One problem with my cunning plan to use Mediawiki REDIRECTs to handle DOIs is that some DOIs, such as those that BioOne serves based on SICIs contain square brackets, [ ], which conflicts with wiki syntax.

Duncan Hull alerted me to his paper "Defrosting the Digital Library: Bibliographic Tools for the Next Generation Web" ( PloS Computational Biology , doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000204). Here's the abstract: It's an interesting read, and it also cites my bioGUID project.

Thinking more and more about using Mediawiki (or, more precisely, Semantic Mediawiki) as a platform for storing and querying information, rather than write my own tools completely from scratch. This means I need ways of modelling some relationships between identifiers and objects. The first is the relationship between document identifiers such as DOIs and metadata about the document itself.

I've been using ISSN's (International Standard Serial Number) to uniquely identify journals, both to generate article identifiers, and as a parameter to send to CrossRef's OpenURL resolver. Recently I've come across journals that change their ISSN, which has fairly catastrophic effects on my lookup tools.

ZooKeys (ISSN 1313-2970) is a new journal for the rapid publication of taxonomic names, rather like Zootaxa . On first glance it has some nice features, such as being Open Access (using the Creative Commons Attribution license), DOIs, and RSS feeds -- although these don't validate, partly due to an error at the bottom of the feeds: Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at

The good news is that the merger of Blackwell's digital content with that of Wiley's has not affected the DOIs, which is exactly as you'd expect, and is a nice demonstration of the power of identifiers that use indirection (although there was a time when Wiley was offline). For example, the article identified by doi:10.1111/j.1095-8312.2003.00274.x had the URL http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1095-8312.2003.00274.x and now has

Brian de Alwis has written a cool Apple Script called OpenDOI that adds support for resolving doi: and hdl: URLs using Safari on a Mac. With it installed, links such as hdl:10101/npre.2008.1760.1 and doi:10.1093/bib/bbn022 become clickable, without having to stick a HTTP proxy in front of them. Seems that an obvious extension to this would be to add support for LSIDs.

As much as I like the idea of a globally unique, resolvable identifier, my recent experience with JSTOR is making me wonder. JSTOR has three identifiers for articles it archives, DOIs, SICIs, and stable URLs (the later being introduced with the new platform released April 4, 2008). Previously JSTOR would publish DOIs for many of its articles.

Bit of a rarity these days.

CrossRef have released a tool for bloggers to look up DOIs and insert them into blog posts: So far the tool is only available for WordPress blogs. The idea is that bloggers can use DOIs to uniquely identify papers that they are discussing, while at the same time providing readers with an easy way to go to the site hosting the article, and aggregators such as postgenomic.com can cluster posts about the same paper.