2020 on Crossref

A tribute to our Kirsty

Crossref — Wed, 16 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Our colleague and friend, Kirsty Meddings, passed away peacefully on 10th December at home with her family, after a sudden and aggressive cancer. She was a huge part of Crossref, our culture, and our lives for the last twelve years.

Kirsty Meddings is a name that almost everyone in scholarly publishing knows; she was part of a generation of Oxford women in publishing technology who have progressed through the industry, adapted to its changes, spotted new opportunities, and supported each other throughout. We hope this post will do justice to her memory in our profession.

Kirsty’s early career

After completing her degree in English and Spanish American Literature at Warwick University, Kirsty started her career in scholarly communications and publishing at Blackwell’s Information Services. She was there for a year before joining CatchWord, an online journal start-up, in 1998, as Electronic Publisher and Account Manager and in 1999 was promoted to the new role of Library Relations Manager.

CatchWord was acquired by Ingenta and Kirsty moved into product management working on integrating the CatchWord and Ingenta platforms and launching IngentaConnect in 2004. Ingenta became Publishing Technology in 2005 and Kirsty was Product Development Manager working with engineering, business development, and users on developing online products and services. She was also involved in a range of community initiatives including COUNTER, KBART, and ICEDIS.

Joining Crossref

Kirsty’s professional headshot

She was an early pioneer in electronic and online publishing - an innovator who understood scholarly publishing, technology, libraries, and people - a powerful combination. And Crossref was quick to offer her a role.

In Kirsty’s introduction to Crossref she was described by the recruiter as:

An experienced and highly capable individual with a solid background in product development, marketing and customer service issues related to the supply of scholarly electronic content from publishers to library and end user audiences. A good communicator and team worker with sound technical understanding and an excellent grasp of publishing industry issues.

This adequately captures Kirsty’s impressive professional achievements, but not her personality. Kirsty was a Product Manager at Crossref for 12 years and was a valued and loved friend and colleague. Committed to Crossref—its values and people—she was funny, human, and always asked tough questions.

She joined us on October 27th, 2008 as our first Product Manager and the third UK employee. In her time at Crossref, Kirsty made a major impact, working on a range of important projects and services - particularly new, innovative services. Not long after she started at Crossref, she wrote a “day in the life” profile for the journal Serials that perfectly captures what it was like in 2009 at Crossref Oxford (there were three of us in Oxford and only ten total staff at Crossref): Meddings, K., 2009. Mini-profile: a day in the life of a product manager. Serials, 22(1), pp.5–6. DOI: https://doi-org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/10.1629/225

Her own biography, on her staff page, states:

Kirsty Meddings has been involved in a diverse set of initiatives that have kept her busy since 2008. She has spent most of her career in scholarly communications, in a variety of marketing and product development roles for intermediaries and technology suppliers. She speaks conversational geek and competent publishing, and is working towards fluency in both.

See? Funny!

Professional achievements

Kirsty started out working on CrossCheck, now Similarity Check, the plagiarism screening service that launched in 2008. The service was in need of some attention and better organisation - Kirsty got stuck in, whipped it into shape and it has gone on to be one of Crossref’s most widely-adopted services. This article that Kirsty wrote for ISMTE’s publication, EON, remains useful nearly 10 years after it was written! Kirsty successfully managed the partnership with Turnitin (starting as iParadigms), the technical provider for Similarity Check, for many years. Colleagues there are mourning her loss too.

Kirsty was instrumental in launching Crossmark, which became a production service in 2012. After a few changes of hands, she resumed work on the service in recent years, and announced the removal of Crossmark fees to better support uptake in 2020.

The addition of clinical trial information to the Crossref metadata was a community-driven initiative, developed from the concept of threaded publications. There were/are lots of moving parts in this initiative, and in many ways it was one of the precursors to the idea of the Research Nexus: linking via metadata and relationships to provide a clearer picture of the ecosystem that exists around a research object.

What was once FundRef (ahh, those logos!) has matured into the Open Funder Registry under Kirsty’s stewardship. In collaboration with Elsevier, the registry has grown from an initial 4,000 funders, to over 25,000 and we can see over 5 million works registered with Crossref that are linked to at least one funder. More recently, Kirsty was the Product Manager for the registration of research grants with Crossref, working with our Funder Advisory Group, and she was starting to work with CDL and DataCite to absorb the Funder Registry into ROR.

In 2018, Kirsty launched our first ever dashboard for member best practice. She led the development and design of Participation Reports and the decision of which checks would be most important for the scholarly community to assess. This has quickly become one of Crossref’s most valuable and used tools.

Public speaking

Kirsty always spoke with authority across a range of topics, appearing totally calm even if she was nervous. Among many talks, she spoke at the STM seminar on Publication Ethics and Research Integrity, ISMTE, UKSG, ALPSP seminars, the COPE Forum, ran numerous CrossCheck, CrossMark, FundRef and TDM webinars, and a recent online LIVE event.

She was a frequent presenter at many of Crossref annual meetings, and enjoyed the opportunity to meet and catch up with our members, the board, and the community (many of whom always ask after her). Checking in after conferences on who said what, who’s moving where, what feedback we had, and picking up on opportunities for further collaboration were all things that we looked forward to sharing.

To use UKSG’s own words, Kirsty was always a staunch supporter of the organisation - attending, exhibiting, and speaking at many UKSG conferences and events over her whole career. She was also a legend at the dinners, on the dance floor, and in the bar. At the 2019 conference she tallied the votes at the quiz night - Kirsty loved a quiz! We had an all-staff end-of-year quiz via zoom last week and it was just not the same without her.

Here are Kirsty’s slides on SlideShare, some videos of Kirsty’s talks on YouTube, and her ORCID record which lists her published works.

Strong friendships

One of the most rewarding experiences of working at Crossref is meeting up with the whole team and with our members. Jetlag, hunting out coeliac-friendly food, staying up far too late chatting, trying to fit in exploring bits of cities around board and other meetings, presenting, organizing, thinking, laughing (I’m sure to the annoyance of other plane passengers)—these experiences were all part and parcel of working with Kirsty, and where many of us cemented connections with her.

We started a message board and within days it was populated with numerous stories, poems, and photos from so many friends and colleagues on whom Kirsty made such a lasting and loving impression.

Kirsty’s message board

It’s impossible to capture someone’s character in a blog, but some of the words that carry across the messages that people have shared are empathy, compassion, honesty, intelligence, brilliance, sincerity, laughter, human, passion, openness, and fun. We’ll miss her immensely.

Kirsty was somewhat of an expert in grief. She lost her first husband, James Culling, to leukemia in December 2012, leaving her a widow with two sons, Dan, 7 at the time, and Luke, just 6-months old. A few years later, through the charity Widowed And Young (WAY), she met Martin Eggleston. Martin and his daughter Amy joined Kirsty, Dan, and Luke, and they created a very happy blended family. Some of us went to their wedding and it was an incredible event full of love and laughter - and of course music. Always music.

Kirsty represented us, along with Rachael, at the funeral of another colleague last year, Christine Hone, in Amsterdam. Kirsty helped all of us get through the grief then. And because she made it okay to grieve and to talk about grief, it is heartbreaking and also comforting that she is indirectly helping us all now to be better able to handle her own death.

How we can honour Kirsty’s memory

We heard that Kirsty’s last words were “I’m listening”. Which is just so fitting. She was always ready with an ear, a shoulder to support us all, and indeed she demanded that we express ourselves honestly.

If you want to share memories of Kirsty, you can join others who have done so on the message board or just take a few minutes to read through.

And there is a justgiving page in memory of Kirsty for Maggie’s Oxford, a branch of a cancer support charity who helped her and her family through James’s death and is now helping her family again.

Professionally, Kirsty made major contributions at Crossref and in scholarly communications in general. More importantly, she had a profound impact on a personal level with many people. Our thoughts are with Martin, Dan, Amy, and Luke, and also with Kirsty’s mum Val, her brother Colin, her in-laws, her close friends, and all the people who—like the rest of us—are better for knowing her, and will never forget her.

Fast, citable feedback: Peer reviews for preprints and other record types

Martyn Rittman — Wed, 09 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Crossref has supported depositing metadata for preprints since 2016 and peer reviews since 2018. Now we are putting the two together, in fact we will permit peer reviews to be registered for any record type.

Currently, peer reviews can be registered for journal articles, but that means that they can only be related to some of the content our members deposit. Preprints, books, chapters, working papers, dissertations, and a host of other works can also be registered with Crossref. A number of these frequently undergo some form of review and many of our members and voices in the community have called for us to widen the net on peer reviews, including journal publishers, book publishers, review platforms, and preprint servers. We’ve listened and taken action, and from now on Crossref members can add relationship metadata that links peer reviews to any record type. The metadata will also contain the type of review, stating whether it is a referee report, author response, or community comment, etc. This allows accurate reporting on whether the peer review is happening within a traditional editorial process or elsewhere.

Reviews for preprints

In the last decade there has been an increase in the number of disciplines using preprints. Since enabling registration of preprint metadata, it has become our fastest-growing record type. Preprints, working papers, and other forms of early publication help to accelerate dissemination of the latest research and discovery. They can also promote discussion on important topics, and help authors to improve papers before an editorial decision for journal publication. During the COVID-19 pandemic, preprints have become invaluable for speeding the publication of vital research and case studies.

On the other hand, preprints do not undergo formal review and editorial approval, leading to concerns about the dissemination of false information. While the issue of misinformation in preprints has been discussed for some time, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought it more sharply into focus. organisations that post preprints need to balance the benefits of rapid dissemination with promoting their responsible use.

To support the feedback process, preprint servers along with a growing number of other platforms and services offer scholars the opportunity to post public comments on preprints. By doing this, they give extra context for readers, provide suggestions for authors, and raise awareness of work that could be flawed or too preliminary.

Another growing trend is journal publishers adopting editorial processes that involve preprint-first options and open peer review. As Dr. Stephanie Dawson from ScienceOpen says:

“We have long believed in rewarding reviewers by assigning Crossref DOIs to their open reviews to make them citable objects and we were one of the first users of Crossref’s peer review schema. However, a large percentage of the articles reviewed on ScienceOpen are publicly available preprints. The UCL Open: Environment journal hosted on the platform, for example, is based on a workflow of open peer review of preprints. Our customers, editors, reviewers and authors are therefore extremely happy that these reviews can now also be assigned a Crossref peer review DOI for more accountability and transparency in scholarly publishing.”

At Crossref, we’re continually looking to support more record types and relations between them to build trust, support reproducibility and increase discoverability of content. This is another small step in building the research nexus and we look forward to working with members depositing peer reviews of preprints.

404: Support team down for essential maintenance

Amanda Bartell — Fri, 04 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

2020 has been a very challenging year, and we can all agree that everyone needs a break. Crossref will be providing very limited technical and membership support from 21st December to 3rd January to allow our staff to rest and recharge. We’ll be back on January 4th raring to answer your questions. Amanda explains more about why we made this decision.

As we all know, 2020 has been an unprecedented year, with the COVID-19 pandemic affecting lives across the globe.

It’s been amazing to watch our members pivot their working practices and continue to publish content and register it with Crossref to keep the wheels of research and scholarly communications moving.

Since January, we’ve seen 9,079,082 items registered with Crossref, up 13% on 2019. 2628 new members have also joined during that time and we now have almost 13.5k members from 139 countries. We’ve seen over 337 million requests to our REST API on average per month in 2020, a 9% increase over 2019 (and over 600 million total metadata queries on average per month across all our APIs and services).

Of course, all this activity brings an increasing number of requests for help and support. Since the start of 2020, we have answered almost 24,000 support tickets from the community. Sometimes these just need a quick answer or a link to our documentation. Sometimes it’s a straightforward new member application or a routine query. But sometimes a prospective member needs a lots of advice, sometimes a long-standing member or user needs in-depth investigations and consultancy. Sometimes the request highlights a problem in one of our systems that needs input from our product and development colleagues. But either way, it’s keeping our small team of five full-time employees very busy.

Vanessa wrote earlier in the year about how our Community Outreach team has changed its working practices this year. As Head of Member Experience I’ve been incredibly impressed by the way our membership, support and billing staff have done the same - remaining really focused on the needs of the Crossref community while (at the same time) balancing this with the demands of working from home, childcare, home-schooling, and supporting those affected by the pandemic in their own community. Isaac’s thoughtful post on our forum about his first week working at home because of the pandemic really highlighted some of these challenges.

We take work/life balance seriously at Crossref. We want to make sure that we’re are able to continue to help the Crossref community effectively in 2021, but are also able to continue to look after ourselves, our families, and our own communities in this difficult time. We all hope that 2021 will be a very different year, but there’s still likely to be disruption ahead for all of us, and one thing is sure: there will continue to be plenty more requests coming in for our small team to stay on top of in the meantime.

With this in mind, we want to make sure that our support staff are able to properly rest and recharge during what is a holiday period for many of us coming up. We’ll be operating with just one person each on the technical support and membership support side between 23rd December and 3rd January. This means that while we’ll be able to answer urgent queries, non-urgent questions will be left unanswered until 4th January. And we’ll not take on any new members between 21st December and 3rd January too.

We know many of you will be continuing to work during this period. If you have a non-urgent question, do take a look at our support documentation in the meantime, or see if other members (or our amazing Ambassadors) are able to help on our forum. If you can’t find what you’re looking for and it’s urgent, we hope that the limited staff who are on call will still be able to help you out.

Colleagues in the US have recently celebrated their Thanksgiving, and I remain enormously thankful for our team here at Crossref, and for you all in the scholarly community for your enthusiasm for working together collectively to help the world find, cite, link, assess, and reuse scholarly content. We all really appreciate your patience while we reset ready for 2021. Happy Holidays!

Crossref’s Board votes to adopt the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure

Geoffrey Bilder — Wed, 02 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR

On November 11th 2020, the Crossref Board voted to adopt the “Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure” (POSI). POSI is a list of sixteen commitments that will now guide the board, staff, and Crossref’s development as an organisation into the future. It is an important public statement to make in Crossref’s twentieth anniversary year. Crossref has followed principles since its founding, and meets most of the POSI, but publicly committing to a codified and measurable set of principles is a big step. If 2019 was a reflective turning point, and mid-2020 was about Crossref committing to open scholarly infrastructure and collaboration, this is now announcing a very deliberate path. And we’re just a little bit giddy about it.

Here is a picture of me being “giddy.”

If you just want to see the principles that the board has endorsed, you can see them here:

https://doi-org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/10.24343/C34W2H

But if you also want some background and want to understand some of the implications of Crossref adopting the principles, read on…

Warning - this is a long post.

