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.

The rather frail nature of biodiversity services (some of the major players have had service breaks in the last few weeks) has prompted me to revisit Dave Vieglais's BigDig and extend it to other services, such as uBio, EOL, and TreeBASE, as well as DSpace repositories and tools such as Connotea.The result is at http://bioguid.info/status/. The idea is to poll each service once an hour to see if it is online.