If you’ve ever thought that scholarly citation practice was antediluvian and perverse- you should check-out patents some day. Over the past year of so Crossref has been working with Cambia and the The Lens to explore how we can better link scholarly literature to and from the patent literature. The first object of our collaboration was to attempt to link patents hosted on the new, beta version of The Lens to the Scholarly literature.

Last year Crossref and DataCite announced support for HTTP content negotiation for DOI names. Today, we are pleased to report further collaboration on the topic. We think it is very important that the two largest DOI Registration Agencies work together in order to provide metadata services to DOI names.

PDF-EXTRACT Crossref Labs is happy to announce the first public release of “pdf-extract” an open source set of tools and libraries for extracting citation references (and, eventually, other semantic metadata) from PDFs. We first demonstrated this tool to Crossref members at our annual meeting last year. See the pdf-extract labs page for a detailed introduction to this new set of tools.

PHD Comics has posted its Valentine’s Day Reading list. Without DOIs!    So in order to preserve the scholarly citation record, we’ve resolved those that have DOIs…. Title: The St. Valentine’s Day Frontal Passage Citation:  Sassen, K, 1980, ‘The St. Valentine’s Day Frontal Passage’, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society , vol. 61, no. 2, p. 122. Crossref DOI:

Today two new record types were added to dx.doi.org resolution for Crossref DOIs. These allow anyone to retrieve DOI bibliographic metadata as formatted bibliographic entries. To perform the formatting we’re using the citation style language processor, citeproc-js which supports a shed load of citation styles and locales.

We’ve been asked a few times if it is possible to determine whether or not a particular domain name belongs to a Crossref member. To address this we’re launching another small service that performs something like a “reverse look-up” of URLs and domain names to DOIs and Crossref member status.

In April In April for its DOIs. At the time I cheekily called-out DataCite to start supporting content negotiation as well. Edward Zukowski (DataCite’s resident propellor-head) took up the challenge with gusto and, as of September 22nd DataCite has also been supporting content negotiation for its DOIs. This means that one million more DOIs are now linked-data friendly. Congratulations to Ed and the rest of the team at DataCite.

Today I’m announcing a small web API that wraps a family name database here at Crossref R&D. The database, built from Crossref’s metadata, lists all unique family names that appear as contributors to articles, books, datasets and so on that are known to Crossref. As such the database likely accounts for the majority of family names represented in the scholarly record.

So does anybody remember the posting DOIs and Linked Data: Some Concrete Proposals? Well, we went with option “D.” From now on, DOIs, expressed as HTTP URIs , can be used with content-negotiation. Let’s get straight to the point.

Announcements regarding Crossref system status or changes are posted in an Announcements forum on our support portal (http://support.crossref.org). We recommend that someone from your organisation monitor this forum to stay informed about Crossref system status, schema changes, or other issues affecting deposits and queries.

While working on an internal project, we developed “pdfstamp“, a command-line tool that allows one to easily apply linked images to PDFs. We thought some in our community might find it useful and have released it on github. Some more PDF-related tools will follow soon.