Early Royal Society papers get DOIs

The Royal Society has registered all of its historical back-file content with CrossRef. The Oldenburg Epistle Dedicatory, dating from 1665 and published in the first volume of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, is now the earliest publication linkable via CrossRef DOI.

In registering DOIs for its complete journal archive, the Royal Society joins several CrossRef member publishers who have recently completed, or are in the midst of, vast retro-digitisation initiatives, including Elsevier, Springer, Sage, Kluwer, Wiley, Blackwell, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, among others.

‘As more and more historical scholarly content is digitised and cross-referenced, the online web of scholarship will continue to fill in and grow backwards in time,’ commented Amy Brand, CrossRef’s director of business and product development.