CrossRef is now accepting proposals for the most original and promising use of CrossRef’s article-level metadata as part of a scholarly research/authoring tool or related library service. Free access to participating publishers’ metadata and DOIs will be granted to the researcher or librarian whose proposal is selected.

Deadline for proposals: July 15, 2007

What to submit:

  • A short but thorough description of the service you would like to create using the CrossRef metadata, including estimated implementation time
  • Links to software/services/protocols/standards that you may have implemented in the past
  • Your CV </ul>

    To whom:

    • Amy Brand, PhD, Director of Business & Product Development email: abrand at crossref dot org </ul> More details available at CrossRef

      Background on Crossref Metadata and Web Services:

      CrossRef is an independent membership association, founded and directed by publishers. CrossRef helps connect users to primary research content by enabling publishers to work collectively. Our citation-linking network today covers over 27 million articles and other content items from several hundred scholarly and professional publishers. CrossRef Web Services, or CWS, offers an easy-to-use suite of tools for authorized partners to collect metadata on a cross-publisher basis to streamline their own crawling, indexing, and linking services. One way to access the 27 million+ metadata records now registered in CrossRef is via our OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) interface. The CrossRef OAI-PMH repository interface serves as the central point for the distribution of metadata from participating publishers, utilizing a robust and widely adopted technology targeted at consumers of large quantities of metadata. Access to the CrossRef’s metadata repository is controlled by IP authentication and can be tailored to provide specific content from select publishers to each authorized recipient. The metadata in CrossRef’s database consists of basic bibliographic information for each item, including author(s), title, journal name, ISSN, volume, issue, page, and DOI-URL pair. Here are links to some sample CWS metadata: http://www.crossref.org/oai-handler_sample.xml, http://www.crossref.org/oai-pmh_sample2.xml. CrossRef's data repository is extensive but highly variable in quality from publisher to publisher. They have recently begun to take measures to ensure higher quality metadata. Any suggestions you may have regarding how best to achieve a higher level of data quality and consistency, as part of your proposal or otherwise, would be greatly appreciated. Different but similarly basic metadata is collected for other types of content. In addition, many publishers now also deposit references as part of their metadata.