Additional update to core dictionary

Brian McMahon bm at iucr.org
Thu Mar 24 10:28:21 GMT 2011


Colleagues

Assuming James also approves the recent "fast-track" changes, I'll
be happy to work on releasing quickly a new minor upgrade version
of the core CIF dictionary.

With your indulgence, I would like to take the opportunity to add
at the same time
        _journal_paper_doi
as a new member of the JOURNAL category, expressing the digital
object identifier (DOI) assigned to the article published from
the data in the current CIF, e.g.
        _journal_paper_doi              '10.1107/S010876739101067X'

Traditionally, these _journal_ items have been taken to be in
the gift of the IUCr journals staff, and have not gone through
the usual formal review process. They are not individually
defined in the core dictionary, though perhaps they should be.

I would not expect any particular concern over the proposed new
item; it's just another piece of bibliographic housekeeping.
However, there is the possibility of creating new data names to
record DOIs for other associated publications or data sets,
now that it is starting to become common practice to register such
identifiers for data sets. We have considered this possibility
carefully in the Acta office, and have come to the conclusion that
such definitions would be premature. There is as yet no established
code of practice for assigning DOIs to data sets in a way that
records their relationship to other data sets or publications.
CrossRef, the body that has managed DOIs centrally for the
publishing industry, is now partnered by DataCite, which seeks
to perform the same role for research data sets. We feel that it
would be best to track any protocols these bodies establish for
cross-linking before seeking to emulate them with suitable
CIF data names.

On the other hand, if any of you feel differently about this,
or have specific data names that you wish to suggest, please
feel free to do so.

Best wishes
Brian


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