For the last two days I've been participating in a NESCent meeting on Dryad, a "repository of data underlying scientific publications, with an initial focus on evolutionary biology and related fields". The aim of Dryad is to provide a durable home for the kinds of data that don't get captured by existing databases such as GenBank and TreeBASE (for example, the Excel spreadsheets, Word files, and tarballs of data that, if they are lucky, make it

CrossRef has been having some issues with it's OpenURL resolver over the weekend, which means that attempts to retrieve metadata from a DOI, or to find a DOI from metadata, have been thwarted. While annoying (see The dangers of the ‘free’ cloud: The Case of CrossRef), in one sense it's reassuring that it's not just biodiversity data providers that are having problems with service availability.

I've been using ISSN's (International Standard Serial Number) to uniquely identify journals, both to generate article identifiers, and as a parameter to send to CrossRef's OpenURL resolver. Recently I've come across journals that change their ISSN, which has fairly catastrophic effects on my lookup tools.

The good news is that the merger of Blackwell's digital content with that of Wiley's has not affected the DOIs, which is exactly as you'd expect, and is a nice demonstration of the power of identifiers that use indirection (although there was a time when Wiley was offline). For example, the article identified by doi:10.1111/j.1095-8312.2003.00274.x had the URL http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1095-8312.2003.00274.x and now has

As much as I like the idea of a globally unique, resolvable identifier, my recent experience with JSTOR is making me wonder. JSTOR has three identifiers for articles it archives, DOIs, SICIs, and stable URLs (the later being introduced with the new platform released April 4, 2008). Previously JSTOR would publish DOIs for many of its articles.

Tom Pasley recently drew my attention to CrossRef's addition of a XML format parameter to their OpenURL resolver. Adding &format=xml to the OpenURL request retrieves bibliographic metadata in "unixref" format (for those who like this sort of thing, the XML schema is here). The biggest change is now the metadata lists more than one author for multi-author papers.

CrossRef have released a tool for bloggers to look up DOIs and insert them into blog posts: So far the tool is only available for WordPress blogs. The idea is that bloggers can use DOIs to uniquely identify papers that they are discussing, while at the same time providing readers with an easy way to go to the site hosting the article, and aggregators such as postgenomic.com can cluster posts about the same paper.

In a series of emails Chris Freeland, David Shorthouse, and I have been discussing DOIs in the context of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). I thought it worthwhile to capture some thoughts here. In an email Chris wrote: I think the perception that there are two "camps" is unfortunate.

Following on from my earlier grumble about how the catalogue of Life handles literature, I've spent an afternoon mapping publications in the "itis".publications table in a copy of ITIS to external GUIDs, such as DOIs, Handles, and SICIs in JSTOR. The mapping is not complete by any means, but gives an idea of how many publications have GUIDs.You can view the mapping here.

Playing with the recently released "Catalogue of Life" CD, and pondering Charles Hussey's recent post to TAXACOM about the "European Virtual Library of Taxonomic Literature (E-ViTL)" (part of EDIT) has got me thinking more and more about how primitive our handling of taxonomic literature is, and how it cripples the utility of taxonomic databases such as the Catalogue of Life.