Archiving
For several years, we have been publishing a second version of all articles on Intr²Dok, the open access repository of the Fachinformationsdienst für internationale und interdisziplinäre Rechtsforschung, for the purposes of library registration of the articles published on the Völkerrechtsblog, long-term archiving and permanent digital citability by means of persistent web addresses – so-called Digital Object Identifiers (DOI). This was set up by the German Research Foundation at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin to support members of law faculties and academic institutions with demand-driven services and infrastructure. While the specialised information service gains visibility from the legal community in this way – an indispensable prerequisite for its work – the Völkerrechtsblog also benefits from the cooperation beyond the three dimensions mentioned. The fact that blog contributions can be found in international library catalogues not only gives these contents, which have appeared outside the conventional publication channels of legal scholars, a transfer of respectability, but also provides them with additional reach that can also be traced on the social web with the help of alternative bibliometrics thanks to their DOI designation.
While the import of bibliographic metadata and full texts of the content published on the Völkerrechtsblog into Intr²Dok and the retransmission of the DOI stamped there into the respective citation recommendation of the original article was initially still manually doable, the increasingly rapid intensification of the publication frequency of the Völkerrechtsblog, which accelerated once again in the wake of the Coronavirus Pandemic, made it necessary to set up an automated solution. For this purpose, the Gemeinsame Bibliotheksverbund, which is responsible for the system architecture and technical operation of Intr²Dok, implemented a corresponding bidirectional mechanism. The tool used for import and DOI transfer uses the REST interface of WordPress, the world’s most widespreadidly used blog software, as well as the collaboratively developed, open-source software framework MyCoRe, on which the open access repository of the Fachinformationsdienst für international und interdisziplinäre Rechtsforschung is based. Its team checks the metadata and full texts that are imported automatically every twelve hours for completeness and formal consistency – a process that ends with the stamping of a DOI (in the fabrica of the registration consortium DataCite), which in turn is simultaneously written into a previously determined field of the metadata schema of the science blog in question.
Should you also be interested in automatically guaranteeing library verification, long-term archiving and permanent digital citability of the content of your science blog operated using WordPress, the software code of the solution jointly found by the four parties involved is available to you on the Github pages of the Joint Library Network for free reuse under a GNU General Public Licence. The basic condition for this, however, marks your cooperation with an institutional or disciplinary open access repository based on MyCoRe, such as Intr²Dok, which is accessible to all legal academic blogs free of charge for such cooperation. In this case, the Fachinformationsdienst für international und interdisziplinäre Rechtsforschung looks forward to hearing from you.
Software code
https://github.com/gbv/wordpress-importer-service
https://github.com/gbv/wordpress-importer-gui