Background and Origins

Some of you may be surprised that we’ve done this - simply because you always assumed we operated under these principles anyway. And we have. Mostly.

The “Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure” were largely inspired by a set of uncodified rules and norms that Crossref had been operating under for years. So how did we get to this circular situation where we are making a big announcement about adopting something we have largely been doing anyway?

Six years ago I met with Cameron Neylon and Jennifer Lin when they were still at PLOS and we decided that we wanted to write a blog post about…

Well, it doesn’t really matter.

We never finished writing that blog post because we got distracted by an issue that we kept seeing which was that services that the scholarly community depended on were increasingly taking directions that seemed antithetical to the community’s interests.

We were concerned because the scholarly community was becoming increasingly distrustful of infrastructure services. We wondered if there were any practices that we could point to that might mitigate the risk of infrastructure being co-opted and that would help build trust. Fortunately, we had two great models to look at:

Crossref, which had a set of informal rules and norms that it had followed since its founding (e.g., transparency of operations, being business-model neutral, one member one vote).
ORCID, an organisation that was spun-out of Crossref and which had adopted a written set of principles, based largely on codifying practices that they had seen at Crossref.

And so we wrote these practices up and added a few that we thought were missing. And we posted a different blog post to the one we had originally planned. It was titled “The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructures.” And the blog post became popular. And we did a bunch of talks about the Principles. And, much to our surprise, POSI has influenced the directions and policies of a number of organisations and initiatives since, including SPARC, Invest in Open Infrastructure, Open Data Institute, OA Switchboard, and others.

Elsewhere, community organisations and likeminded community members helped further develop the implementation of POSI through discussions at FORCE11 and through additional blog posts and books. Some, like Dryad and ROR, started to work to align their organisational structure to embrace POSI.

And this left Crossref in a strange position. Although we were largely the inspiration for these Principles - we ourselves had never codified and adopted them.

Motivations. Why Now?

Because it is the right thing to do for those that currently depend on Crossref

It is a healthy thing for the organisation to do. Adopting these principles strengthens Crossref’s governance. After twenty years, Crossref infrastructure has become critical to a broad segment of the community. As our membership profile changes, and as our broader stakeholder community expands, we need to explicitly evolve our governance to reflect stakeholders. And it would be irresponsible to continue to have our governance guided by a set of informal conventions. Particularly in the context of a global political period where we’ve seen the informal operating conventions and policy understandings of at least two major democracies ignored or discarded.

Because it could help make the creation of new, sustainable, open scholarly infrastructure easier and less expensive

There is a lot of new interest in open scholarly infrastructure. New infrastructure services and systems are being proposed almost every month. Many of them seek extensive advice and consulting from Crossref. A subset of these are incubated through Crossref. And a subset of these become Crossref services. Others are spun out as separate organisations (e.g., ORCID) or were specifically initiated as collaborations (e.g., ROR).

Our experience has been that the vast majority of work involved in these infrastructure projects was in establishing trust amongst the stakeholder community. We think that Crossref adopting the principles will help to address fundamental questions about accountability and sustainability that are inevitably raised when a new constituency approaches Crossref with an idea for collaborating on a new or existing infrastructure service. In short, adopting the principles will make future collaboration easier.

Adopting the Principles: Plus ça change

The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) proposes three areas that an Open Infrastructure organisation can address in order to garner the trust of the broader scholarly community: accountability (governance), funding (sustainability), and protection of community interests (insurance).

POSI proposes a set of concrete commitments that an organisation can make to build trust in each of these areas. There are 16 such commitments. Of these 16 commitments, Crossref is already completely or partially meeting the requirements of 15. And adopting the 16th commitment just formalises a direction Crossref has been heading toward for several years.

Critically, “adopting” POSI does not mean that we have to instantly meet all of the criteria. After all, when ORCID adopted its principles, it didn’t meet any of them. They were adopted to make a statement of intent. And they were publicly adopted so that the community could measure the organisation’s progress as well as to allow the community to detect if ORCID started to stray from its stated intentions.

Adopting the principles is akin to adopting a mission statement or a vision statement. It is an aspirational guide, not a description of the status quo.

Having said that, the principles are more concrete than a mission or vision statement, and this makes them easier to measure.

It is also important to note that the criteria are designed to balance each other. So, for example, one would not want to change the governance or business model to better support the mission if doing so would also threaten the sustainability of the organisation.

And finally, meeting a commitment is an ongoing process - it is not a one-off event. The organisation needs to keep measuring their performance against the principles in order to make sure that they have not inadvertently regressed.

Implications

Before adopting the principles, we did a candid self-audit to see which ones we thought we currently met and which ones we still needed to work on.

The three areas and sixteen commitments that are proposed in POSI are all designed to ensure that an infrastructure can not be co-opted by a particular party or interest group.

And the last area, “Insurance,” is the backstop that makes sure that, if some in the community feel that the infrastructure organisation has gone in a radically wrong direction, they can recreate the infrastructure as it was when they were comfortable with it, and they will not be hindered by practices or policies that lock them into the existing organisation.

This “insurance” is very much inspired by Crossref. Crossref itself was built, in part, to make sure that publishers were not locked into platforms and that journals and societies were not locked into publishers. Using the indirect Crossref DOI linking mechanism ensures that content can move between platforms and publishers without breaking vital citation links. Moving between platforms or publishers is never easy. And it isn’t cheap. But using Crossref DOIs for citation links at least makes it possible.

Crossref has an extra insurance level as well. It is built on the DOI and Handle infrastructure. If Crossref were to take a direction that some of its members found unacceptable, those members could join another DOI Registry agency more amenable to them. It wouldn’t be easy. It wouldn’t be cheap. But it would be possible.

And this knowledge helps keep Crossref grounded and attuned to the needs and concerns of its members. We know that our members are not “trapped” with us. We don’t take lightly the trust placed in us. And we know that there is trust still to build with various corners of our community. And it is this knowledge that helps keep us from developing the disdainful, take-it-or-leave-it, attitude that can be the cliché characteristic of infrastructure organisations.

So the fundamental, overarching goal of POSI is to set out principles that ensure that the stakeholders of an infrastructure organisation have a clear say in setting its agenda and priorities and that, in extremis, the stakeholders can leave and create an alternative infrastructure if the original organisation becomes unresponsive, hostile, or disappears.

As we look at how Crossref currently maps to the principles, please keep in mind three things:

If we have marked something as green, that doesn’t mean we think we do this perfectly. It simply means that we already have internal processes that focus on this commitment and we have evidence that these processes have thus far been working.
The fact that something is green and has “thus-far been working” does not mean that we should rest easy. We could regress. Our processes need to be able to detect and address regressions.
The commitments are supposed to be balanced. So we don’t want to do something to turn something green if it has an irreversible impact on another commitment. So, for example, we should not address a shortfall in the contingency fund by generating revenue in a way that ultimately hurts Crossref’s mission.
The implication of #3 above is that it may take us some time to meet all of the commitments. But again, the community can measure our progress against meeting the commitments.

So how does Crossref currently meet POSI?

Governance

🟢 Coverage across the research enterprise.
🟢 Non-discriminatory membership
🟢 Transparent operations
🟢 Cannot lobby
🟢 Living will
🟢 Formal incentives to fulfil mission & wind-down
🔴 Stakeholder Governed

Sustainability

🟢 Time-limited funds are used only for time-limited activities.
🟢 Goal to generate surplus
🟡 Goal to create contingency fund to support operations for 12 months
🟢 Mission-consistent revenue generation
🟢 Revenue based on services, not data

Insurance

🟢 Available data (within constraints of privacy laws)
🟡 Patent non-assertion
🟡 Open source
🟡 Open data (within constraints of privacy laws)

Governance

If an infrastructure is successful and becomes critical to the community, we need to ensure it is not co-opted by particular interest groups. Similarly, we need to ensure that any organisation does not confuse serving itself with serving its stakeholders. How do we ensure that the system is run “humbly”, that it recognises it doesn’t have a right to exist beyond the support it provides for the community and that it plans accordingly? How do we ensure that the system remains responsive to the changing needs of the community?

– POSI

In the area of governance, Crossref clearly meets six of the seven criteria listed. We will discuss these first.

🟢 Coverage across the research enterprise

it is increasingly clear that research transcends disciplines, geography, institutions and stakeholders. The infrastructure that supports it needs to do the same.

– POSI

Crossref includes members who publish in the STM, HSS and Professional spheres. There are still some gaps in our coverage (e.g., monographs, law), but this is not through policy or lack of trying.

Crossref has members in 139 countries and has agreements with people in 150 countries. However note that geographic diversity is not the same as language diversity. Although we have members in many countries, the vast majority of our registered content is still in English. This does not reflect the trends in research outputs. We still need to do a lot of work to support non-English publications and non-English speaking members. But we have already identified this as a priority and are working on a number of initiatives to better support research communication in languages other than English.

🟢 Non-discriminatory membership

we see the best option as an “opt-in” approach with a principle of non-discrimination where any stakeholder group may express an interest and should be welcome. The process of representation in day to day governance must also be inclusive with governance that reflects the demographics of the membership

– POSI

It is first worth noting that “non-discriminatory” does not mean that we cannot have standards, obligations, and rules that all members of Crossref have to adhere to. It simply means that said rules are clear and that we apply them uniformly.

Crossref has always had catholic membership criteria. Although we have until now historically defined ourselves as a primarily “publisher” organisation, we define “publisher” loosely as anybody who produces content that commonly references or is referenced by scholarly literature. Historically, this has included NGOs, IGO’s, standards bodies, institutional archives, and professional publishers. More recently it has expanded to include preprint archives and funders.

The requirements for joining Crossref are few. We admit any applicant who:

Agrees to the obligations of membership.
Can pay the fees.

In practice we have historically had a policy of rejecting individuals as members. But even this is probably a pointless distinction as many of our members are “organisations” consisting of one person.

And fundamental to Crossref’s governance is that a member’s influence in the governance of Crossref is not tied to the level of financial investment they make in the organisation. All members have the same single vote. All board members have one vote.

Recently, we have also made changes to our governance and election process. The first to introduce contested elections for the board. The second to ensure that board membership was proportionally balanced amongst the membership tiers. Even as recently as 2017, when the Board established a Governance Committee, the idea of weighting votes to membership tiers was roundly rejected - on principle.

This is not to say that we can relax on this point. For example, as more funders and institutions join Crossref, we will need to make sure that our governance reflects that. We talk about this more in the section on governance.

Some will also point out that our fees are themselves a form of discrimination as they can still be an insurmountable barrier to some in the community. We understand this and, without trying to make light of or dismiss the situation, we are also confident that we are constantly looking at ways to lower the barrier-to-entry for joining Crossref. Our fees have gone steadily down since we were founded and we are constantly reviewing them to try and make them more equitable. We have created a category of sponsoring organisations to defray the costs of membership. We collaborate closely with organisations like PKP to try and build tools and services that make participation in Crossref easier and less expensive.

🟢 Transparent operations

achieving trust in the selection of representatives to governance groups will be best achieved through transparent processes and operations in general (within the constraints of privacy laws).

– POSI

Crossref has transparent finances and a transparent governance process. Much of this is simply a byproduct of the regulations governing non-profits with tax exempt status in the US and our specific registration as a non-profit membership association in New York State.

Until fairly recently, the obvious exception to this was Crossref’s use of pre-picked slates in board elections, but we have since improved this with an open election process.

🟢 Cannot lobby

the community, not infrastructure organisations, should collectively drive regulatory change. An infrastructure organisation’s role is to provide a base for others to work on and should depend on its community to support the creation of a legislative environment that affects it

– POSI

Crossref has never lobbied. Partly this is a byproduct of our commitment to be business-model neutral as most lobbying efforts in the industry seem to center around promoting the views held by members who share a business model.

But also, Crossref has never lobbied on its own behalf. We have always relied on our members and the community to point out and promote Crossref if there is any area of legislative policy that the Crossref infrastructure could help with.

🟢 Living will

a powerful way to create trust is to publicly describe a plan addressing the condition under which an organisation would be wound down, how this would happen, and how any ongoing assets could be archived and preserved when passed to a successor organisation. Any such organisation would need to honour this same set of principles

– POSI

Crossref has two relationships that require us to set out plans for an orderly wind-down.

The first is a condition of our incorporation as a non-profit in the state of New York. This explicitly includes a provision that requires us to hand over our operations and responsibilities to a successor non profit organisation that has a similar constituency and mission. The NY State Attorney General reviews and approves any major changes to ensure this requirement is met.

The second is a condition of our being members of the DOI Foundation, which includes provisions for us to hand over management of DOIs to another registration agency should Crossref ever wind-down. It is worth noting that we have already seen this clause invoked for other registration agencies that have wound down and who have, as part of the DOI Foundation provisions, handed responsibility for their DOIs to Crossref.

This is not to say that we are perfect on this score. We do not, for example, have any single place that outlines the steps that would need to be taken in order to execute the requirements laid out by our obligations to the state of New York and the IDF.

🟢 Formal incentives to fulfil mission & wind-down

infrastructures exist for a specific purpose and that purpose can be radically simplified or even rendered unnecessary by technological or social change. If it is possible the organisation (and staff) should have direct incentives to deliver on the mission and wind down.”

– POSI

Crossref has a track record of periodically reviewing our services and decommissioning those that are no longer needed - either because they have fulfilled their specific mission or because there is simply waning interest in them (arguably, the same thing).

Again, this is not to say we are perfect on this score. We also have, by our last count, about 30 specialised, overlapping APIs- many of which are used by just a handful of users. These have escaped our normal scrutiny because they never had the status of a formal service and had not been through our product management process.

But still, Crossref has long made it a habit to question its own existence. At virtually every board annual strategy meeting we ask the question “will technology X make Crossref unnecessary?” We need to continue with the attitude that the best thing we could do for our members is to make ourselves unnecessary.

🔴 Stakeholder Governed

a board-governed organisation drawn from the stakeholder community builds more confidence that the organisation will take decisions driven by community consensus and consideration of different interests.

– POSI

Overall, Crossref meets most of the Governance requirements with the notable exception of broader stakeholder involvement.

Of course, the key to this is how you define “stakeholder.”

Some may dispute this and argue that Crossref “stakeholders” are “publishers” because they are the parties that invested in creating Crossref.

But this narrow definition of “stakeholder” - focusing solely on those who have “invested”- is not widely held. In fact, common phrases like “stakeholder economy” and “stakeholder capitalism” describe the exact opposite- systems that don’t just focus on the “investor”, but which instead balance benefits to the investor with benefits to employees, the broader community, society, and the environment.

