Open Citation Linking: The Way Forward
    http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october02/hitchcock/10hitchcock.html

   Steve Hitchcock, Donna Bergmark*, Tim Brody, Christopher Gutteridge,
   Les Carr, Wendy Hall, Carl Lagoze*, Stevan Harnad

                   Southampton University
                   *Cornell University

    ABSTRACT: The speed of scientific communication ? the rate of ideas
    affecting other researchers' ideas ? is increasing dramatically. The
    factor driving this is free, unrestricted access to research
    papers.  Measurements of user activity in mature eprint archives
    of research papers such as arXiv have shown, for the first time,
    the degree to which such services support an evolving network of
    texts commenting on, citing, classifying, abstracting, listing and
    revising other texts. The Open Citation project has built tools to
    measure this activity, to build new archives, and has been closely
    involved with the development of the infrastructure to support
    open access on which these new services depend. This is the story
    of the project, intertwined with the concurrent emergence of the
    Open Archives Initiative (OAI). The paper describes the broad
    scope of the project's work, showing how it has progressed from
    early demonstrators of reference linking to produce Citebase, a
    Web-based citation and impact-ranked search service, and how it has
    supported the development of the EPrints.org software for building
    OAI-compliant archives. The work has been underpinned by analysis
    and experiments on the semantics of documents (digital objects)
    to determine the features required for formally perfect linking
    ? instantiated as an application programming interface (API) for
    reference linking ? that will enable other applications to build on
    this work in broader digital library information environments.