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The American Psychological Association (APA) offers extensive linking from reference lists to other material published by APA and hundreds of other publishers through its participation in the CrossRef linking program.
APA has joined with other publishers of scholarly information to use new and innovative technology to facilitate scholarly research. One of the most often requested features is the ability to get immediately to a full-text document from a citation list. Technically, this was feasible for some time, but until 2000 creating these links required that publishers develop bilateral agreements with each other in a laborious one-by-one process.
A prototype of a new linking system using the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) was demonstrated at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1999. Subsequently, several publishers including APA came together to form the Publishers International Linking Association (PILA) to operate CrossRef at the beginning of 2000.
Through CrossRef, members deposit DOIs for each journal article—and in APA's case, each book chapter—they publish. These are maintained in a central resolver so that there is a persistent link to the published item. Other publishers then may harvest DOIs for their reference citations to enable them to create a link so that readers can get immediately to the document that has been cited.
APA also inserts DOIs in PsycINFO to assure that the database is both a discovery and a linking tool. DOIs are harvested and inserted into new records before each weekly release. Periodically, APA also searches for back content that might have been added to the CrossRef depository since the records were put into PsycINFO.
For more information on this collaborative linking system, visit the CrossRef web site.
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