It is this latter, broader definition of “stakeholder” that is used in POSI.

And just in case anybody still thinks that people other than publishers don’t consider themselves “stakeholders’ in the Crossref infrastructure, we simply point to this, recently tweeted by Brea Manuel, a researcher, in celebration of their publication in Nature Reviews Chemistry (read it, and learn how to recruit and retain a diverse workforce):

Sustainability

Financial sustainability is a key element of creating trust. “Trust” often elides multiple elements: intentions, resources, and checks and balances. An organisation that is both well meaning and has the right expertise will still not be trusted if it does not have sustainable resources to execute its mission. How do we ensure that an organisation has the resources to meet its obligations?

– POSI

In the area of sustainability, Crossref clearly meets four of the five of the criteria listed and is most of the way to meeting the fifth.

🟢 Time-limited funds are used only for time-limited activities

day to day operations should be supported by day to day sustainable revenue sources. Grant dependency for funding operations makes them fragile and more easily distracted from building core infrastructure.

– POSI

Crossref has never supported production activities based on grants. Indeed Crossref’s delivery on this point is what inspired the approach taken in this principle. This distinguishes Crossref from many grant-funded infrastructure initiatives which either barely stay afloat or disappear altogether. Even those that survive often do so by pursuing solutions that align with their funder’s interest over their user’s needs.

🟢 Goal to generate surplus

organisations which define sustainability based merely on recovering costs are brittle and stagnant. It is not enough to merely survive, it has to be able to adapt and change. To weather economic, social and technological volatility, they need financial resources beyond immediate operating costs.

– POSI

Crossref has always attempted to generate a surplus. Crossref has generated surpluses since 2002 - so for 18 years of its 20 year existence.

🟡 Goal to create contingency fund to support operations for 12 months

a high priority should be generating a contingency fund that can support a complete, orderly wind down (12 months in most cases). This fund should be separate from those allocated to covering operating risk and investment in development.

– POSI

Crossref currently has a contingency fund that would support operations for 9 months. Although this may be standard for industry, it seems prudent to extend this in the case of infrastructure organisations, particularly when they are membership organisations. First, the very fact that something is infrastructure implies that the systemic effects of its failing ungracefully could have industry-wide repercussions. Second, the decision-making process of a membership organisation whose governance is voluntary is inherently slower. It has taken Crossref Board 9 months, for example, just to discuss the ramifications of adopting POSI.

Given our recent financial performance, we expect Crossref could comfortably increase the contingency fund to support 12 months of operations within the next 2-3 years.

🟢 Mission-consistent revenue generation

potential revenue sources should be considered for consistency with the organisational mission and not run counter to the aims of the organisation.

– POSI

Crossref has a good track record of periodically reviewing our services and fees and adjusting them to better support Crossref’s mission. The role of the Membership & Fees Committee in advising the Board has been critical. The very first example of this was in the early days of Crossref when we dropped matching fees because they were disincentivising members from linking their references. Crossref was also quick to recognise that, in order to support global research and reach smaller publishers in lower income countries, we had to develop a sponsoring mechanism to help defray the costs and ameliorate the technical complexity of participating in Crossref. Most recently we have taken the decision to drop fees for Crossmark as it was clear they had become a barrier to our members distributing retraction and correction notifications in a machine actionable format.

🟢 Revenue based on services, not data

data related to the running of the research enterprise should be a community property. Appropriate revenue sources might include value-added services, consulting, API Service Level Agreements or membership fees

– POSI

Crossref does not charge for or resell its members’ data. Doing so would restrict dissemination and reduce the discoverability of our members’ content. Instead our revenue comes from a combination of membership fees and service fees. The DOI registration is a member service that generates the bulk of our revenue. But our SLA-backed APIs are becoming increasingly popular as members and others seek to integrate Crossref metadata into their production workflows and services.

Insurance

Even with the best possible governance structures, critical infrastructure can still be co opted by a subset of stakeholders or simply drift away from the needs of the community. Long term trust requires the community to believe it retains control. Here we can learn from Open Source practices. To ensure that the community can take control if necessary, the infrastructure must be “forkable.” The community could replicate the entire system if the organisation loses the support of stakeholders, despite all established checks and balances. Each crucial part then must be legally and technically capable of replication, including software systems and data. Forking carries a high cost, and in practice this would always remain challenging. But the ability of the community to recreate the infrastructure will create confidence in the system. The possibility of forking prompts all players to work well together, spurring a virtuous cycle. Acts that reduce the feasibility of forking then are strong signals that concerns should be raised. The following principles should ensure that, as a whole, the organisation in extremis is forkable.

– POSI

Crossref clearly meets two of the four Insurance requirements. And the remaining two can be met easily with some clarification and time.

The “governance” section of POSI is designed to ensure that an infrastructure organisation is beholden to the broader stakeholder community and that it can not be co-opted by a particular party or special interest. And the “sustainability” section of POSI is designed to ensure that the infrastructure organisation takes the financial steps to ensure it can weather sudden changes in the financial or technical environment. But the last section, “insurance” is designed to protect stakeholder interests in case either “governance” or “sustainability” fail.

The term “forkable” comes from the Open Source software community where it is used to indicate when a software community’s interests diverge and they decide to split a project into several projects, with each new project focusing on a particular sub-community’s interests.

One of the immediate worries that people have when they first hear of the concept of “forkability” is that it will encourage the creation many variations of a project based on frivolous criteria. But this simply does not happen. Forking a project is never easy and takes a lot of effort. It is only done successfully when a critical mass of the community becomes unhappy with the direction a project is taking and is willing to take on the substantial burden of running an entirely separate project. Without such a critical mass, the fork just withers and has virtually no effect on the original project.

And the reason for this is simple, the mere knowledge that a project is “forkable” forces project maintainers to balance the interests of the community so that no sizable subgroup grows dissatisfied enough to fork the project.

Forkability encourages reponsivness to the community by making sure that the community is not “locked-in.”

Crossref itself was founded, in part, to prevent lock-in. Use of the DOI in linking citations makes it easier for publishers to move platforms, and for journals and societies to move between publishers.

And Crossref itself is architected in part to ensure that lock-in is not possible. Crossref is just one of several DOI registration agencies. Members unhappy with Crossref, can move to another DOI registration agency and their citation links will continue to work. But there are things we could do to make this even easier.

🟢 Available data (within constraints of privacy laws)

It is not enough that the data be made “open” if there is not a practical way to actually obtain it. Underlying data should be made easily available via periodic data dumps.

– POSI

Crossref provides public APIs that allow users to access Crossref metadata. We are planning to eventually release yearly public data files. We already did this once when we released a public data file in support of COVID-19 research. This in no way prevents the provision of data through paid Service Level Agreement tiers that provide guarantees of regularity, availability or reliability for those that need it. Existing Metadata Plus customers primarily use data that is available through the open API or existing dumps, but value additional services that support their use-cases.

🟡 Patent non-assertion

“The organisation should commit to a patent non-assertion covenant. The organisation may obtain patents to protect its own operations, but not use them to prevent the community from replicating the infrastructure.

– POSI

Crossref has never registered a patent. But the DOI Foundation, with significant support from Crossref, had to respond to (and then monitored) a set of patent applications that, if successful, the DOI System would infringe on. The applications were filed more than 15 years ago and haven’t been successful so these applications aren’t a current concern. As a result of this, the DOI Foundation adopted a patent policy in 2005 that covers all Registration Agencies and protects the DOI System. We may want to register protective patents in the future in order to enable us to defend ourselves against patent trolls.

The problem with patents is that they could be used by an organisation to prevent the infrastructure forking. One technique that has been used by major companies to assure communities that they will not be affected by patents, is to make a patent non-assertion covenant. For example, IBM, Microsoft and Google have made non-assertion statements in order to assure the open source and standards communities that they participate in that they will not co-opt an open source project or open standard by asserting patents on code or processes they contribute.

Though Crossref has never registered a patent, issuing a patent non-assertion covenant would help assure stakeholders that we would not use patents in the future to prevent the community from forking the system.

🟡 Open source

All software required to run the infrastructure should be available under an open source license. This does not include other software that may be involved with running the organisation.

– POSI

All code for new initiatives since 2007 has been released under an open source MIT license. The legacy Content System code could be open sourced within 12-18 months with no extra effort.

If some Crossref stakeholders wanted to “fork” Crossref or leave for another DOI registration agency, their biggest hurdle would be trying to recreate the twenty years worth of rules and algorithms we use for processing and matching metadata. Without access to the source code of the system, it would be almost impossible for these to be reverse engineered.

Similarly, without access to the source code of our system - it is difficult to ensure that Crossref is, indeed, non-discriminatory in the way it works with member content. It would be possible, for example, for Crossref to modify its matching algorithms to deliberately favour or deprecate some members’ content.

If we want to assure the community that we are managing our member metadata fairly and if we want to provide even better insurance to our members and the broader stakeholders, we should make all of our code open source.

The legacy so-called “CS” (content system) is in the process of being refactored. The only reason we cannot open source this immediately is that we still need to make some security changes to it. These security changes are being done as part of a current refactoring project and should be completed without any extra effort within 12-18 months. After that, we can open source the code.

🟡 Open data (within constraints of privacy laws)

For an infrastructure to be forked it will be necessary to replicate all relevant data. The CC0 waiver is best practice in making data legally available. Privacy and data protection laws will limit the extent to which this is possible.

– POSI

Achieving this simply requires us clarifying copyright and license information and that this will not have any effect on the metadata registered in Crossref by our members.

First we should outline the current copyright status of a Crossref metadata record.

The fundamental issue is that what we colloquially call “Crossref metadata” is actually a mix of elements, some of which come from our members, and some of which come from third parties and some of which comes from Crossref itself. These elements, in turn, each have different copyright implications.

On top of this, Crossref has terms and conditions for its members and terms and conditions for specific services. These grant Crossref the right to do things with some classes of metadata and not do things with other classes of metadata - regardless of copyright.

Let’s start with the easiest case. Crossref already has two services with CC0 metadata:

The Open Funder Registry
Event Data

Obviously, the POSI open data provision would not change anything for either service.

The next easiest case is private data. Crossref collects PII (usernames, passwords IP addresses, etc.). This would remain private. And we will continue to manage it in conformance with GDPR. It would not be affected by the open data provision of POSI.

Next let’s look at what most people probably think of as “Crossref metadata”- that is, the basic bibliographic metadata that Crossref has collected from its members since its founding (titles, authors, volumes, issues, etc). For the record- this does not include abstracts.

Since 2000 Crossref has stated that it considers this basic bibliographic metadata to be “facts.” And under US law (Crossref is registered in the US) these facts are not subject to copyright at all. If this data is not subject to copyright at all, there is no way Crossref can “waive the copyright” under CC0. This metadata would not be affected at all under the open data provision of POSI.

More recently, some of our members have been submitting abstracts to Crossref. These are copyrighted. In the case of subscription publishers, the copyright usually belongs to the publisher. In the case of open access publishers, the copyright most often belongs to the authors. In both cases, Crossref cannot waive copyright under CC0 because the copyright is not ours to waive. However, we are allowed to redistribute the abstracts with our metadata because that is part of the terms and conditions we have with our members. We already have language that notes the distinct copyright status of the abstracts in our metadata, but, ideally, we should extend our schema to make that information available in a machine actionable form as well. In short, the copyright status of abstracts would not be affected at all by the open data provision of POSI.

Crossref also has its Reference Distribution Policy that the board adopted in 2017 - limited and closed references are not distributed by Crossref and this won’t change. [EDIT 6th June 2022 - all references are now open by default with the March 2022 board vote to remove any restrictions on reference distribution].

And this leaves us with the one thing that would be affected by the open data provision of POSI- data that is created by Crossref itself as a byproduct of our services. By law, this data is under Crossref’s copyright unless we explicitly waive it. This data includes things like, participation reports, conflict reports, member IDs and Cited-by counts (just the counts, not the references) and any aggregations of our otherwise uncopyrighted data that might, by aggregating it, be subject to sui generis database rights. At the moment, although we distribute this data freely and without restriction, we have no explicit copyright attached to it. All we would be seeking to do is explicitly say that data generated by Crossref will be distributed CC0. Again, at first it would be enough to just specify this in human readable form, along with our other copyright information. But, eventually, we would want to include this information in machine actionable form in the metadata itself.

To summarise:

Metadata type	Example	Current Copyright	Change under POSI
Already CC0	Open Funder Registry, Event Data	CC0	None
Private	Log files, user IDs	Private	None
Bibliographic	Title, authors, volume, issue	Facts	None
Closed references		Facts - but no distribution under the reference distribution board policy from 2017	None
Limited references		Facts - but no public distribution under the reference distribution board policy from 2017	None
Open references		Facts	None
Crossref-generated data	Participation data, reports, extracts	Copyright Crossref	CC0

[EDIT 6th June 2022 - all references are now open by default with the March 2022 board vote to remove any restrictions on reference distribution].

No member metadata will be affected by our adopting the open data provision of POSI. The only data that would be affected is data generated by Crossref itself.

However, the adoption of this principle would likely have an effect on our decisions about future services. For example, under this principle we would not launch any new services where the data was not freely reusable or the copyright of the data was not CC0.

Conclusion and Next steps

So again we face the paradox- We are announcing something that is simultaneously insignificant and important. It is insignificant in that we are simply saying that we will continue to do what we have largely been doing since Crossref was founded. But it is important because, in codifying what we have been doing, we are also confirming that these principles actually worked. That they were essential to building the trust that allowed us to function over the past twenty years, and they will continue to be essential in the future- as we look to work with existing organisations to strengthen current infrastructures, and work with new stakeholders to develop new infrastructures.

So much of the work in building scholarly infrastructure is about building trust. We would love to see other organisations and services adopt POSI as well. Doing so would help us to collaborate more efficiently by allowing us to confirm from the outset that our fundamental values align. And having a set of verifiable commitments that we can point to will also help build the community’s trust in our respective organisations and services.

And this brings us to an important point. Although POSI might have been inspired by Crossref, POSI is not a “Crossref thang” and it never has been. The movement to create open scholarly infrastructures and to define and clarify the ground rules within which they operate has become a much broader community concern.

To this end, we’ve worked with some sibling infrastructure organisations—such as Dryad and ROR—as well as the original authors of POSI to create a website where we could host the list of principles independent of the original blog post and independent of any single organisation:

openscholarlyinfrastructure.org

Minimally, this provides a place for anybody who wants to link to or cite POSI - either because they are endorsing them, or because they are simply discussing them.

