In a previous post (Learning from eLife: GitHub as an article repository) I discussed the advantages of an Open Access journal putting its article XML in a version-controlled repository like GitHub. In response to that post Pensoft (the publisher of ZooKeys) did exactly that, and the XML is available at https://github.com/pensoft/ZooKeys-xml.OK, "now what?" I hear you ask. Originally I'd used the example of incorrect bibliographic data for citations as the motivation, but there are other things we can do as well. For example, when reading a ZooKeys article (say, using my eLife Lens-inspired viewer) I notice references that should have a DOI but which don't. With the XML available I could add this. This adds another link in the citation graph (in this case connecting the ZooKeys paper with the article it cites). If Pensoft were to use that XML to regenerate the HTML version of the article on their web site then the reader will be able to click on the DOI and read the cited article (instead of the "cut-and-paste-and-Google-it" dance). Furthermore, Pensoft could update the metadata they've submitted to CrossRef, so that CrossRef knows that the reference with the newly added DOI has been cited by the ZooKeys paper.
To experiment with this I've written some scripts that take ZooKeys XML, extract each citation from the list of literature cited, and look up DOIs for each reference that lacks them (using the CrossRef metadata search API). If a DOI is found then I insert it into the original XML. I then push this XML to my fork of Pensoft's repository (https://github.com/rdmpage/ZooKeys-xml). I can then ask Pensoft to update their repository (by issuing a "pull request"), and if Pensoft like what they see, they can accept my edits.
Automating the process makes this much more scalable, although manual editing will still be useful in some cases, especially where the original references haven't been correctly atomised into title, journal, etc.
So that the output is visible independently of Pensoft deciding whether to accept it, I've updated my Zookeys article viewer to fetch the XML not from the ZooKeys web site, but from my GitHub repository. This means you get the latest version of the XML, complete with additional DOIs (if any have been added).
Initial experiments are encouraging, but it's also apparent that lots of citations lack DOIs. However, this doesn't mean that they aren't online. Indeed, a growing number of articles are available through my BioStor repository, and through BioNames. Both of these sites have an API, so the next step is to add them to the script that augments the XML. This brings us a little closer to the ultimate goal of having every taxonomic paper online and linked to every paper that either cites, or is cited by, that paper.
