Publisher linking services provider CrossRef, US, has announced that deposits for books are growing faster than any other content type in the reference linking system for the second year in a row. As of July 2009, more than 1.8 million CrossRef Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) have been assigned for books. Each CrossRef DOI represents a citable book title, chapter, or reference entry that can be used to link references from scholarly content. Book deposits range from monographs with a single CrossRef DOI to massive reference works with tens of thousands of individual entries.
CrossRef is a registration agency for the scholarly publishing community, and its DOIs are designed to make citation linking possible in content published by this group. CrossRef seeks to fully support making the different DOI applications interoperable.
To encourage publishers to ramp up reference linking for scholarly books, and to explain how CrossRef DOIs for books work, the company has published two documents. The first, Best Practices for Books, was created by CrossRef’s Book Working Group. The second is a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) document explaining the relationship between CrossRef DOIs and other DOI applications, such as the ISBN-A.
Almost 60 publishers have deposited CrossRef DOIs for nearly 84,000 book titles since CrossRef began accepting book deposits. The best practices document, available at http://www.crossref.org/06members/best_practices_for_books.html, includes suggestions for improving reference matching results. It identifies minimum and recommended book metadata for deposits and queries in the CrossRef system. Ways to handle editions and other types of versions, considered very important in book publishing, are also addressed.
CrossRef’s FAQ explains the differences between CrossRef DOIs used for reference linking and some new types of identifiers emerging for books. The document, available at http://www.crossref.org/06members/otherdoifaq.html, goes into detail about an application called the ISBN-A—ISBNs made actionable through the DOI System.
Search for more such STM services in K-Store
Discuss this NEWS