If we see enough activity of this type, then the site could evolve to become a register of those organisations and services who have formally adopted POSI and a place where they can link to their self-assessments against the principles.

The community promoting, discussing and applying POSI has long since grown beyond the original authors of the POSI blog post. And it is also much larger than any single organisation. Our hope is that this website encourages that growth.

And, of course, in addition to the external outreach and coordination, Crossref still has internal work to do in addressing the outstanding issues that were raised in our own self-assessment above. We need to increase our contingency funds. We need to publish a patent non-assertion covenant. We need to open source our core software. And we need to clarify our metadata license information and make it explicit that Crossref waives copyright (using CC-0) for any metadata generated by Crossref. And, finally, as Crossref expands and starts working with different stakeholders, we will need to adjust our governance and the composition of our board accordingly. We will, of course, post updates here as we make progress on addressing these areas.

2020 marked Crossref’s 20th birthday. What a grim year to have an anniversary. But we are, at least, ending it on a little bit of a high. We are delighted that the issue of open scholarly infrastructure has become so prominent in the community. And we are eager to help strengthen and extend this infrastructure. The decision by Crossref’s board to adopt POSI is the equivalent of Crossref finally adopting a written constitution. And it is a fitting launch to our next twenty years.

Calling all 24-hour (PID) party people!

Kathleen Luschek — Tue, 13 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

While we wish we could be together in person to celebrate the fifth PIDapalooza, there’s an upside to moving it online: now everyone can participate in the universe’s best PID party! With 24 hours of non-stop PID programming, you’ll be able to come to the party no matter where you happen to be.

Send us your ideas for #PIDapalooza21

Now is your chance to share your work in the #PIDapalooza21 spotlight! We’re seeking proposals for short, interactive sessions about what you are doing––or want to do––with persistent identifiers and the communities that love and use them.

#PIDapalooza21 will feature sessions around the broad theme of PIDs and Open Research Infrastructure, focusing on the following areas:

Theme 1. PIDs 101

For PID beginners! You’ve got just 30 minutes to get attendees up to speed on a PID or PIDs. Make it fast! Make it fact-filled! Make it fun!

Theme 2. PID Communities International

Have you always wanted to host a Spanish-language PID session, or bring together PID people in the humanities? Tell us how you’d connect with PID peers around the world!

Theme 3. PID Success Stories

There’s nothing better than hearing about what’s working in the PID world––and why! Share your success stories so we can all benefit from them.

Theme 4. PID Party!

It wouldn’t be PIDapalooza without the party sessions, so be creative! Help us make this the best PID party ever!

Propose a session now!

The call for proposals will be open until October 30. Submit your PIDea now!

*Note: The PIDapalooza submission form uses Google. If you are unable to access Google Forms, email your session idea.

Get the full low-down on #PIDapalooza21 at the PIDapalooza website.

EASE Council Post: Rachael Lammey on the Research Nexus

Rachael Lammey — Mon, 12 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This blog was initially posted on the European Association of Science Editors (EASE) blog: “EASE Council Post: Rachael Lammey on the Research Nexus”. EASE President Duncan Nicholas accurately introduces it as a whole lot of information and insights about metadata and communication standards into one post…

I was given a wide brief to decide on the topic of my EASE blog, so I thought I’d write one that tries to encompass everything - I’ll explain what I mean by that.

In the past, Crossref has had the opportunity to talk to EASE members about the importance of registering content whose metadata contains important information related to the article. Richer metadata helps to connect the content to other key information such as who wrote it, who it was funded by, the relevant license, the research it cites, any updates to the work such as corrections and retractions, and the data that underpin the research. The use of open persistent identifiers like DOIs, funder IDs, ORCID iDs and ROR IDs are always recommended.

Such rich and connected metadata also helps discoverability of the published research in a different way than just direct access; if you can find something based on looking at the publications related to a particular funder, author, or institution, then there are more ways to come across what you’re looking for. Making links between objects underpinning the research also helps put the research in context and can help further research by making connections to other valuable information that may have been more difficult to make otherwise.

I’ve mentioned the Research Nexus in the title of this post. It’s achieved by declaring relationships between publications and other associated research objects, and from those objects to related publications. The metadata that reveals relationships between research objects can be as informative as the objects themselves. These relationships can assert certain facts that may not be otherwise obvious: this is our goal with the Research Nexus. These relationships and assertions need to exist not just on the web pages of the outputs, but also reflected in a standard way in the metadata so that the information is computer-readable and can be used at scale. As Jennifer Lin, who coined the term, explains:

“Researchers are adopting new tools that create consistency and shareability in their experimental methods. Increasingly, these are viewed as key components in driving reproducibility and replicability. They provide transparency in reporting key methodological and analytical information. They are also used for sharing the artefacts which make up a processing trail for the results: data, material, analytical code, and related software on which the conclusions of the paper rely. Where expert feedback was also shared, such reviews further enrich this record.”

In her Crossref blog, Jennifer goes on to give some examples, including:

Linking to an entire collection of methods and video protocols via Protocols.io
Linking to software and peer reviews in JOSS
Linking to preprint, data, code, source code, peer reviews in Gigascience

I’d include an additional example of linking research to the grant using the grant identifier and associated metadata from the funding section of this PLOS paper (read more about the example from EuroPMC who register grants with Crossref for Wellcome).

These links can be established by adding them into the Crossref relationship metadata schema. The information is then made available to anyone via our open APIs, so that they can easily see and use the information.

In all of these, publishers and other parties are linking to associated research outputs to support the reproducibility and discoverability of content.

The reproducibility point is worth reiterating; EASE has always supported projects to maintain high standards around the review of research, publication standards and ethics, and the reduction of research waste. And connecting articles to data, preprints, protocols, and peer reviews, and making the relationships open for analysis will help achieve this.

We also know that there are work and cost involved in establishing these links, and we’re working on ways to lower the barriers in doing so by:

Revisiting what we charge to encourage best practice. Starting in 2020, we have removed fees for registering vital information on corrections, retractions and other Crossmark metadata. This is timely in light of the updates to the EASE Standardised Retraction form.
We’re also working to remove fees for translations and versions that are linked together by the appropriate relationship metadata so that publishers posting translations or different versions of an article don’t have to pay multiple times for these. Our Membership & Fees Committee is currently reviewing other ways we can support publishers keen to make these connections.
Finding ways to make it easier for publishers to collect this information from authors e.g. submission systems integrations with data repositories to collect robust information on article/data links.
Allowing the registration of peer review metadata for content other than journal articles e.g. books, preprints (coming soon).
Making it easier for publishers to register this information with us at Crossref via the provision of simple to use tools, interfaces and reporting.

The outputs of the research process, such as journal articles, don’t exist in isolation - you only have to look at the interest in the corpus of COVID-19 publications, preprints and associated data to see this. This thinking is also supported by campaigns like Metadata 2020 advocating for “richer, connected, and reusable, open metadata will advance scholarly pursuits for the benefit of society.” The relationships revealed by the Research Nexus may one day help progress research to realise benefits that help us all, providing we all make efforts to effectively support them. More to come…

2020 Board Election

Lucy Ofiesh — Mon, 28 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This year, Crossref’s Nominating Committee assumed the task of developing a slate of candidates to fill six open board seats. We are grateful that in the midst of a challenging year, we received over 70 expressions of interest from all around the world, a 40% increase from last year’s response. It was an extraordinary pool of applicants and a testament to the strength of our membership community.

There are six seats open for election (two large, four small), and the Nominating Committee is pleased to present the following slate.

The 2020 slate

Candidate organisations, in alphabetical order, for the Small category (four seats available):

Beilstein-Institut, Wendy Patterson
Korean Council of Science Editors, Kihong Kim
OpenEdition, Marin Dacos
Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO), Abel Packer,
The University of Hong Kong, Jesse Xiao

Candidate organisations, in alphabetical order, for the Large category (two seats available):

AIP Publishing, Jason Wilde,
Oxford University Press, James Phillpotts,
Taylor & Francis, Liz Allen

Here are the candidates’ organisational and personal statements

You can be part of this important process, by voting in the election

If your organisation is a voting member in good standing of Crossref as of September 14, 2020, you are eligible to vote when voting opens on September 30, 2020.

How can you vote?

On September 30, 2020, your organisation’s designated voting contact will receive an email with the Formal Notice of Meeting and Proxy Form with concise instructions on how to vote. You will also receive a user name and password with a link to our voting platform.

The election results will be announced at LIVE20 virtual meeting on November 10, 2020.

Open Abstracts: Where are we?

Ludo Waltman — Fri, 25 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA) launched this week. The initiative calls on scholarly publishers to make the abstracts of their publications openly available. More specifically, publishers that work with Crossref to register DOIs for their publications are requested to include abstracts in the metadata they deposit in Crossref. These abstracts will then be made openly available by Crossref. 39 publishers have already agreed to join I4OA and to open their abstracts.

Where are we at the moment in terms of openness of abstracts? For an individual publisher working with Crossref, the percentage of the publisher’s content for which an abstract is available in Crossref can be found in Crossref’s Participation Reports. The chart presented below gives the overall picture (as of September 1, 2020) for medium-sized and large publishers working with Crossref. The vertical axis shows the number of journal articles of a publisher in the period 2018-2020. Because of the large differences between publishers in the number of articles they publish, this axis has a logarithmic scale. The horizontal axis shows the percentage of the articles of a publisher for which an abstract is available in Crossref. The orange dots represent publishers that have agreed to join I4OA. The publishers colored in blue have not yet agreed to join the initiative.

A similar chart was published a few months ago in this blog post on the importance of open abstracts. Comparing the above chart with the one published a few months ago, the first effects of I4OA are already visible. While for most publishers the percentage of abstracts available in Crossref has hardly changed, it has increased from 11% to 95% for the Royal Society, one of the founding publishers of I4OA. This reflects the efforts the Royal Society has made over the past months to improve the availability of abstracts in Crossref for its content, not only for new content but also for existing content. For SAGE, another founding publisher of I4OA, the percentage of abstracts available in Crossref has increased from 38% to 50%. A further increase can be expected to take place in the coming months. The third founding publisher of I4OA, Hindawi, has remained at a stable level, with abstracts being available for 97% of its content.

The above chart shows that many publishers supporting I4OA are already making abstracts available in Crossref. Other publishers do not yet make abstracts available in Crossref but have nevertheless decided to join I4OA. This is the case for Frontiers, PLOS, and Karger, and also for several smaller publishers not visible in the above chart, such as EMBO and Ubiquity Press. These publishers are currently adjusting their workflows and will start submitting abstracts to Crossref soon.

Of the publishers that have not yet joined I4OA, some may not yet be aware of I4OA, while others may need more time to decide whether they will join the initiative. As can be seen in the above chart, most publishers that have not yet joined I4OA do not make abstracts available in Crossref at the moment. However, some publishers have not yet joined I4OA even though they do make abstracts available in Crossref. We hope these publishers will join I4OA soon. By joining the initiative, these publishers would formalize their commitment to openness of abstracts.

None of the publishers in the above chart makes abstracts available in Crossref for 100% of its journal content. Some publishers, such as Copernicus and Hindawi, are close to 100%, but even these publishers have some content for which no abstract is available. Importantly, this does not necessarily mean that publishers have failed to submit abstracts to Crossref for some of their content. Instead, it may simply mean that some of their journal content does not have an abstract. Research articles usually have an abstract, but many other types of content published in journals, such as book reviews, letters, editorials, and corrections, often do not have an abstract. For most publishers, it is therefore impossible to make abstracts available for 100% of their content. Moreover, since Crossref does not distinguish between different types of content published in journals, we cannot provide separate statistics on the availability of abstracts for different types of journal content.

As an example, let’s consider Brill, a publisher that has joined I4OA and that mainly focuses on the humanities and social sciences. Abstracts are available in Crossref for 57% of Brill’s content in the period 2018-2020. This may suggest that Brill has failed to submit abstracts to Crossref for a significant share of its content. However, when we look up journal publications of Brill in 2018 and 2019 in the Web of Science database, abstracts turn out to be available for only 68% of these publications. Assuming that Web of Science has more or less complete coverage of abstracts, this seems to indicate that Brill has already submitted most of its abstracts to Crossref. In fact, Web of Science shows that about a quarter of the publications of Brill are book reviews and that hardly any of these book reviews has an abstract. This illustrates why some publishers, for instance those that publish many book reviews, cannot be expected to get close to 100% availability of abstracts.

Despite the above caveats, it is clear that there is still a long way to go in improving the availability of abstracts in Crossref. As of September 1, 2020, abstracts were available for 21% of all journal articles in Crossref in the period 2018-2020. In Web of Science (Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index), 86% of all journal publications in 2018 and 2019 that have a DOI also have an abstract.

Publishers who wish to distribute their abstracts openly through Crossref can include them in the normal content registration process. They can send XML to Crossref (using Crossref’s metadata deposit schema), either directly via HTTPS POST or via the Crossref admin system. For back-content, a resubmission of the full XML is required. In addition, various tools can be used to deposit abstracts. Open Journal Systems (OJS) has a plugin that supports the depositing of abstracts. Metadata Manager also facilitates this, but only for journal articles. Crossref’s web deposit form does not yet support abstracts, but Crossref is working on this.

To keep track of the progress publishers are making in depositing abstracts in Crossref, we plan to publish regular updates of the chart presented above on the I4OA website. We look forward to witnessing the impact of I4OA in the coming months!

Thank you to guest authors Bianca Kramer and Ludo Waltman, as well as the other founding members of I4OA.

Get involved with Peer Review Week 2020 and register your peer reviews with Crossref

Amanda Bartell — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Just when you thought 2020 couldn’t go any faster, it’s Peer Review week again! Peer Review is such an important part of the research process and highlighting the role it plays is key to retaining and reinforcing trust in the publishing process.

As the Peer Review Week team states:

“Maintaining trust in the peer review decision-making process is paramount if we are to solve the world’s most pressing problems. This includes ensuring that the peer review process is transparent (easily discoverable, accessible, and understandable by anyone writing, reviewing, or reading peer-reviewed content) and that everyone involved in the process receives the training and education needed to play their part in making it reliable and trustworthy.”

A key way that publishers can make peer reviews easily discoverable and accessible is by registering them with Crossref - creating a persistent identifier for each review, linking them to the relevant article, and providing rich metadata to show what part this item played in the evolution of the content. It also gives a way to acknowledge the incredible work done by academics in this area.

