CrossRef, the reference linking network for scholarly publishing, announced today the release of an OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) interface to its Web Services metadata distribution program. In addition, it announced that it had recently signed both Scirus and the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) as new CWS partners.
CrossRef Web Services (CWS) is a suite of tools to enable authorized partners to collect metadata on a widespread, cross-publisher basis, potentially covering up to 23 million metadata records now included in CrossRef. CWS was developed earlier this year to standardize how published content is crawled, indexed, and linked to on the Web. Participation by CrossRef member publishers is optional.
CrossRef’s new OAI-PMH repository interface will serve as the central point for the distribution of metadata from participating publishers. The service utilizes a robust and widely adopted technology targeted at consumers of large quantities of metadata (for more information, see [the OAI web site]); access to the CrossRef’s metadata repository is controlled by IP authentication and can be tailored to provide specific content from select publishers to each authorized recipient.
In partnering with Scirus, Elsevier’s free, science-specific search engine, CrossRef will allow Scirus to collect metadata from hundreds of participating publishers in order to give researchers, academics, students, and librarians enhanced searchability over authoritative, scientific published content. According to Joris van Rossum, Head of Scirus “This partnership, which allows us to take advantage of the new Web Services protocol, fits perfectly with Scirus’ ambition to be the most comprehensive and trustworthy search engine for scientific published content on the Web.”
EMBL-EBI, a pioneering center for research and services in bioinformatics, intends to use the CrossRef metadata to systematically look up DOIs for the purpose of displaying them alongside bibliographic references in its various databases and utilities, which aim to aid the scientific community in the understanding of genomic and proteomic data.
Comment. This is a rare but permissible mix of OAI interoperability and IP access control. CrossRef will harvest metadata that publishers are not making accessible to other harvesters. But then it will hold the metadata in an OAI-compliant repository accessible only to approved participants. Do not expect the CrossRef-collected metadata be harvestable by other OAI service providers like OAIster and ScientificCommons. (Thanks to Klaus Graf for an email that helped me revise my original comment.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/11/2006 05:48:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
