Rants, raves (and occasionally considered opinions) on phyloinformatics, taxonomy, and biodiversity informatics. For more ranty and less considered opinions, see my Twitter feed.
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Tuesday, April 21, 2009
CrossRef fail - at least we're not alone...
CrossRef has been having some issues with it's OpenURL resolver over the weekend, which means that attempts to retrieve metadata from a DOI, or to find a DOI from metadata, have been thwarted. While annoying (see The dangers of the ‘free’ cloud: The Case of CrossRef), in one sense it's reassuring that it's not just biodiversity data providers that are having problems with service availability.
I did send a comment to them, praising them for their wonderful service, and explaining I'd like to see it again. It appears they listened (not just to me).
ReplyDeleteIt does concern me though, and I've considered how we'd manage should CrossRef somehow evaporate... the alternatives that come to mind are NLM PubMed and... uh... I think that's about it for "free services".
Sorry to double up, but this is probably more permanent than twitter?
ReplyDeleteChuck's answer to queryin about caching CrossRef's unixref response:
http://bit.ly/17MWcg
After Roger Hyam's post I've sworn not to talk about the "p" word.
ReplyDeleteI cache CrossRef's metadata, partly to avoid hitting their OpenURL resolver too often, partly so that I can trawl through for the inevitable errors or missing values. Quite a few records have no titles, and some may lack pagination as the metadata was stored for the electronic version, which may appear before the article is printed.