For Peer Review week last year, Rosa and Rachael from Crossref created this short video to explain more.

Fast forward to 2020 and over 75k peer reviews have now been registered with us by a range of members including Wiley, Peer J, eLife, Stichting SciPost, Emerald, IOP Publishing, Publons, The Royal Society and Copernicus. We encourage all members to register peer reviews with us - and you can keep up to date with everyone who is using this API query. (We recommend installing a JSON viewer for your browser to view these results if you haven’t done so already).

Register peer reviews and contribute to the Research Nexus

At Crossref, we talk a lot about the research nexus, and it’s a theme that you’re going to hear a lot more about from us in the coming months and years.

The published article no longer has the supremacy it once did, and other outputs - and inputs - have increasing importance. Linked data and protocols are key for reproducibility, peer reviews increase trust and show the evolution of knowledge, and other research objects help increase the discoverability of content. Registering these objects and stating the relationships between them support the research nexus.

Peer reviews in particular are key to demonstrating that the scholarly record is not fixed - it’s a living entity that moves and changes over time. Registering peer reviews formally integrates these objects into the scholarly record and makes sure the links between the reviews and the article both exist and persist over time. It allows analysis or research on peer reviews and highlights richer discussions than those provided by the article alone, showing how discussion and conversation help to evolve knowledge. In particular, post-publication reviews highlight how the article is no longer the endpoint - after publication, research is further validated (or not!) and new ideas emerge and build on each other. You can see a real-life example of this from F1000 in a blog post written by Jennifer Lin a few years ago.

As we’ve said before:

Article metadata + peer review metadata = a fuller picture of the evolution of knowledge

Registering peer reviews also provides publishing transparency and reviewer accountability, and enables contributors to get credit for their work. If peer review metadata includes ORCID IDs, our ORCID auto-update service means that we can automatically update the author’s ORCID record (with their permission), while our forthcoming schema update will take this even further, making CRediT roles available in our schema.

How to register peer reviews with Crossref

You need to be a member of Crossref in order to register your peer reviews with us and you can currently register peer reviews by sending us your XML files. Unfortunately, you can’t currently register peer reviews using our helper tools like the OJS plugin, Metadata Manager, or the web deposit form.

You can find out more about registering peer reviews on our website - we even have a range of markup examples.

We know that there’s a range of outputs from the peer review process, and our schema allows you to identify many of them, including referee reports, decision letters, and author responses. You can include outputs from the initial submission only, or cover all subsequent rounds of revisions, giving a really clear picture of the evolution of the article. Members can even register content for discussions after the article was published, such as post-publication reviews.

Get involved with Peer Review Week 2020

We’re looking forward to seeing the debate sparked by Peer Review Week and hearing from our members about this important area. You can get involved by checking out the Peer Review Week 2020 website or following @PeerRevWeek and the hashtags #PeerRevWk20 #trustinpeerreview on Twitter.

We’re excited to see what examples of the evolution of knowledge will be discoverable in registered and linked peer reviews this time next year!

Crossref at the Frankfurt Digital Book Fair

Rosa Morais Clark — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Frankfurt Book Fair (#FBM20) will be online this year since people are really not traveling right now. This special edition of #FBM20 will have an extensive digital program in which we will be participating. So you can hang out with us from anywhere in the world!

Similar to the in-person event of years past, members of our technical support, membership, and outreach teams will be on hand at our online Crossref Cafe.

Here are our Crossref Cafe hours:

	Support	Membership	Community outreach	Product
Wed 14 Oct 8:00 - 9:00 UTC	Paul	Sally	Vanessa	Bryan
Wed 14 Oct 14:00 - 15:00 UTC	Shayn	Anna	Susan	Sara
Thu 15 Oct 8:00 - 9:00 UTC	Paul	Laura	Vanessa	Martyn
Thu 15 Oct 14:00 - 15:00 UTC	Isaac, Shayn	Anna, Kathleen	Susan	Kirsty
Fri 16 Oct 8:00 - 9:00 UTC	Paul	Amanda	Vanessa, Rachael	Rakesh
Fri 16 Oct 14:00 - 15:00 UTC	Isaac, Shayn	Anna, Kathleen	Susan

Who will be online:

Susan, Vanessa, and Rachael can talk to you about our upcoming events.
Kirsty can talk to you about Crossmark.
Kathleen can explain Similarity Check.
Laura can show you how to use Metadata Manager for Content Registration.
Isaac, Shayn, and Paul can help troubleshoot any metadata, DOI, or reporting needs.
Sara can talk to you about content registration.
Anna will give you a ‘metadata health check’ including a tour of your Participation Report.
Rakesh can talk to you about product design.
Sally and Amanda can answer your questions about membership.
Martyn can talk to you about Cited-by.
Bryan can talk to you about recent updates to our products and services.

We are happy to schedule one-on-one virtual meetings as well.

Please do drop-in to say “Guten Tag”. We’re looking forward to seeing you online!

Publishers, are you ready to ROR?

Maria Gould — Tue, 25 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

If you manage a publishing system or workflow, you know how crucial—and how challenging!—it is to have clean, consistent, and comprehensive affiliation metadata. Author affiliations, and the ability to link them to publications and other scholarly outputs, are vital for numerous stakeholders across the research landscape. Institutions need to monitor and measure their research output by the articles their researchers have published. Funders need to be able to discover and track the research and researchers they have supported. Academic librarians need to easily find all of the publications associated with their campus. Journals need to know where authors are affiliated so they can determine eligibility for institutionally sponsored publishing agreements.

Until recently, an open, unambiguous, and persistent identifier for research organisation affiliations has been a missing layer of the scholarly ecosystem. DOIs could identify articles and datasets and other research outputs, and ORCID IDs could identify researchers, but no equivalent solution was available to identify institutions. With the launch of the Research Organization Registry (ROR) in 2019 (which Crossref has helped to develop), the landscape is changing. ROR IDs are an opportunity to make affiliation details easier for publishers to use and easier for those who rely on this data.

Affiliations are a key piece of Crossref metadata that has been missing, but will soon be supported in the Crossref metadata schema. This means that content registered with Crossref can be associated with a ROR IDs to enable better tracking and discovery of research and other publication outputs by institution.

What is ROR?

ROR is the Research Organization Registry––open, noncommercial, community-led infrastructure for research organisation identifiers. The registry currently includes globally unique persistent identifiers and associated metadata for more than 98,000 research organisations (as of August 2020).

ROR IDs are specifically designed to be implemented in any system that captures institutional affiliations and to enable connections (via persistent identifiers and networked research infrastructure) between research organisations, research outputs, and researchers.

ROR IDs are interoperable with those in other identifier registries, including GRID (which provided the seed data that ROR launched with), Crossref Funder Registry, ISNI, and Wikidata. ROR data is available under a CC0 waiver and can be accessed via a public API and data dump.

ROR is not the first organisation identifier to exist. But ROR is distinct because it is completely open, specifically focused on identifying affiliations, and collaboratively developed by, with, and for key stakeholders in scholarly communications. ROR is operated as a joint initiative by Crossref, DataCite, and California Digital Library, and was launched with seed data from GRID in collaboration with Digital Science. These organisations have invested resources into building an open registry of research organisation identifiers that can be embedded in scholarly infrastructure to effectively link research to organisations.

Why care about ROR IDs in Crossref metadata?

Ed Pentz, Crossref’s Executive Director, explains the key role ROR can play in enriching Crossref metadata:

“Over the years Crossref has expanded the metadata it collects (for example, ORCID IDs and license URLs) based on the changing needs of our members and the scholarly research community. A key type of metadata that is missing from Crossref is affiliations. We’ve had a lot of feedback from members that adding affiliations should be a priority. At Crossref LIVE19 in Amsterdam, ROR was ranked joint first place for Crossref by the 100 plus attendees at the meeting. For the last few years we’ve been diligently working on the initiative and are very happy that ROR is now coming to fruition.”

Crossref metadata does include some affiliations already. But this data is not comprehensive or consistent, and appears as free-text strings only (even if originally sourced from a list of institutions). A search for UC Berkeley, for instance, returns multiple variants of the university’s name:

University of California, Berkeley
University of California-Berkeley
University of California Berkeley
UC Berkeley
And likely more…

While it isn’t too difficult for a human to guess that “UC Berkeley,” “University of California, Berkeley,” and “University of California at Berkeley” are all referring to the same university, a machine interpreting this information wouldn’t necessarily make the same connections. If you are trying to easily find all of the publications associated with UC Berkeley, you would need to run and reconcile multiple searches at best, or miss data completely at worst. This is where an affiliation identifier comes in: a single, unambiguous, standardized identifier that will always stay the same (for UC Berkeley, that would be https://ror.org/01an7q238).

ROR IDs for affiliations can transform the usability of Crossref metadata. While it’s crucial to have IDs for affiliations, it’s equally important that the affiliation data can be easily used. The ROR dataset is CC0, so ROR IDs and associated affiliation data can be freely and openly used and reused without any restrictions.

What does this mean for publishers?

As the Crossref schema update is being cleared for takeoff, this is a good time for publishers and publishing service providers to be thinking about adopting ROR.

ROR IDs can be useful in publishing workflows in a variety of ways. They can easily be implemented into manuscript tracking systems to identify the affiliations of submitting authors and co-authors. This can be done via a simple institution lookup that connects to the ROR API. Authors choose their affiliation from a dropdown list populated from ROR; they do not have to provide a ROR ID or even know that a ROR ID is being collected.

Upon publication, ROR affiliation data can be included when content is registered with Crossref. ROR IDs are also supported in the JATS XML format that many publishers use. Crossref metadata can be searched and crawled, and the Crossref API will make ROR IDs available so affiliation data can be captured by tools and services and fed into downstream reporting and tracking systems.

Get ready to ROR!

ROR is already working with a number of publishers and service providers that are planning to integrate ROR in their systems, map their affiliation data to ROR IDs, and/or include ROR IDs in publication metadata.

For example: Rockefeller University Press has already added the collection of ROR IDs to their publication workflow. Upon submission, the author selects an institutional affiliation from a dropdown list of options that comes from ROR. Rockefeller University Press also relies on this affiliation data for billing and licensing purposes to coordinate Gold Open Access publishing agreements.

In addition to publishers, libraries and repositories and other stakeholders are building in support for ROR. You can also see the list of active and in-progress ROR integrations here.

We know decisions about identifier adoption aren’t easy or immediate, so get in touch with ROR if you have questions or want to be more involved in the project. ROR holds regular community meetings and webinars and supports several community working groups for those interested in implementing ROR IDs and working with ROR data. This is a community-driven effort so we want to hear from you!

Evolving our support for text-and-data mining

Bryan Vickery — Fri, 21 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Many researchers want to carry out analysis and extraction of information from large sets of data, such as journal articles and other scholarly content. Methods such as screen-scraping are error-prone, place too much strain on content sites and may be unrepeatable or break if site layouts change. Providing researchers with automated access to the full-text content via DOIs and Crossref metadata reduces these problems, allowing for easy deduplication and reproducibility. Supporting text and data mining echoes our mission to make research outputs easy to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse.

In 2013 Crossref embarked on a project to better support Crossref members and researchers with Text and Data Mining requests and access. There were two main parts to the project:

To collect and make available full-text links and publisher TDM license links in the metadata.
To provide a service (TDM click-through service) for Crossref members to post their additional TDM terms and conditions and for researchers to access, review and accept these terms.

The TDM click-through was launched in May 2014.

To date, 37.5 million works registered with Crossref have both full-text links and TDM license information. We continue to encourage all members to include full-text links and license information in the metadata they register to assist researchers with TDM. You can see how each member is doing via its Participation Report (e.g. Wiley’s).

Members are also making subscription content available for text mining (temporarily or otherwise) for specific purposes, such as to help the research community with its response to COVID-19. Back in April we highlighted how this can be achieved by including:

A “free to read” element in the access indicators section of publisher metadata indicating that the content is being made available free-of-charge (gratis)
An assertion element indicating that the content being made available is available free-of-charge.

To access Crossref’s click-through tool for text and data mining, users could log in via their ORCID iD. They could then review TDM license agreements posted by Crossref members and accept, reject or postpone their decisions until later. Having agreed to a publisher’s terms and conditions this action was logged against the user’s API token which they could use when requesting full-text from the publisher.

Since the pilot in 2014, only 2 publishers have continued with the tool and fewer than 300 API tokens have been issued.

Publishers have since developed their own mechanisms for managing TDM requests. The introduction of UK (2014) / EU (2019) copyright exceptions for TDM has significantly reduced the number of requests and at the same time, more and more content is published under an open access license.

Given the low take-up of the click-through by both publishers and researchers, its goals are no longer being met. Therefore we will retire the TDM click-through in December 2020. Until that date, it will still operate for the two publishers and various researchers who use it while they finish implementing their alternative plans.

Crossref will continue to collect member-supplied TDM licensing information in metadata for individual works, and researchers can continue to find this via the Crossref APIs.

Similarity Check news: introducing the next generation iThenticate.

Kirsty Meddings — Tue, 28 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Crossref’s Similarity Check service is used by our members to detect text overlap with previously published work that may indicate plagiarism of scholarly or professional works. Manuscripts can be checked against millions of publications from other participating Crossref members and general web content using the iThenticate text comparison software from Turnitin.

The 2000 members who already make use of Similarity Check upload almost 2,000,000 documents each month to look for matching text in other publications.

We have some great news for those 2000 members –– a completely new version of iThenticate is on its way, and will start to roll out to users in the coming months.

New functionality has been developed based on your feedback over the past few years and includes:

An improved Document Viewer that makes PDFs searchable and accessible, with responsive design for ease of use on different screen sizes. All of the functionality of the Viewer and the Text-only reports in the previous version have been streamlined into just two views: Sources Overview and All Sources.
Improved exclusion options to make refining matches even easier. Smarter citation detection now identifies probable citations both inline and in reference sections.
A new “Content Portal” where you can see what percentage of your own content has been successfully indexed for the iThenticate comparison database, and download reports of indexing errors that need to be fixed.
A new API for integration with manuscript submission systems allows display of the largest matching word count and the top 5 source matches alongside the Similarity Score.
The maximum number of pages and file size per document has been doubled to 800 pages/200 MB.

The new document viewer in iThenticate v2.0

Improved reference exclusion

Crossref members can use Similarity Check directly by logging in, or via an integration with a submission/peer review system. We are working with many system providers to bring v2.0 to you as soon as possible. In the meantime, we are looking for members to help us test the new system directly in the iThenticate user interface. If you are interested and can spare a few hours some time in the next month please let me know.

