In a previous post (Learning from eLife: GitHub as an article repository) I discussed the advantages of an Open Access journal putting its article XML in a version-controlled repository like GitHub. In response to that post Pensoft (the publisher of ZooKeys ) did exactly that, and the XML is available at https://github.com/pensoft/ZooKeys-xml.OK, "now what?" I hear you ask.

The Association of American Publishers have launched a response to the OSTP White House Executive Order on public access to publicly funded research. In this they offer to set up a registry or system called CHORUS which they suggest can provide the same levels of access to research funded by Federal Agencies as would the widespread adoption of existing infrastructure like PubMedCentral.

I've stumbled on a case where two different publishers have issued different DOIs for the same articles. In this case, Springer and J-State both publish the Japanese Journal of Ichthyology (ISSN 0021-5090). The following article:is published by Springer with the DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF02914322, and this DOI is registered with CrossRef. J-Stage publish the same article, with the DOI (http://dx.doi.org/10.11369/jji1950.36.196).

The new look Biodiversity Heritage Library includes articles extracted from BioStor, which is a step forwards in making the "legacy" biodiversity literature more accessible. But we still have some way to go. In particular the articles lack the obvious decoration of a modern article, the DOI.

CrossRef have released CrossRef Metadata Search a nice tool that can take a free-form citation and return possible matches from CrossRef's database. If you get a match CrossRef can take the DOI and format for you it in a variety of styles using DOI content negotiation.If, like me, you spend a lot of time trying to find DOIs (and other identifiers) for articles by first parsing citations into their component parts, then this is good news.

I am pleased to announce that the JISC have funded an extension to the Open Citations Project to run from 1st August 2012 until 31st January 2013, during which we will review and revise the technology used to create the Open Citations Corpus, will update the content provided by PubMed Central, and will improve its presentation.

Quick note that Morgan Jackson (@BioInFocus) has written nice blog post Citations, Social Media & Science inspired by the fact that the following paper:Kwong, S., Srivathsan, A., & Meier, R. (2012). An update on DNA barcoding: low species coverage and numerous unidentified sequences. Cladistics, no–no. doi:10.1111/j.1096-0031.2012.00408.xcites my "Dark taxa" in the body of the text but not in the list of literature cited.

Based on recent discussions my sense is that our community will continue to thrash the issue of identifiers to death, repeating many of the debates that have gone on (and will go on) in other areas. To be trite, it seems to me we have three criteria: cheap , resolvable , and persistent . We get to pick two. Cheap and resolvable means URLs, which everybody is nervous about because they break.

Last month, feeling particularly grumpy, I fired off an email to the TDWG-TAG mailing list with the subject Lobbing grenades: a challenge . Here's the email:In the context of the TDWG meeting (happening as we speak and which I'm following via Twitter, hashtag #tdwg) Joel Sachs asked me whether I had any specific data in mind that could form the basis of a discussion. So, here goes.

DOIs are meant to be the gold standard in bibliographic identifier for article. They are not supposed to break. Yet some publishers seem to struggle to get them to work. In the past I've grumbled about BioOne, Wiley, and others as cuplrits with broken or duplicate or disappearing DOIs.Today's source of frustration is Taylor and Francis Online.