New research and data published in GigaScience and PLOS ONE provides complete open access to detailed 3D images of earthworms To quote the American cartoonist Gary Larson: all things play a role in nature, even the lowly worm—but perhaps never in such a visually stunning way as that presented in two papers published last week in GigaScience and PLOS ONE . The work and data presented here

Our External Links Service enables links to be created from articles on Europe PMC to free third-party resources that enrich our articles. Since launching the service last July we’ve been joined by providers who have set up links to an ever widening range of useful resources, including data underlying articles, press releases and plain English summaries, and article full text not otherwise held by Europe PMC – to name but a few. We now

I had a long Twitter conversation with Terry Catapano (@catapanoth) today, and as can happen with a distracted stream of tweets, I think we were a little at cross purposes. This blog post is an attempt to unpack the debate.

Being the largest land predator, the fearsome and enigmatic Polar Bear is seen by many as a powerful symbol to highlight of the threats to the environment through global warming.

OK, you have to be British to understand the pun in the title, a famous comedy skit about four candles. Back to science, and my mention of some crystal data now having a DOI in the previous post. I thought it might be fun to replicate the contents of one of my ACS slides here. Firstly, a DOI is one implementation of a more generic (and quite old) concept known as a Handle. This is one form of a persistent digital identifier.

We are pleased to announce a new feature in Europe PMC that allows you to track data citations in the scientific literature. It is now possible to search for papers that cite database records for several core life science databases, such as the European Nucleotide Archive, ArrayExpress, and PDBe, as well as dataset DOIs used by, for example, Figshare and Dryad.

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.

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).

I've been banging on about having citable, persistent identifiers for specimens, so was suitably impressed when Derek Sikes posted a comment on iPhylo that Arctos already does this. For example, here is a DOI for a specimen: http://dx.doi.org/10.7299/X7VQ32SJ. So, we're all done, right? Not quite.

Last week we published our first neuroscience data note containing 10GB of fMRI data hosted and integrated into the paper by a DOI to our GigaDB database. While we have published a number of genomics datasets and data notes (see the Puerto Rican Parrot genome data note and its associated data DOI), this is a nice example of us providing a home for “orphan data”, the long tail of data types without community agreed curated repositories.