And if your organisation is not yet using Similarity Check to assess the originality of the manuscripts you receive do take a look at the many benefits the service has to offer.

Meet the new Crossref Executive Director

Ed Pentz — Thu, 23 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It’s me! Back in January I wrote, The one constant in Crossref’s 20 years has been change. This continues to be true, and the latest change is that I’m happy to say that I will be staying on as Executive Director of Crossref. At the recent Crossref board meeting, I rescinded my resignation and the board happily accepted this.

What happened? Well, a lot has changed since I announced that I was leaving back in February. The pandemic has upended “business as usual” and everyone is rethinking pretty much everything. It’s clear that as a result of the crisis, there will be greater economic pressure on our community. These are difficult times and they are going to continue for the foreseeable future.

The people at Crossref are amazing and I’ve been impressed and inspired by everyone’s resilience and creativity in responding to these unusual challenges. Crossref has a very special organisational culture and I want to remain a part of it and continue to develop it.

I’ve also been inspired by the board. In particular, at its July meeting they passed a progressive motion based on a proposal from the leadership team:

RESOLVED: Crossref should proactively lead an effort to explore, with other infrastructure organisations and initiatives, how we can improve the scholarly research ecosystem. Crossref is committed to the collaborative development of open scholarly infrastructure for the benefit of our members and the wider research community.

This is the result of a process that started back in 2019. In the A turning point is a time for reflection blog post, we took a step back as we approached Crossref’s 20th anniversary. We conducted research into the perceived value of Crossref, reflected on what we had achieved, and what the future holds for Crossref. At our annual meeting, “the strategy one” and in our annual report fact file, we reminded people of the organisation’s original founding purpose:

To promote the development and cooperative use of new and innovative technologies to speed and facilitate scientific and other scholarly research.

Following on from 2019, as the pandemic hit, we held virtual strategic sessions with the board in March, May and June. These culminated in the motion above, which allows Crossref to fully embrace this simple, but ambitious, vision. This was a game changer for me, and I realized there was nothing else I wanted to do or that better suited my skills and experience than to continue to lead Crossref and work with the community through the next phase of transformation.

This is not the time for “business as usual”. We live in an interconnected, interdependent world and open infrastructure organisations have to collaborate more deeply and look at doing things differently in order to improve the scholarly research ecosystem. So - more to come!

New faces at Crossref

Crossref — Tue, 30 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Please help us welcome new faces at Crossref! Martyn, Sara, Laura, and Mark joined us very recently and we are happy they’re with us. Both Martyn and Sara have joined the Product team and this has given us the chance to reorganize the team into the following groups: content registration, scholarly stewardship, scholarly impact, metadata retrieval, and UX/UI leadership. Laura joined the Finance and Operations team to help make the billing process simple for our members. Mark joins the Technology team and one of his projects will be improving the Event Data service.

It is exciting to already see the impact of your contributions and look forward to what’s to come!

And now a few words from each of them.

Martyn Rittman

I am a former university researcher who worked on interdisciplinary projects around life sciences and analytical chemistry, with positions in the UK and Germany. I spent seven years at open access publisher MDPI doing everything from running journals to handling production, developing services for authors and publishers, and supporting preprints. I’m very excited to be joining Crossref as a Product Manager and developing some great products and services that focus on how Crossref-indexed research creates impact. This includes supporting the use of preprint metadata. I’m also looking forward to getting my teeth into event data, which looks at how those in the research community and beyond reference, use, and reuse research. If you are interested in making use of event data or have examples of event data applications, I would like to hear from you.

Sara Bowman

I’m thrilled to have joined Crossref at this exciting time in the organisation. As a member of the Product team, my primary area of focus is content registration, building, and improving tools for our members to deposit rich metadata. I’m particularly interested in how we can create a unified user experience for content registration while supporting the needs of our diverse membership. A scientist by training, I’ve spent the last 6 years working on open source technologies to support scholarly communication, most recently in the role of Product Manager at the Center for Open Science. I’m passionate about open tools and using data to drive product development, building innovative solutions to improve research and scholarly communication.

Laura Cuniff

I joined Crossref two months ago as a part-time Billing Support Specialist on the Finance and Operations team. With the help of my supportive and knowledgeable colleagues, I took on learning the various systems. My goal is to make the billing process as simple as possible for our members by researching, retrieving, and relaying billing information. This allows our members to focus on the reason for their engagement with Crossref. With several part-time jobs cobbled together at different times of the day, I have the flexibility to volunteer with a few organisations in my hometown of Ipswich, MA. If you find yourself at the Ipswich Visitor Center, I may greet you, recommend the most beautiful spots in town, give you a tour of the Ipswich Museum, or send you off with a wonderful Ipswich Humane Group cat or dog! I’m very excited to be here!

Mark Woodhall

I am an open-source enthusiast who has worked in a range of technology roles at a variety of companies as a polyglot programmer with experience in Clojure(Script), Java, C#, and JavaScript. It’s really exciting to be working at Crossref as a Senior Software Developer on the Technology team and I’m proud to be part of a team with open source at its heart. I’m really looking forward to getting more involved with event data and building a scalable solution to support its future uses.

Welcome to the Crossref community Martyn, Laura, Sara, and Mark.

Community Outreach in 2020

Vanessa Fairhurst — Mon, 29 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

2020 hasn’t been quite what any of us had imagined. The pandemic has meant big adjustments in terms of working; challenges for parents balancing childcare and professional lives; anxieties and tensions we never had before; the strain of potentially being away from co-workers, friends, and family for a prolonged period of time. Many have suffered job losses and around the world, many have sadly lost their lives to the virus.

I’ve been very fortunate that my family and friends remain in good health and very grateful to work for a supportive and caring organisation such as Crossref. I don’t usually work from home every day, so adjusting to the ‘new normal’ these last few months has been difficult at times. I certainly miss seeing my colleagues in the Oxford office day-to-day, and now have a new appreciation for the challenges our remote working members of staff face, particularly when it comes to feeling quite isolated at times. I’ve also learnt about the importance of good communication and building in greater flexibility to projects, especially when you are not able to see people face-to-face.

My role as Outreach Manager is all about people; it often involves organising and attending industry events as well as running our own educational days, which we call our Crossref LIVE events. The global health crisis brought the majority of international travel to an abrupt halt, something the environment may thank us for, but that also requires a dramatic reimagining of how we can effectively and empathetically engage with our members and the wider community.

As our planned in-person events have been postponed, for now, we converted our LIVE events into an online format, which we have so far run in Arabic, Spanish, Korean and Brazilian Portuguese with help from our Ambassadors and technical support team. We have had better attendance and engagement than we ever dreamed, with lots of thoughtful questions and positive feedback. While an online format has its limitations it also brings new opportunities, particularly by enabling us to reach many members who would not be able to attend a physical event. We have more in the works for the rest of the year, so keep a lookout on our webinar and events pages.

We have all had to adapt to new ways of living and working this year, but vital research continues to be done and new content continues to be published. We embrace new ways of engaging with our international membership so we can continue to support them in their roles and in working with our systems, despite the uncertain circumstances we find ourselves in.

Lessons learned:

Online events need to be much shorter than physical ones. Zoom fatigue is real, no one can stay focused for long periods of time at the screen.
Flexibility is key, running events in multiple languages and time-zones make them more accessible for a geographically diverse audience, but also ensuring recordings and other materials are readily available means people can engage with the content in their own time. And they do. Our Spanish LIVE on May 19 saw 335 people attend, and a further 304 (so far) watch the recording in their own time.
Don’t forget to build in time for breaks.
Although it’s impossible to replicate the natural human interaction that occurs at a physical event, an online format can still bring hearts as well as minds together. Break-out rooms, polls, and clever use of chat functionality all help to build engagement and turn a passive audience into active participants.
People love an online quiz.
Partner with others –– an interesting guest speaker can bring a whole new dynamic to your planned content.
Take the opportunity to be a little more experimental. We can’t do business as usual right now, so embrace new ideas and see what works!

Hoping you all stay safe and healthy, and that we can meet again in person in 2021.

Calling all prospective board members

Lucy Ofiesh — Thu, 21 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

English version –– Información en español –– Version Française

The Crossref Nominating Committee is inviting expressions of interest to join the Board of Directors of Crossref for the term starting in 2021. The committee will gather responses from those interested and create the slate of candidates that our membership will vote on in an election in September. Expressions of interest will be due Friday, June 19, 2020.

The role of the board at Crossref is to provide strategic and financial oversight of the organisation, as well as guidance to the Executive Director and the staff leadership team, with the key responsibilities being:

Setting the strategic direction for the organisation;
Providing financial oversight; and
Approving new policies and services.

The board is representative of our membership base and guides the staff leadership team on trends affecting scholarly communications. The board sets strategic directions for the organisation while also providing oversight into policy changes and implementation. Board members have a fiduciary responsibility to ensure sound operations. Board members do this by attending board meetings, as well as joining more specific board committees.

As an example, in 2019 the board decided to remove fees for the Crossmark service. This involved a strategic review of the service and its alignment with the mission by the Membership & Fees committee; followed by a review of the financial implications of removing the fee; and ultimately, a vote by the full board to remove the fee starting in 2020.

Crossref’s services provide central infrastructure to scholarly communications. Crossref’s board helps shape the future of our services, and by extension, impacts the broader scholarly ecosystem. We are looking for board members to contribute their experience and perspective.

I’m interested but busy! What is expected of board members?

Board members attend three meetings each year that typically take place in March, July, and November. Meetings have taken place in a variety of international locations and travel support is provided when needed.

Starting in 2020, following travel restrictions as a result of COVID-19, the board introduced a plan to convene at least one of the board meetings virtually each year and all committee meetings take place virtually. Most board members sit on at least one Crossref committee. Care is taken to accommodate the wide range of timezones in which our board members live.

While the expressions of interest are specific to an individual, the seat that is elected to the board belongs to the member organisation. The primary board member also names an alternate who may attend meetings in the event that the primary board member is unable.

Board members are expected to be comfortable assuming the responsibilities listed above and to prepare and participate in board meeting discussions.

About the election

The board is elected through the “one member, one vote” policy wherein every member of Crossref has a single vote to elect representatives to the Crossref board. Board terms are for three years, and this year there are six seats open for election.

The board maintains a balance of seats, with eight seats for smaller publishers and eight seats for larger publishers, in an effort to ensure that the diversity of experiences and perspectives of the publishing community is represented in decisions made at Crossref. This year we will elect two of the larger publisher seats and four of the smaller publisher seats.

The election takes place online and voting will open in September. Election results will be shared at the November board meeting and new members will commence their term in 2021.

About the nominating committee

The nominating committee will review the expressions of interest and select a slate of candidates for election. The slate put forward will exceed the total number of open seats. The committee considers the statements of interest, organisational size, geography, gender, and experience.

2020 Nominating Committee:
Melissa Harrison, eLife, Cambridge, UK, committee chair
Scott Delman, ACM, New York, NY
Susan Murray, AJOL, Grahamstown, South Africa
Tanja Niemann, Erudit, Montreal, Canada
Arley Soto, Biteca, Bogotá, Colombia

How to submit an expression of interest

Please click here to submit your expression of interest or contact me with any questions at lofiesh [at] crossref.org.

Versión en español

El Comité de Nominación de Crossref está invitando a expresiones de interés a unirse a la Junta Directiva de Crossref para el período que comienza en 2021. El comité recopilará las respuestas de los interesados y creará la lista de candidatos que nuestra membresía votará en una elección en septiembre. Las expresiones de interés vencen el viernes 19 de junio de 2020.

La función de la junta directiva de Crossref es proporcionar supervisión estratégica y financiera de la organización, así como orientación para el Director Ejecutivo y el equipo de liderazgo del personal, con responsabilidades importantes como:

Establecer la dirección estratégica para la organización;
Proporcionar supervisión financiera; y
Aprobar nuevas políticas y servicios.

La junta es representativa de nuestra base de miembros y guía al equipo de liderazgo del personal sobre las tendencias que afectan las comunicaciones académicas. La junta establece direcciones estratégicas para la organización mientras supervisa los cambios e implementación de políticas. Los miembros de la junta tienen la responsabilidad fiduciaria de garantizar operaciones sólidas. Los miembros de la junta hacen esto asistiendo a las reuniones de la junta, además de unirse a comités de la junta más específicos.

Como ejemplo, en 2019 la junta decidió eliminar las tarifas de servicio de Crossmark. Esto implicó una revisión estratégica del servicio y su alineación con la misión del comité de Membresía y Tarifas; seguido de una revisión de las implicaciones financieras de eliminar la tarifa; y, en última instancia, un voto de la junta completa para retirar la tarifa a partir de 2020.

Los servicios Crossref proporcionan infraestructura central para las comunicaciones académicas. La junta directiva de Crossref ayuda a dar forma al futuro de nuestros servicios y, por extensión, impacta el ecosistema académico más amplio. Estamos buscando miembros de la junta para contribuir con su experiencia y perspectiva.

¡Estoy interesado pero ocupado! ¿Qué se espera de los miembros de la junta?

Los miembros de la junta asisten a tres reuniones cada año que generalmente tienen lugar en marzo, julio y noviembre. Las reuniones se han llevado en una variedad de ubicaciones internacionales y se brinda apoyo para viajes cuando es necesario.

A partir de 2020, después de las restricciones de viaje como resultado de COVID-19, la junta introdujo un plan para convocar al menos una de las reuniones de la junta virtualmente todos los años, y todas las reuniones del comité tienen lugar virtualmente. La mayoría de los miembros de la junta formen parte del menos un comité Crossref. Se tiene cuidado de acomodar la amplia gama de zonas horarias en las que viven los miembros de nuestra junta.

Aunque las expresiones de interés son específicas de un individuo, el asiento elegido para la junta pertenece a la organización miembro. El miembro primario de la junta también nombra a un suplente que puede asistir a las reuniones en caso de que el miembro de la junta principal no pueda.

Se espera que los miembros de la junta se sientan cómodos asumiendo las responsabilidades anteriores y que se preparen y participen en las discusiones de la reunión de la junta.

Las reuniones de la junta se llevarán a cabo en inglés, por lo que los posibles miembros de la junta deben sentirse cómodos leyendo material en inglés y en inglés conversacional.

