At long last we’re official, and the GCMAS 2021 conference proceedings have DOIs attached. You can find the official proceedings here or else use the DOI:

https://doi.org/10.52141/gcmas2021

If you’re not familiar with these, digital object identifiers (DOIs) are intended to provide a “permanent” link to a resource such as an article, abstract, or even work of art. What this means is that organizations that get their own DOI prefix (ours is 10.52141) commit to taking the responsibility for maintaining resource links in perpetuity. Right now, these resources live on gcmaspubs.org.

What does this mean for you? It means that now you will finally be able to start citing GCMAS abstracts in publications via their DOI. DOIs make documents easier to find as they are stable regardless of the location of the resource. In academia, many of us are asked to provide DOIs of our work to “prove” that the work was published. This can be big if you are going for promotion.

When CrossRef accepts an organization as a member, they also ask that that organization use DOIs in all modern publications to help researchers more easily find cited works. Legacy works such as older conference proceedings can be grandfathered out of this requirement. What this meant for us is that for all abstracts submitted this year which did not list DOIs in their references, these DOIs or some type of URL had to be found before the conference proceedings could be listed officially. In some cases finding these were trivial, but in others where the references were by first author, year, and journal, sometimes this was labor intensive. In any event, that’s now done for 2021. I’m now going to try to do the same for the 2020 unconference as I have time. With luck those proceedings will have DOIs in the not too distant future.

One more thing – both the proceedings as a whole AND each individual abstract has a unique DOI. You should go to gcmaspubs.org to find your paper and note the assigned DOI in the event you want to include them in your CVs and other documents.

All the best!

Tim Niiler