Ed Pentz, CrossRef,
Scholarly research is changing with the rapid growth of informal communications and the intensive use of computer processing and the related creation of massive amounts of data. These changes are happening outside of the traditional peer-reviewed journal system and large databases are playing an increasingly important role in research. It is inevitable that these changes will have an impact on scholarly journals - databases are becoming more like journals and journals are becoming more like databases. Because of this, how to get from raw data to authoritative, peer-reviewed knowledge is very important. A solution is to use the CrossRef system as a model for interlinking data and databases with the published peer-reviewed literature.
CrossRef is a not-for-profit membership association founded and directed by publishers, currently representing over 1,600 publishers and societies. CrossRef operates a cross-publisher citation linking system, and is an official DOI (Digital Object Identifier) Registration Agency. The CrossRef system successfully enables a wide range of publishers to persistently identify and link to over 20 million content items including journal articles, book chapters, conference proceeding articles and database records. CrossRef is having a big impact on the way that users access content and CrossRef and DOIs will play a large role in integrating new methods of research with the published literature.
Keywords: Citation linking, DOI