Sobre las elecciones

La junta se elige mediante la política de “un miembro, un voto” en la que cada miembro de Crossref tiene un voto para elegir representantes en la junta de Crossref. Los términos de la junta son de tres años, y este año hay seis asientos abiertos para la elección

La junta mantiene un equilibrio de asientos, con ocho asientos para editoriales más pequeñas y ocho asientos para editoriales más grandes, en un esfuerzo por garantizar que la diversidad de experiencias y perspectivas de la comunidad editorial esté representada en las decisiones tomadas en Crossref. Este año elegiremos dos de los asientos de editor más grandes y cuatro de los asientos de editor más pequeños.

La elección se realiza en línea y la votación se abrirá en septiembre. Los resultados de las elecciones se compartirán en la reunión de la junta de noviembre y los nuevos miembros comenzarán su mandato en 2021.

Sobre el comité de nominaciones

El comité de nominaciones revisará las expresiones de interés y seleccionará una lista de candidatos para la elección. Esta lista presentada excederá el número total de asientos disponibles. El comité considera declaraciones de interés, tamaño organizacional, geografía, género y experiencia.

Comité de nominaciones 2020:
Melissa Harrison, eLife, Cambridge, UK, committee chair
Scott Delman, ACM, New York, NY
Susan Murray, AJOL, Grahamstown, South Africa
Tanja Niemann, Erudit, Montreal, Canada
Arley Soto, Biteca, Bogotá, Colombia

Cómo presentar una expresión de interés

Por favor haga clic aquí para enviar su expresión de interés o contáctame si tiene alguna pregunta lofiesh [at] crossref.org.

Version Française

Appel à tous les membres potentiels du conseil d’administration

Le comité de nomination de Crossref invite les personnes qui seraient intéressées à se porter candidates pour l’élection au conseil d’administration de Crossref, pour le mandat commençant en 2021. Le comité de nomination rassemblera les réponses des personnes candidates et élaborera une liste des candidats, pour lesquels nos membres pourront voter lors des élections au conseil d’administration, en septembre. Les candidatures doivent être déposées au plus tard le vendredi 19 juin 2020.

Le rôle du conseil d’administration de Crossref est d’opérer une supervision stratégique et financière de l’organisation, et de conseiller le directeur exécutif ainsi que l’équipe de direction du personnel. Les principales responsabilités du conseil d’administration sont les suivantes :

Fixer l’orientation stratégique de l’organisation
Assurer la surveillance financière
Approuver de nouvelles politiques et de nouveaux services

Le conseil d’administration est représentatif de nos adhérents et guide l’équipe de direction du personnel en ce qui concerne les tendances affectant les communications savantes. Le conseil d’administration établit des orientations stratégiques pour l’organisation, tout en assurant le contrôle des changements et de la mise en œuvre des politiques. Les membres du conseil ont la responsabilité fiduciaire d’assurer son bon fonctionnement. Les membres du conseil d’administration s’acquittent de cette responsabilité en assistant aux réunions du conseil d’administration et en participant à des comités, plus spécifiques, du conseil d’administration.

A titre d’exemple, en 2019, le conseil d’administration a décidé de supprimer les frais liés au service Crossmark. Ceci a impliqué un examen stratégique du service et de son alignement avec la mission de Crossref, par le comité des adhésions et frais, puis un examen des implications financières de la suppression des frais, et, finalement, un vote par l’ensemble du conseil d’administration pour supprimer les frais à partir de 2020.

Les services de Crossref fournissent une infrastructure centralisée pour les communications savantes. Le conseil d’administration de Crossref aide à façonner l’avenir de nos services et, par extension, a un impact sur l’écosystème universitaire plus large. Les futurs membres du conseil d’administration sont recherchés particulièrement pour leur expérience et leur point de vue.

Je suis intéressé mais très occupé! Qu’attend-on des administrateurs?

Les membres du conseil d’administration assistent à trois réunions par an qui ont généralement lieu en mars, juillet et novembre. Les réunions se déroulent dans des lieux divers, à l’échelle internationale, et une assistance financière est octroyée, en cas de besoin, pour le voyage.

À partir de 2020, à la suite des restrictions de voyage causées par la COVID-19, le conseil a présenté un plan pour convoquer au moins une des réunions du conseil en téléconférence chaque année, et toutes les réunions des comités auront lieu en téléconférence. La plupart des membres du conseil d’administration siègent à au moins un comité de Crossref. Nous souhaitons préciser que nous prenons soin de prendre en compte le large éventail de fuseaux horaires dans lesquels vivent les membres de notre conseil d’administration.

Bien que les manifestations d’intérêt émanent d’une personne, le siège pourvu au conseil appartient à l’organisation membre dans son ensemble. Le membre titulaire du conseil d’administration nomme également un suppléant, qui pourra assister aux réunions en cas d’empêchement du membre titulaire du siège au conseil d’administration.

Il est attendu que les membres du conseil d’administration puissent dédier aux responsabilités présentées ci-dessus le temps qui leur est raisonnablement dû, ainsi qu’à la préparation et à la participation aux discussions des réunions du conseil.

À propos de l’élection

Le conseil d’administration est élu selon une politique de «un membre, une voix» dans laquelle chaque membre de Crossref dispose d’une seule voix pour élire les représentants au conseil d’administration de Crossref. Le mandat du conseil d’administration est de trois ans et, cette année, six sièges sont à pourvoir lors de des élections de septembre prochain.

Le conseil d’administration maintient un équilibre des sièges, avec huit sièges pour les petits éditeurs et huit sièges pour les grands éditeurs, afin de garantir que la diversité des expériences et des perspectives de la communauté de l’édition soit représentées dans les décisions prises à Crossref. Cette année, sont à pourvoir deux sièges de grands éditeurs et quatre sièges de petits éditeurs.

Le vote aura lieu en ligne et s’ouvrira en septembre. Les résultats de ce scrutin seront communiqués lors de la réunion du conseil d’administration de novembre et les nouveaux membres commenceront leur mandat en 2021.

À propos du comité de nomination

Le comité des candidatures examinera les candidatures et sélectionnera une liste de candidats aux élections. Le nombre de candidats proposés dépassera le nombre total de sièges à pourvoir. Le comité prend en compte les déclarations d’intérêt, la taille de l’organisation, la géographie, le sexe et l’expérience des personnes pour sa sélection.

Comment exprimer une manifestation d’intérêt

Veuillez cliquer ici pour envoyer votre candidature ou contactez-moi pour toute question à lofiesh [at] crossref.org.

Come for a swim in our new pool of Education materials

Laura J Wilkinson — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

After 20 years in operation, and as our system matures from experimental to foundational infrastructure, it’s time to review our documentation.

Having a solid core of education materials about the why and the how of Crossref is essential in making participation possible, easy, and equitable.

As our system has evolved, our membership has grown and diversified, and so have our tools - both for depositing metadata with Crossref, and for retrieving and making use of it.

Our new documentation gives the full picture, with each chapter explaining an aspect of Crossref and why it matters, followed by instructions on how to participate. As far as possible, these instructions are given for each of our deposit and retrieval methods.

The revised documentation has been edited for use of simple English, and consistent terminology. Specialist vocabulary is explained as it is introduced. Understanding what’s involved across the full range of Crossref services can often seem complicated. This makes the documentation easier for readers, and provides a good basis for human and machine translations.

The chapters and sections are modular, so you can approach and combine them in different ways according to your existing knowledge and what you wish to learn. This Choose Your Own Adventure style means that sections don’t overlap, avoiding problems of repetition and versioning, and helping us to keep the information current.

The revised documentation includes several new topics, including:

The importance of metadata, explaining why you might register metadata for different purposes (discoverability, research integrity, reproducibility, and reporting and assessment)
Persistent identifiers (PIDs), explaining the structure of a DOI, and how you might use DOIs at different levels
Choosing which way to register your content, including suggested DOI registration workflow and suffix generator to make life easier
Introduction to types of metadata, including descriptive (bibliographic), administrative, and structural
Version control, corrections, and retractions, including publication stages and DOIs
Metadata stewardship, including maintaining your metadata, reports, understanding your member obligations, and maintaining your Crossref membership.

This new documentation is part of our efforts to make Crossref participation possible, easy, and rewarding for our members large and small, all over the world. It provides a concrete basis on which to build further education and outreach projects in the future. New members will start to see our paced member onboarding program, introducing them to parts of the documentation as and when it’s useful to them. And like the rest of the Crossref website, it’s all licensed for reuse under CC-BY.

I would like to say a big thank you to the members of the Education Task Force, who helped guide the development of the new documentation, representing a diverse range of Crossref members large and small from around the world:

Anjum Sherasiya - India, Editor-in-Chief of Veterinary World, Crossref Ambassador
Budi Setiawan - Indonesia, Poltekkes Kemenkes Yogyakarta
Caroline Breul - USA, BioOne
Isabel Recavarren - Peru, Consejo Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación Tecnológica (CONCYTEC), Crossref Ambassador
Mike Nason - Canada, Public Knowledge Project (PKP) and University of New Brunswick
Nadine van der Merwe - South Africa, Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf)
Roberto Camargo - Brazil, Associação Brasileira de Editores Científicos (ABEC)
Sioux Cumming - UK, INASP
Taeil Kim - South Korea, Korean Association of Medical Journal Editors (KAMJE)
and from Crossref: Amanda, Esha, Geoffrey, Ginny, Isaac, Kirsty, Patricia, and Susan.

Please explore the new documentation, give us your feedback using the yellow “Docs feedback” button at the bottom of each page, and share this update to spread the word!

Crossing the Rubicon - The case for making chapters visible

Jennifer Kemp — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

To help better support the discovery, sale and analysis of books, Jennifer Kemp from Crossref and Mike Taylor from Digital Science, present seven reasons why publishers should collect chapter-level metadata.

Book publishers should have been in the best possible position to take advantage of the movement of scholarly publishing to the internet. After all, they have behind them an extraordinary legacy of creating and distributing data about books: the metadata that supports discovery, sales and analysis.

Librarianship, and the management of book catalogs at scale took off in the nineteenth century. The Dewey Decimal Classification, the various initiatives of the Library of Congress and the British Library followed. Innovations from the 1960s gave us MARC records and ISBNs. The late 90s produced ONIX, which gave the book industry a tremendous start in migrating online.

However, progress in the decades after appears to have been less dramatic. Some might even argue that this tremendous legacy and wealth of metadata experience has acted as a weight, and has slowed progress. Nowhere is this lack of progress clearer than in the discovery and analysis of book chapters: approximately one-quarter of books published per year has chapter-level metadata, and about two-thirds of books don’t have a persistent and open identifier, ratios that have not significantly changed over the last ten years.

Only one-quarter of scholarly books make chapter level metadata available

The proportion of edited books and monographs with chapter-level data is approximately one-quarter of all books published in the last ten years. Calculating this figure is necessarily approximate, using numbers published in Grimme et al (2019), and based on data and observed trends in both Dimensions and Crossref.

So why the lack of progress?

For many publishers and their vendor partners, with systems geared up to the efficient delivery of title-level information, the case for moving towards chapter-level metadata can seem daunting (and potentially expensive!).

Metadata is necessarily detailed and it’s not the kind of thing most people will dabble in. Practitioners, as in other technical fields, have expertise that others may find difficult to leverage if they don’t know what questions to ask. organisations often find themselves entrenched in outdated approaches to metadata.

Crossref and Metadata 2020 are collaborating to produce arguments why publishers should move from book-level metadata to chapters. They’ve been working with representatives from the scholarly community, including both small and large presses, not-for-profits and university presses.

Here we present 7 reasons why publishers should collect chapter-level metadata:

1. Increased discoverability
Increasingly, we’re seeing students and researchers move away from traditional book catalogs and onto more general purpose tools, that are often optimized for journal content, and which may - inadvertently - exclude books and chapters from search results. Making chapter level data and DOIs available places book content into these new channels at no additional cost, and starts to reduce the dependency on specialist vendors. Discovery is simplified, requiring less familiarity or expertise to find relevant book content.

2. Increased usage
Exposing the contents of books at a more granular level drives more users towards the book content, and increasing usage numbers and (depending on platform and business model) revenue.

3. Matching author expectations
New generations of authors expect their content to be easily discoverable in the platforms they use. Without chapter level data, this content won’t easily be found in Google Scholar, Mendeley or ResearchGate. For younger researchers, for those in certain disciplines or using resources well-suited to it, if the chapter metadata - which in many cases requires either an introductory paragraph or an abstract - is missing, the book may as well not exist.

4. Author exposure
About half of scholarly book publishing is thought to be in the form of collected works: books where two or three editors get credit at the top level, but dozens of authors contribute to the chapters. Without chapter level metadata, these authors – the book authors of tomorrow – get no credit for their efforts.

5. Usage and citations reporting
Having chapters readily available in the modern platforms means that they start to accumulate evidence of sharing and citations from the moment of being published. Where chapter content is available on its own, the lack of associated metadata inhibits this evidence. After all, the DOI is a citation identifier. Evidence of impact is now critical for research evaluation, funding, tenure and promotion, and without this data, an author’s chapter may as well remain unread.

6. Supporting your authors with funding compliance and reporting
Authors are increasingly being mandated by their funders to report back on the status of their books and chapters. And, in the case of Open Books and Open Chapters, the funders and authors are frequently the ultimate clients, who are looking to record and report evidence of both academic or social impact. Making chapter level information and identifiers available will facilitate this evidence gathering, especially for open chapters within otherwise non-open books, and increasingly common phenomena.

7. Understanding the hot topics in your books
Whether you use Altmetric, or one of the other data sources that capture book activity, being able to access the social and media metrics of the chapters in your book gives you an immediate insight into the topics that capture interest at a broader level. Vital information when it comes to planning more books in the space, especially if you’re on the look out for books with trade crossover potential.

With chapter-level data, publishers can summarize their programs and compare how many authors they work with, how many book titles they have and where there might be gaps in subject and authors omitted from the metadata. Does the scholarly record fully reflect each book? If not, there may be a good deal of information that is simply unavailable to the machines that read the metadata and use it in systems throughout scholarly communications.

Fortunately, it’s becoming easier to manage this data. Although traditional book metadata systems don’t always support chapter-level data, they do often permit publishers to register title-level DOIs, and with Crossref encouraging ISBN information alongside the generation of chapter level DOIs, some of the significant challenges have been reduced.

Both Crossref and Metadata 2020 offer best practices that make clear the need for richer metadata. It’s also important to acknowledge the very real barriers to providing robust metadata, whether for book chapters or anything else, which is why having the conversations and being aware of available resources is important. Because, though it may be difficult, the hurdles are often up-front making the decision to invest in better metadata, factoring in associated costs, setting up workflows, etc.

