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On 1 May 2005, the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) becomes a DOI Registration Agency. TIB will be developing a registration facility for the use of DOIs with science data. This follows the successful completion of the pilot project we announced in September 2003 to use DOIs for the persistent identification of data sets, for citation and discovery: "Project announced to develop DOIs for scientific data: German National Library of Science and Technology joins IDF".

The IDF is extremely pleased to welcome this new initiative, which marks a further significant step in the expansion of DOI applications to new data types and sectors. It also marks the success of the IDF's efforts to stimulate pilot projects for the use of persistent identifiers.

For further details see:

• The full press release, 4 May 2005: "New DOI Registration Agency for scientific data appointed: 1,500,000 datasets to be registered by end of 2005".
• Article in Data Science Journal which discusses the application of DOIs to scientific data sets: a pre-print is available.

Google intends to make widespread use of the DOI in facilitating its crawling and indexing processes and within search results, as a means to link to published resources. Google has requested access to all CrossRef registered DOIs, and recognizes the value of the DOI in ensuring that "appropriate copy" links that get returned within their Google Scholar OpenURL pilot (see http://scholar.google.com/scholar_preferences?prev=/). The use of DOIs in Google is bound to lead over time to much greater awareness of the DOI among researchers as well. There are now 42 publishers participating in CrossRef Search, CrossRef's pilot for cross-publisher, full text search of published, scholarly literature, developed in partnership with Google. The CrossRef Search pilot was launched in April of 2004, seven months before Google announced Google Scholar, Google's own pilot for search of scholarly content across both publisher and institutional sites. Beginning later this month, the set of results delivered to CrossRef Search will come from the Google Scholar index as opposed to the general Google index.

The DOI agency CrossRef is now exploring a more formal business relationship with Google, in order to establish a set of recommended terms and conditions for Google's use of and access to publishers' full text content. If there are multiple versions of an article shown in Google Scholar search results, the first link will be to the publisher's authoritative copy. CrossRef and Google are working together on optimizing Google's use of the DOI to use the DOI as the primary means to link to an article.

On April 7, voting closed on the five-year revision of the Z39.84 (2000) Standard Syntax for the DOI by the US National Information Standards Organization (NISO).

This revision, which is entirely backward-compatible with the original 2000 standard, contains a substantially re-written forward, clarification that DOIs have no length restriction, and some technical updating re Unicode and case sensitivity. Supporting references and other material have also been updated. Comments from the voting process will now be incorporated into a final version which we expect to be passed and issued shortly.

The DOI syntax is one component of the DOI system, as is the Data Dictionary (see next item). The DOI System as a whole is a work item to become an ISO standard within TC46/SC9, the ISO body responsible for "information content identifiers" such as ISBN, ISSN, ISTC, ISRC, etc. See DOI News, November 2004, "DOI System on track to become an ISO standard".

The ISO/IEC Technical Management Board has confirmed (resolution 28/2005, 31 March 2005) the appointment of the International DOI Foundation (IDF) as the Registration Authority for the MPEG 21 Rights Data Dictionary (ISO/IEC Information technology -- Multimedia framework (MPEG-21) -- Part 6: Rights Data Dictionary, ISO/IEC 21000-6). IDF will now work with ISO to establish operational details of this function.

The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), a working group of ISO/IEC, includes the MPEG-21 "Multimedia Framework" which includes several components of digital rights management technology standardisation. This role is entirely complementary and supportive of DOI's use of Data Dictionary methodology in developing, and having adopted as baseline technology, the concepts of interoperable metadata as a solution to MPEG's call for a common dictionary or vocabulary for intellectual property rights.

For further information see the DOI Factsheet "DOI and data dictionaries". For information on MPEG see the MPEG home page.

The IDF is undertaking a strategic review with input from its members, registration agencies, founders and other stakeholders to enable the DOI to fulfil its mission by moving the DOI infrastructure to the next stage of development. Input from all parties is welcome. For further information contact n.paskin@doi.org.

For further information see the DOI Factsheet "DOI and data dictionaries". For information on MPEG see the MPEG home page.

In November we noted our participation with the work of the Digital Libraries Federation's Electronic Resource Management Initiative (ERMI) and indicated that IDF and EDItEUR had proposed the need for adding structure to the ERMI list, allowing for interoperability and extensibility as well as expression in ONIX. EDItEUR has announced an "ONIX for Licensing Terms" initiative, which will produce a "proof of concept" demonstrator to show how library licensing terms can be expressed and communicated in ONIX format, allowing license terms to be linked to electronic resources and facilitate libraries management of electronic resources and administration of compliance. IDF will be participating in the kick-off meeting of the project on April 21 in London.

See "DOI and license and rights terms". For further information, contact Brian Green of EDItEUR, brian@bic.org.uk.