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OSTIblog Articles in the CrossRef Topic

Before and after CrossRef

It is truly wonderful when something comes along that speeds access to science. Such is the case with CrossRef’s linking network for scholarly literature. Anyone that has ever done a literature search prior to 2000 is completely blown away today when they encounter the time saved and the quality of CrossRef’s linking service. I vividly recall my own literature review for my PhD dissertation almost 40 years ago and I want to share my story.

For many long and miserable days and nights for a solid month I practically lived at the University of Maryland’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Library plowing through a massive set of numerous volumes of citation indices looking up keywords related to my dissertation. My topic Secondary deflections and lateral stability of beams was based on my research at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. None of my faculty had specialized in such topics and so my task was monumental-- do a full blown literature review from scratch. I would write down suspected relevant citations and walk through the extensive stacks of the library where I could locate the journal, find the right volume of the journal, and examine the article. Since the indexing contained minimal information, most of the time the articles weren’t relevant and much of my effort was fruitless. When I got lucky and found a relevant article, I had to copy the citation information and meat of the article by hand. Then I had to scour the references in that article and determine if it was necessary to find the referenced journals in the stacks and examine the referenced articles. This is how a dissertation literature review was done before online...

Related Topics: CrossRef, dissertation, DOE Data Explorer (DDE), dois, ETDEWEB, FundRef, journal articles, literature review, SciTech Connect

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OSTI Partnering with Publishers on CrossRef and FundRef to Enhance Public Access to DOE Scientific and Technical Information

Throughout our history, the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) has worked to make authoritative science information ever more efficiently available to researchers and the public alike. Our core mission – ensuring access to and preservation of U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) research results – has not changed. But the technology we apply to that mission has changed a lot over the past 20 years. By adopting Internet technology carefully and early, pioneering new advances in that technology to meet our needs and partnering with other stakeholders in the scientific and technical information community (STI), OSTI aspires to achieve our mission better than ever before.

In 1994, OSTI actually created the first DOE home page, and we have made significant strides into the Information Age ever since, defining new electronic exchange formats, creating collections of digitized scientific and technical information and establishing an energy science and technology virtual library. OSTI also has played a leading role in developing and adopting pioneering web tools such as federated search, the simultaneous search of multiple web databases in real time via a single search query, and relevance ranking, technology that allows search results to be returned in a ranked order relevant to the search query, to enhance the diffusion of scientific knowledge.

As we reported in the last issue of the OSTI.gov Newsletter, as directed by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and requested by former DOE Office of Science Director Dr. William Brinkman, OSTI is now developing a gateway that will provide public access to the gold standard of scientific communications, peer-reviewed accepted manuscripts and scientific journal articles resulting from DOE research investments.

OSTI is committed to being a leader in making the web work for DOE science, and in...

Related Topics: CrossRef, Digital Object Identifier, DOE STI, FundRef, public access, scientific information, SciTech Connect

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OSTI and Reference Linking

by Daphne Evans 13 May, 2008 in Technology

OSTI actively supports the practice of Reference Linking. Also referred to as citation linking, reference linking adds value to technical reports and journal articles by hyperlinking the references at the end of the document. Authors frequently cite numerous supporting reports and articles. However, locating these cited works can be difficult. If these references can be hyperlinked to online full text, or availability information, that opens up all kinds of possibilities for the discovery and reuse of related research.

When authors submit technical reports to OSTI, they can request that their references be hyperlinked. We will identify hyperlinks for as many of the references as possible, and create an enhanced file. The authors review the new document, and once approved it is made available per their specifications. This greatly enhances the technical report and the accessibility of the references.  This service is provided at no cost to the author or their organization.

Another great benefit for the author is that DOE technical reports referenced in journal articles can also be hyperlinked. In 2005, OSTI entered into an agreement with CrossRef, a nationally recognized reference-linking service. Now OSTI and CrossRef use Digital Object Idenitifers (DOIs) to facilitate access to DOE's vast collection of science research reports. DOIs are persistent links,...

Related Topics: CrossRef, doe, hyperlinking, reference linking

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