ACCESS | Asia 's Newspaper on Electronic Information Product & Service

December 2001 No.39

Crossref steps up pace of linking developments

CrossRef, a publisher collaborative reference linking service that enables scholarly researchers and students to navigate from one online journal citation to another seamlessly via DOI-based citation links, is stepping up its cross-publisher linking initiatives.

According to Amy Brand, Director of Business Development, "CrossRef is committed to providing the scholarly community with an increasing number of linked journals, a wider selection of connected information sources beyond journals and STM content, and a vehicle for greater collaboration amongst publishers, librarians, and vendors." Brand has been instrumental in CrossRef's membership growth since joining in April 2001.

Embracing internal system improvements as well as member and affiliate member outreach, CrossRef has implemented the following developments:

	A prototype solution to the "appropriate copy" problem combining OpenURL, CrossRef, and Ex Libris' SFX localised linking technologies to redirect DOI links to a library's local holdings.
	Partnering with Atypon Systems - a Santa Clara, CA-based software and business services company for the STM information arena - in a comprehensive upgrade to CrossRef's linking capabilities.
	Extending its services to books and conference proceedings, using an XML XSDschema developed for CrossRef by Inera, an SGML and XML consulting and software services company specialising in STM publishing, based in Newton, MA.

CrossRef now has 83 members and 23 affiliates from the library and information communities. Among recent publishers to join are the Massachusetts Medical Society, which publishes The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM); BioMedCentral, an independent publisher providing biomedical researchers with free access to more than 50 peer-reviewed online journals; S. Karger AG, medical and scientific publishers since 1890 and Sage Publications, extending CrossRef's journal coverage well into the humanities and social sciences. This brings the total number of CrossRef- enabled journals to 5,100, encompassing over 3.5 million article records.

In cooperation with scholarly publishers and the International DOI Foundation, CrossRef, which was established by its founding organisation PILA (Publishers International Linking Association), scholarly publishers as an independent, non-profit membership entity in 1999, uses open standards. It is an official registration agency of the International DOI Foundation (IDF), and is the first full-scale implementation of the DOI system.