Author Carpentry : Persistent access for research outputs with Digital Object Identifiers

Content Contributors: Gail Clement, Tom Morrell

Lesson Maintainers: Tom Morrell

Lesson status: Active

• Taught at CODATA-RDA Research Data Science Summer School, July 10-17, 2017 and the Force11 Scholarly Communication Institute, August 1-4, 2017
• Piloted at CODATA-RDA Research Data Science Summer School, August 2-16, 2016

What you will learn:

• Recognize the essential role of Digital Object Identifiers as building blocks on the scholarly web
• List reasons to use DOIs
• Identify components of a DOI
• Apply basic UNIX curl commands to test and resolve DOIs for research objects
• Explain how the DOI registration system is organized and what information it yields for authors
• Register a DOI for a scholarly work using an open repository
• Create appropriate metadata to describe a new work and mint a DOI for it
• Retrieve the metadata associated with a DOI
• Apply content negotiation commands to obtain a citation for a given DOI in a preferred style (e.g. BibTeX or APA) from the CrossRef API
• Gain experience with command line tools to concatenate citations into a single BibTeX publication list for reuse in other researcher systems (ORCiD; MySciEnCV; Latex)

Topics:

1. Intro
2. Register a DOI

Requirements

Author Carpentry’s teaching is hands-on, so participants are encouraged to use their own computers to insure the proper setup of tools for an efficient workflow.

You should have a list of publications (with a few DOIs) and a scholarly object (like a presentation, data set, report, or photo) that you are willing to share in an open repository with an associated DOI.

This lesson requires basic familiarity with the bash shell, similar to the experience gained through the Software Carpentry shell lesson. You’ll need to have a bash shell installed, you can follow these instructions.

If you choose, you can also install an open source json parsing tool, jQuery, available at: jq json parser to be able to ‘pretty print’ json data retrieved from API services

Cheat Sheet

jQuery (jq) Quick API Reference, https://oscarotero.com/jquery/

References

• curl documentation, https://curl.haxx.se/
• CrossRef REST API, https://github.com/CrossRef/rest-api-doc
• CrossRef Content Negotiation, https://citation.crosscite.org/docs.html
• Beyond the DOI to richer metadata, CrossRef Blog posting of June 15, 2016 by April Ondis, http://blog.crossref.org/2016/06/beyond-the-doi-to-richer-metadata.html
• DataCite API, https://api.datacite.org/
• Digital Object Identifier (DOI) Handbook, https://www.doi.org/hb.html
• Digital Object Identifier System and DOI Names (DOIs) Guide from Australian National Data Service, http://www.ands.org.au/guides/doi
• DOI Citation Formatter beta, https://citation.crosscite.org
• jq online testing tool, https://jqplay.org/
• Parsing JSON with jq, http://www.compciv.org/recipes/cli/jq-for-parsing-json/