCID sign-in button on the top right-hand side of the screen.

We have just released a bunch of new functionality for Crossref Metadata Search. The tool now supports the following features:

• A completely new UI
• Faceted searches
• Copying of search results as formatted citations using CSL
• COinS, so that you can easily import results into Zotero and other document management tools
• An API, so that you can integrate Crossref Metadata Search into your own applications, plugins, etc.
• Basic OpenSearch support- so that you can integrate Crossref Metadata Search into your browser’s search bar.
• Searching for a particular Crossref DOI
• Searching for a particular Crossref ShortDOI
• Searching for articles in a particular journal via the journal’s ISSN

At the moment, Crossref Metadata Search (CRMDS) is a Crossref Labs project and, as such, should be used with some trepidation. Our goal is to release CRMS as a production service ASAP, but we wanted to get public feedback on the service before making the move to a production system.