Open Citation Linking: The Way Forward
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october02/hitchcock/10hitchcock.html
Steve Hitchcock, Donna Bergmark*, Tim Brody, Christopher Gutteridge,
Les Carr, Wendy Hall, Carl Lagoze*, Stevan Harnad
Southampton University
*Cornell University
ABSTRACT: The speed of scientific communication ? the rate of ideas
affecting other researchers' ideas ? is increasing dramatically. The
factor driving this is free, unrestricted access to research
papers. Measurements of user activity in mature eprint archives
of research papers such as arXiv have shown, for the first time,
the degree to which such services support an evolving network of
texts commenting on, citing, classifying, abstracting, listing and
revising other texts. The Open Citation project has built tools to
measure this activity, to build new archives, and has been closely
involved with the development of the infrastructure to support
open access on which these new services depend. This is the story
of the project, intertwined with the concurrent emergence of the
Open Archives Initiative (OAI). The paper describes the broad
scope of the project's work, showing how it has progressed from
early demonstrators of reference linking to produce Citebase, a
Web-based citation and impact-ranked search service, and how it has
supported the development of the EPrints.org software for building
OAI-compliant archives. The work has been underpinned by analysis
and experiments on the semantics of documents (digital objects)
to determine the features required for formally perfect linking
? instantiated as an application programming interface (API) for
reference linking ? that will enable other applications to build on
this work in broader digital library information environments.
Received on Mon Oct 14 2002 - 16:40:53 BST