New Features
Improved resolution of DOIs for PDB entries
10/08
The wwPDB partners are pleased to announce an improved mechanism for the resolution of digital object identifiers (DOIs) associated with released PDB entries. We have launched new wwPDB landing web-pages for each released PDB entry. These pages present basic information about the corresponding PDB structure, offer the model coordinate, experimental data and validation file downloads from the wwPDB FTP area, and, importantly, provide links to all the wwPDB partner websites that serve further advanced information about PDB structures. For an example, please navigate to the landing page for one of recently released entries in the PDB archive https://doi.org/10.2210/pdb6qw9/pdb. This development represents a significant improvement over the previous mechanism, where DOIs would resolve to a PDB-formatted file.
We encourage the scientific journals to make use of these pages and the DOIs issued for each PDB entry by linking to them from the online versions of papers where PDB entries are described or mentioned. We have also taken this opportunity to update the metadata that is associated with each PDB DOI, so that this information can be mined directly from the API offered by our DOI provider (CrossRef).
We would also like to draw the scientific community's attention to the new style of PDB accessions that are being gradually introduced, in preparation for when the supply of the familiar four character codes will be exhausted. The new accessions start with a prefix "PDB_" and contain further eight alphanumeric characters, with the last four characters identical to the familiar four-character codes.
