The Books Interest Group (B.I.G), also known as the "Notorious B.I.G.", discusses best practices for assigning DOIs and reference linking for scholarly books in Crossref. Their mission is to maximize reference linking between books and other content, and enhance book discovery and usage. While book DOI registration and metadata deposits have grown significantly in Crossref, books still lag behind other content types. The group proposes practices like depositing DOIs at title and chapter levels, adding outbound references, and updating author and editorial guidelines to improve book linking and discovery. They meet bi-monthly and welcome new members and ideas.

1. Books Interest
Group
April Ondis
The (only slightly) Mad Marketer
aondis@crossref.org and @Aprilelah

2. Show of hands …
How many of you are book publishers?

3. Books Interest Group - aka “Notorious B.I.G.”
This group was active on and off between
2006-2015, and was newly revived in March 2016.
Why?
DOI Assignment and Reference Linking in Scholarly
Books is the fastest growing content type for
Crossref, with more than 10 million book DOIs
registered for about 705,952 titles.

4. Books Interest Group - aka “Notorious B.I.G.”
But …
Book metadata deposits are still rare in comparison
to the corpus of scholarly books being published.

5. Mission of the Books Interest Group:
• Maximize reference linking among books and
other Crossref content types
• Enhance the discovery, visibility, and usage of
book content

6. Why should books have DOIs?
So glad you asked!
Here are a few benefits of depositing book DOIs
with Crossref:

7. Book DOIs enhance content discovery
• Book publishers who provide reference links
from their online books increase the connections
between their content and others’, and
contributing to improved content discovery
through citations in books.

8. Articles cite books …
… and books cite articles!
Together, both enhance your Cited By counts.

9. Book references are trackable …
… even outside the formal scholarly literature.
The new Event Data service will collect
information about how and where book DOIs are
shared on the web, including social shares such
as tweets and Facebook likes, as well as saves
to Scholarly Collaboration Networks like
Mendeley, etc.

10. You can maximize your membership
Your single annual membership fee covers all
types of content. If you are already depositing
DOIs for journals or articles, there is no
additional membership fee to register your
books (you simply pay the usual fee for
depositing DOIs).

11. DOIs point wherever you point them
Use your DOI to drive book sales. Your books
will benefit from being registered with a Crossref
DOI that points to the online retail platform of
your choice.

12. Books Interest Group
Proposed Best Practices

13. Best Practices for Depositing & Linking Books
Food for thought: Citation styles and conventions for
books certainly vary from field to field. Some
disciplines may principally reference book titles, others
may also cite journal articles and book chapters.
1. Deposit Crossref DOIs at both the title and
chapter/entry level.

14. Best Practices for Depositing & Linking Books
2. Add outbound links from references in books.
3. Deposit references from books with Crossref to
enable Cited-by Linking.

15. Best Practices for Depositing & Linking Books
4. Ask authors to cite specific chapters and entries
using page numbers, chapter/entry titles and
Crossref DOIs.
5. Update editorial guidelines: Ask copyeditors to
look for page numbers and chapter titles in book
citations.

16. You can B.I.G. (Be In the Group) …
The B.I.G. is currently about 30 members, with about
12 regularly active. Current chair is Emily Ayubi of APA,
working closely with Tim McAdoo of APA. We meet
every other month via a GoToMeeting call.
Our next meeting is Wednesday, September 7 at 11:00
am Eastern Time.

17. … or just keep in touch with us!
If you’d like to pass along ideas or questions for the B.I.G.,
you can reach me here: aondis@crossref.org.
Thank you!