CrossRef Sees Increase in DOI's For Books

CrossRef.org the membership organization supporting academic publishing content recently reported that DOI's assigned to books has continued to increase year over year:

As of July 2009, more than 1.8 million CrossRef Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) have been assigned for books. Each CrossRef DOI represents a citable book title, chapter, or reference entry that can be used to link references from scholarly content. Book deposits range from monographs with a single CrossRef DOI to massive reference works with tens of thousands of individual entries.

To encourage publishers to ramp up reference linking for scholarly books, and to explain how CrossRef DOIs for books work, CrossRef has published two documents. The first, Best Practices for Books, was created by CrossRef’s Book Working Group. The second is a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) document explaining the relationship between CrossRef DOIs and other DOI applications, such as the ISBN-A.

“We are very encouraged at the growth of books being used in CrossRef reference linking,” said Michael Forster, Chair of CrossRef’s Book Working Group, and Vice President and Associate Publishing Director, Physical Sciences, Scientific, Technical, Medical, and Scholarly Publishing, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. “We solicited feedback from the entire CrossRef membership before finalizing these guidelines. Our goal is to encourage reference linking among books, proceedings, and journal content, and to enhance the discoverability of professional, reference, technical, and scholarly books.”

The best practices document, available at http://www.crossref.org/06members/best_practices_for_books.html, includes suggestions for improving reference matching results. It identifies minimum and recommended book metadata for deposits and queries in the CrossRef system. Ways to handle editions and other types of versions, so important in book publishing, are also addressed.