Previously, I described the additions that we have made to the kcite plugin (n.d.a/) which now supports multiple different types of identifiers. This includes the subset of DOIs (n.d.b/) that come from either CrossRef (n.d.c) or DataCite (n.d.d) arXiv (n.d.e/) or Pubmed (n.d.f/) However, rather embarrasingly, one of the identifiers that we do not support well are URLs. Slightly ironic as one of the purposes behind (n.d.g/) is to demonstrate that it is possible to replicate the publication experience using the web.

In my previous article, I discussed my ongoing struggles with DOIs and their metadata (n.d.a/) The article discussed the difficulties with implementing content negotiation for kcite (n.d.b) in particular, getting metadata for a given DOI and understanding that metadata once it had been fetched. Here, I discuss these two issues again!

With the release of Kcite 1.5 (n.d.a/) we now support multiple forms of citation (n.d.b/) There have also been some changes to the implementation layer, however, that I will describe in this article. I have previously written critically about DOIs and their problems (n.d.c/) One of my criticisms is the inability to access metadata about a DOI in a standardised way. In this article, I will consider the addition of content negotiation and whether this improves the situation. From this, I will draw a number of conclusions about the DOI system.

Today, I was pleased to release version 1.5 of kcite. Follwing in my tradition of being unable to get the Wordpress plugin release process to work correctly, shortly after I released 1.5.1 which is the same thing, but with the correct metadata.

We’ve been working for sometime now on our lightweight semantic publishing environment, kblog. Near the beginning of the last academic year, unfortunately, we were compromised through a zero-day vulnerability. With the press of academic life and teaching, it has taken me a long, long time to get the show back on the road. However, finally, I think we have achieved this. The main cause for the delay was, simply, that I didn’t have time — at other stages of the year, it would not have been so much of a problem, but in October there is very little give in my working week. However, an additional problem has been that restoring kblog was a lot more effort than it should have been.