UPDATE Sept. 8/2007: Please read the response to this post by Edward Pentz, Executive Director of CrossRef in the comments below.
Mission statement: "CrossRef is a not-for-profit membership association whose mission is to enable easy identification and use of trustworthy electronic content by promoting the cooperative development and application of a sustainable infrastructure."
Not-for-profilt, hunh? Money-grabbing in the professional publishing industry has once again proven to be more important than making scientific works readily accessible. As of September 7, 2007, CrossRef will roll out new rules for its OpenURL and DOI lookups. Unless you become a card carrying CrossRef "affiliate", there will be a daily cap of 100 lookups using their OpenURL service, which will require a username/password. If >100 lookups are performed, CrossRef will reserve the right to cancel the account and will force you to buy into their senseless pay-for-use system. Here are the new rules as described at http://www.crossref.org/04intermediaries/60affiliate_rules.html:
- Affiliates must sign and abide by the term of the CrossRef Affiliate Terms of Use
- Affiliates must pay the fees listed in the CrossRef Schedule of Fees
- The Annual Admininstrative Fee is based on the number of new records added to the Affiliates service(s) and/or product(s) available online
- There are no per-DOI retrieval fees. There are no fees based on the number of links created with the Digital Identifiers.
- Affiliates may "cache" retrieved DOIs (i.e. store them in their local systems)
- The copyright owner of a journal has the sole authority to designate, or authorize an agent to designate, the depositor and resolution URL for articles that appear in that journal
- A primary journal (whether it is hosted by the publisher or included in an aggregator or database service) must be deposited in the CrossRef system before a CrossRef Member or Affiliate can retrieve DOIs for references in that article. For example, an Affiliate that hosts full text articles can only lookup DOIs for references in an article if that journal's publisher is a PILA Member and is depositing metadata for that journal in the CrossRef System
- Real-time DOI look-up by affiliates is not permitted (that is, submitting queries to retrieve DOIs on-the-fly, at the time a user clicks a link). The system is designed for DOIs to be retrieved in batch mode.
So what's the big deal?
The issue has to do with scientific society back-issues like the kind served by JStore. Without some sort of real-time DOI look-up, it is near impossible to learn of newly scanned and hosted PDF reprints for older works. After September 7, the only solution available to developers and bioinformaticians is to periodically "batch upload" lookups. CrossRef sees Rod Page's bioGUID service and my simple, real-time gadget as a threat to their steady flow of income even though it clearly fits within their general purpose "...to promote the development and cooperative use of new and innovative technologies to speed and facilitate scholarly research."
