Blog

OCLC has published a report (PDF) identifying some requirements for what they call a “Cooperative Identities Hub”. A quick glance through it seems to show that the use cases focus on what we are calling the “Knowledge Discovery” use cases. As I mentioned in my interview with Martin Fenner, there is also a category of “authentication” use cases that I think needs to be addressed by a contributor identifier system. Still, this is a good report that highlights many of the complexities that an identifier system needs to address.

Martin Fenner continues his interest in the subject of author identifiers. He recently posted an online poll asking people some specific questions about how they would like to see an author identifier implemented.^*

The results of the poll are in and, though the sample was very small, the results are interesting. The responses are both gratifying -there seems to be a general belief that Crossref has a roll to play here- and perplexing -most think the identifier needs to identify other “contributors” to the scholarly communications process- yet there seems to be a preference for the moniker “digital author identifier”. This latter preference is certainly a surprise to us as we had been focusing our efforts on identifying analog authors. The only “digital authors” I know of are this one at at MIT and possibly this one at Aberystwyth University. 😉

So while doing some background reading today I realized that legal citations already widely support a form of “citation typing” in the form of “Introductory Signals“. The 10 introductory signals break down as follows…

In support of an argument:

   1) [no signal]. (NB that, apparently, this is increasingly deprecated.)

   2) accord;

   3) see;

   4) see also;

   5) cf.;

For Comparisons:

   6) compare … with …;

For contradiction:

   7) but see;

I was happy to read David Shotton’s recent Learned Publishing article, Semantic Publishing: The Coming Revolution in scientific journal publishing, and see that he and his team have drafted a Citation Typing Ontology.^*

Anybody who has seen me speak at conferences knows that I often like to proselytize about the concept of the “typed link”, a notion that hypertext pioneer, Randy Trigg, discussed extensively in his 1983 Ph.D. thesis.. Basically, Trigg points out something that should be fairly obvious- a citation (i.e. “a link”) is not always a “vote” in favor of the thing being cited.
In fact, there are all sorts of reasons that an author might want to cite something. They might be elaborating on the item cited, they might be critiquing the item cited, they might even be trying to refute the item cited (For an exhaustive and entertaining survey of the use and abuse of citations in the humanities, Anthony Grafton‘s, The Footnote: A Curious History, is a rich source of examples)
Unfortunately, the naive assumption that a citation is tantamount to a vote of confidence has become inshrined in everything from the way in which we measure scholarly reputation, to the way in which we fund universities and the way in which search engines rank their results. The distorting affect of this assumption is profound. If nothing else, it leads to a perverse situation in which people will often discuss books, articles, and blog postings that they disagree with without actually citing the relevant content, just so that they can avoid inadvertently conferring “wuffie” on the item being discussed. This can’t be right.
Having said that, there has been a half-hearted attempt to introduce a gross level of link typology with the introduction of the “nofollow” link attribute- an initiative started by Google in order to try to address the increasing problem of “Spamdexing”. But this is a pretty ham-fisted form of link typing- particularly in the way it is implemented by the Wikipedia where Crossref DOI links to formally published scholarly literature have a “nofollow” attribute attached to them but, inexplicably, items with a PMID are not so hobbled (view the HTML source of this page, for example). Essentially, this means that, the Wikipedia is a black-hole of reputation. That is, it absorbs reputation (through links too the Wikipedia), but it doesn’t let reputation back out again. Hell, I feel dirty for even linking to it here ;-).
Anyway, scholarly publishers should certainly read Shotton’s article because it is full of good, and practical ideas about what can can be done with today’s technology in order to help us move beyond the “digital incunabula” that the industry is currently churning out. The sample semantic article that Shotton’s team created is inspirational and I particularly encourage people to look at the source file for the ontology-enhanced bibliography which reveals just how much more useful metadata can be associated with the humble citation.
And now I wonder whether CiteULike, Connotea, 2Collab or Zotero will consider adding support for the CItation Typing Ontology into their respective services?
* Disclosure:
a) I am on the editorial board of Learned Publishing
b) Crossref has consulted with David Shotton on the subject of semantically enhancing journal articles

Discussions around “contributor Ids” (aka “Author ID, Researcher ID, etc.) seem to be becoming quite popular. In the interview that I pointed to in my last post, I mentioned that Crossref has been talking with a group of researchers who were very interested in creating some sort of authenticated contributor ID as a mechanism for controlling who gets trusted access to sensitive genome-wide aggregate genotype data.

Well, I’m delighted to say that said group of researchers(at the GEN2PHEN project) have created a “Researcher Identification Primer” website in which they outline the many use-cases and issues around creating a mechanism for unambiguously identifying and/or authenticating researchers. This looks like a great resource and I expect it will serve as a useful focus for further discussion around the issue.

Over the past few months there seems to have been a sharp upturn in general interest around implementing an “author identifier” system for the scholarly community. This, in turn, has meant that more people have been getting in touch with us about our nascent “Contributor ID” project. The other day, after seeing my comments in the above thread, Martin Fenner asked if he could interview me about the issue of author identifiers for his blog on Nature Networks, Gobbledygook. I agreed and he posted the interview the other day.

Very cool to see Alexander Griekspoor releasing an iPhone version of his award-winning Papers application. A while ago Alex intigrated DOI metadata lookup into the Mac version of papers and now I can get a silly thrill from seeing Crossref DOIs integrated in an iPhone app. Alex has just posted a preview video of the iPhone application and it includes a cameo appearance by a DOI. Yay.

So the other day Noel O’Boyle made me feel guilty when he pinged me and asked about the possibility using one of the Crossref APIs for creating a Ubiquity extension. You see, I had played with the idea myself and had not gotten around to doing much about it. This seemed inexcusable- particularly given how easy it is to build such extensions using the API we developed for the WordPress and Moveable Type plugins that we announced earlier in the year. So I dug up my half-finished code, cleaned it up a bit and have posted the results.

Crossref is hiring an R&D software engineer to work in our Oxford office. This is a fantastic opportunity to work on wide range of projects that promise to revolutionize scholarly publishing.

I’ve just returned from Frankfurt Book fair and noticed that there has been some recent in the The NLM Style Guide for Authors, Editors and Publishers recommendations concerning citing blogs.

Which reminds me of an issue that has periodically been raised here at Crossref- should we be doing something to try and provide a service for reliably citing more ephemeral content such as blogs, wikis, etc.?