But as we have seen from the previous decades, book publishers and their suppliers are experts in managing substantial amounts of metadata. Just as no-one would argue to roll-back all those advantages, we believe that - once deployed - industry-wide creation and distribution of chapter data would be an advance from which there is no retreat.

REFERENCES

https://riojournal.com/article/38698/

The State of Open Monographs Report

https://longleafservices.org/blog/the-sustainable-history-monograph-pilot/

https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2017/12/07/enriching-metadata-is-marketing/

https://www-ingenta-com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/blog-article/five-reasons-chapter-level-metadata-increases-value-academic-books/

Memoirs of a DOI detective...it’s error-mentary dear members

Paul Davis — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Hello, I’m Paul Davis and I’ve been part of the Crossref support team since May 2017. In that time I’ve become more adept as a DOI detective, helping our members work out whodunnit when it comes to submission errors.

If you have ever received one of our error messages after you have submitted metadata to us, you may know that some are helpful and others are, well, difficult to decode. I’m here to help you to become your own DOI detective.

Motive: ridding the world of bad metadata

When depositing xml files to us, there can be a plethora of error messages returned to you in the submission logs. Wait, what are submission logs? If that is the first thing that came to mind, then you’re in the right place; do keep reading.

Means: XML deposits

After each content registration or update is received into our deposit admin system, it is initially placed in the submission queue and later, once its time comes, is processed. Whether that deposit comes from the web deposit form, Metadata Manager, or a good old fashioned XML deposit, a submission log is created in our system. This log contains important information about the deposit and its success or failures.

I will go through how you will find and receive this log later on. At the bottom of the submission log you will see a status message that looks like this:

 <batch_data>
<record_count>***</record_count>
<success_count>***</success_count>
<warning_count>***</warning_count>
<failure_count>***</failure_count>
</batch_data>

To some, this might look a bit like a crime scene. If the status report displays the same number in the <record_count> and the <success_count>, then no crime (against deposits) has been committed. Everything you have tried to register or update has been successful and we are all free as DOI detectives to knock off early.

At some point you will probably come across an error or failure in the submission logs, where the failure count is 1.

 <batch_data>
<record_count>1</record_count>
<success_count>0</success_count>
<warning_count>0</warning_count>
<failure_count>1</failure_count>
</batch_data>

For the purposes of this blog, this type of message means a “crime” has been committed. The worst kind of crime - a metadata crime. In the real world, outside of this blog, it just means that your deposit has failed and you need to take some action to fix it. You will also receive accompanying error messages (an evidence log) with details about what went wrong with your submission. We’ll deliver these submission details to you as well in the following ways:

For those submitting via the web deposit form, to the email address used to register your submission
On screen and within the admin tool using the submission ID for those submitting via Metadata Manager
For those submitting XML, to the email included in the <email_address> element of your deposit XML
You can also find the submission log in the admin system at any point

More information on viewing past deposits in the admin system can be found on our support site.

The usual suspects

Those serial offenders, when it comes to failed deposits, are:

Timestamps

Misdemeanor - Every deposit has a <timestamp> value, and that value needs to be incremented each time the DOI is updated. This is done automatically for you in Metadata Manager, the Web Deposit Form and the OJS plugin. But if you’re updating an existing DOI by sending us the whole XML file again, you need to make sure that you update the timestamp as well as the field you’re trying to update.

Error: <msg>Record not processed because submitted version: 201907242206 is less or equal to previously submitted version 201907242206</msg>

Rehabilitation - simply resubmit your XML file, but make sure that you increment the timestamp value to be larger than the current timestamp value.

Titles

Misdemeanor - These need to match exactly between what we have on the system against the ISSN/ISBN and what is in the deposit file.

Error: <msg>Deposit contains title error: the deposited publication title is different than the already assigned title</msg>

Error: <msg>ISSN "123454678" has already been assigned, issn (123454678) is assigned to another title (Journal of Metadata)</msg>

Rehabilitation - you can check the title we have on the system against the ISSN/ISBN on the title list and make the necessary changes, or contact support for us to check the title in our system and make changes to match the title in the deposit to the one in the system, if known.

Title level DOIs

Misdemeanor - These also need to match up exactly in both system and deposit

Error: <msg>Deposit contains title error: The journal has a different DOI assigned; If you want to change the journal's DOI please contact Crossref support: title=Journal of Metadata; current-doi=10.14393/JoM; deposited-doi=10.14393/JoM.1.1</msg>

Rehabilitation - contact us to change the journal level DOI in the system or change the DOI in the deposit yourself to match the one already registered for the title.

Errors in the xml

Misdemeanor - Poor formatting, self closing tags, invalid values.

Error: <msg>Deposited XML is not well-formed or does not validate: Error on line 538</msg>

Rehabilitation - update the xml file that was deposited as it was not well formed against our schema or as an xml file in general. Check you have saved the file correctly (as an .xml file), edited it in an xml editor and not a word processor and if that fails, then contact support and we will try to assist. We also have a collection of new xml examples you may use as a template.

Forensics

There are a few tools we offer to help with the deciphering of the error messages –– we think of these as our magnifying glass(es).

The Title list: A list of all of the titles in our database, you can check against the ISSN/ISBN to see what the title on our system is and whether it matches the title you have in your deposit.
The Depositor Report: Shows all journals, books, and conference proceedings against each member. The report includes all DOIs for each journal, book, conference; the most recently used timestamps; and citation counts for each DOI.
The Reports tab in the admin system: You can find out the history behind a DOI by searching against this in the admin console.
Our common error messages are documented within our support documentation. You can always find out more about most of the error messages are system displays at the link above.
You can find the current xml metadata against a DOI by adding the DOI to the end of this link http://doi.crossref.org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/search/doi?pid=support@crossref.org&format=unixsd&doi= (you might need an xml viewer browser extension to view the xml in a more readable format).

Calling for backup

We’ll also soon be adding more leads to our submission logs and error messages for the best of our detectives. These improvements will point our DOI detectives to better documentation about interpreting error messages and taking the appropriate action to resolve those errors.

But there are a lot more error messages out there. If you have trouble deciphering any error message you encounter, then please do send the case number (submission ID) over to CSI (Crossref Support Investigations) at support@crossref.org.

You can also find lots of great information in the pages of our new documentation.

Helping researchers identify content they can text mine

Geoffrey Bilder — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR

Many organisations are doing what they can to aid in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Crossref members can make it easier for researchers to identify, locate, and access content for text mining. In order to do this, members must include elements in their metadata that:

Point to the full text of the content.
Indicate that the content is available under an open access license or that it is being made available for free (gratis).

How to do it.

If your content is open access

Make sure the Crossref metadata for all of your open access content includes:

The URL of the open access license the content is under.
A URL that points to the full text of the content on your site (PDF, XML or HTML).

Instructions for including license and full text URLs in your metadata.

If you are making subscription content available for text mining (temporarily or otherwise).

Make sure the Crossref metadata for the content you are making freely available for text mining includes:

The URL of the publisher license the content is under.
A URL that points to the full text of the content where it is being made freely available (PDF, XML or HTML). This might not be on your site.

Instructions for including license and full text URLs in your metadata.

In addition, you need to flag the content that you are making freely available.

A “free to read” element in the access indicators section of your metadata indicating that the content is being made available free-of-charge (gratis).
An assertion element indicating that the content being made available is available free-of-charge.

Instructions for flagging your content as “free”

Note that step #4 is required in order for users to be able to find content marked as “gratis” in Crossref’s REST API.

And if you decide to revoke the free access in the future, you will need to update the data to reflect that restrictions have been reimposed.

Sounds great. Has anybody else actually done this?

Yes.

Over 43 million metadata records already have a license and a full text link. https://api-crossref-org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/works?filter=has-license:true,has-full-text:true&rows=0

Millions of the above items have one of the Creative Commons licenses or a dedicated text and data mining license provided by the publisher.

And in the past three weeks (as of the writing of this blog post) over 23,000 articles have been flagged as “free” so they are available for text mining.

https://api-crossref-org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/v1/works?filter=assertion:free,has-full-text:true

Changes to resolution reports

Isaac Farley — Fri, 10 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This blog is long overdue. My apologies for the delay. I promised you an update in February as a follow up to the resolution reports blog originally published in December by my colleague Jon Stark and me. Clearly we (I) missed that February projection, but I’m here today to provide said update. We received many great suggestions from our members as a result of the call for comments. For those of you who took time to write: thank you! We took extra time to review and evaluate all of your comments and recommendations. We have reached a decision about the major proposed change - removal of all filters from monthly resolution reports - as well as a couple of suggested improvements from that feedback.

Quick recap of our original blog

Jon wrote the original version of the resolution report in late 2009 in an effort to provide you, our members, with information about the usage of registered Crossref DOIs. At that time, Jon and others at Crossref thought it important to segment human-driven traffic from resolutions by machines (bots). Thus, we decided to filter out well-known machine activity in an attempt to only present you with resolutions by individual humans.

In the last ten-plus years things changed. We live in a time where most of our work requires both human and machine interaction. Therefore, we have hypothesized that some, or most, of those resolutions from machines today represent legitimate activity and should be reported to you each month. Since we don’t have a reliable method to segment those resolutions, and don’t think we should be making judgments about which resolutions should and should not be included in the reports, we proposed removing all filters and presenting you with all the numbers.

What we heard from you

In addition to soliciting comments in the blog, I also reached out to all of our members who had written into our support desk in the last year about anything related to resolution reports. We received dozens of responses from the blog and my outreach via email. The most common response was from members expressing their appreciation for and highlighting the utility of the reports. Most everyone told us how they were using the reports - from monitoring failure rates to mitigate issues to identifying trends over time. And a great number of respondents expressed concern that removing the filters might alter how or what we present to you in the reports (more on that soon). And, finally, several of you shared suggestions for improvement.

Where we go from here

Our existing filters have been removing between 100 and 150 million resolutions from the monthly numbers we report to all members, collectively. Based on those figures, when we remove the filters all resolutions numbers will increase by about 25%. Those increased resolutions will vary from member to member because the numbers are based on actual bots crawling specific content, so some members may see more of an increase than others. We are mindful of how our members might adjust to that new baseline, since these changes will mean a noticeable (and, significant) increase in resolution totals for the majority of our members.

Outside of the suggested tweaks from members below and that 25% increase I mentioned (due to the retirement of the filters), the reports will remain unchanged. You’ll continue to receive successful resolutions, the report of top 10 DOIs, and the csv file containing failed resolutions. Our most important consideration throughout this process is that these reports continue to serve you.

The changes

We liked some of your suggestions, so we’re set to adopt a few of the more straightforward improvements. Those that are more complicated we’re considering for the Member Center (working title, subject to change) project, where we will start to bring together all business and technical information for our members, service providers and metadata users.

As I said, we’re removing the filters. Starting in June, we’ll present all of the resolutions to you. No filters. On average, monthly resolution numbers will therefore increase by about 25%.
We currently link to the failed DOI.csv near the bottom of the resolution report. For many members with large volumes of content, the resolution report can take some time to load and sift through, so we’re moving the link to the failed DOI.csv file up the page (Note: we know they are other changes we can make to the report itself that will make it easier to work with for members with large volumes of data; we’re exploring those improvements).
We learned during this process that some members were not receiving resolution reports when they only had failed resolutions. One of the aims of the reports is to help members identify content registration problems, so this was a bug we are keen to repair. We are fixing it. Once it is fixed, all members who have at least one resolution - successful or failed - during the previous month will receive the report.

What we can’t change

Many members who responded to the call and who also enquire throughout the year (outside of this call) express interest in receiving more information from the resolution reports. You want resolution numbers for all your DOIs. You want referral information about where the resolutions are coming from (e.g., IP addresses) and breakdowns by machine/human. You want more information about how and why the failure rate is growing over time. We understand.

In the past, we did try to process more information for IP addresses and user agents but it turns out that generating that volume of extra data and processing monthly is simply impractical. The other issue is one of privacy. IP addresses are considered personally identifiable information (PII), or data that could potentially be used to identify particular people. We are committed to maintaining the privacy of our members and users and therefore cannot provide this level of granularity in our reports.

Next up

Look for these changes starting in June. If you read this far, you may not need it, but we’ll also include a reminder atop the report itself about the increase in resolution totals as a result of our changes.

Free public data file of 112+ million Crossref records

Jennifer Kemp — Thu, 09 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A lot of people have been using our public, open APIs to collect data that might be related to COVID-19. This is great and we encourage it. We also want to make it easier. To that end we have made a free data file of the public elements from Crossref’s 112.5 million metadata records.

The file (65GB, in JSON format) is available via Academic Torrents here: https://doi-org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/10.13003/83B2GP

It is important to note that Crossref metadata is always openly available. The difference here is that we’ve done the time-saving work of putting all of the records registered through March 2020 into one file for download.

The sheer number of records means that, though anyone can use these records anytime, downloading them all via our APIs can be quite time-consuming. We hope this saves the research community valuable time during this crisis.

A few important notes

All records are included. In other words, the data file has every DOI ever registered with Crossref through March 31st, 2020. This means it’s a large file, 65GB.
- Metadata is supplied by our members and, as such, not all records have the same completeness (or quality) of metadata. Bibliographic metadata is generally required. All other metadata, e.g. license and funding information, ORCIDs, etc. is optional (though very much encouraged).
- References (i.e. authors’ cited sources) are also optional metadata. Nearly 50 million records include references and, of those, nearly 30 million have open references that are included in the data file. “Limited” and “Closed” references are not included in the data file. [EDIT 6th June 2022 - all references are now open by default with the March 2022 board vote to remove any restrictions on reference distribution].
- If an error in the metadata is found, please report it directly to the publisher to correct.
The records are in JSON.
New and updated records can be added incrementally using our REST API, which includes a number of date filter options, e.g. index-date.
No registration is required to use our REST API but we do strongly encourage being a ‘polite’ (i.e. identified) user. It makes troubleshooting much easier and reduces the chance of negatively impacting other users.

Questions, comments and feedback are welcome at support@crossref.org.

We thank AcademicTorrents.com for helping us make this data available. And we are grateful for the incredible efforts of everyone working to support research everywhere–stay safe and well.

You’ve had your say, now what? Next steps for schema changes

Patricia Feeney — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It seems like ages ago, particularly given recent events, but we had our first public request for feedback on proposed schema updates in December and January. The feedback we received indicated two big things: we’re on the right track, and you want us to go further. This update has some significant but important changes to contributors, but is otherwise a fairly moderate update. The feedback was mostly supportive, with a fair number of helpful suggestions about details.

Feedback and changes

Many of you are excited about CRediT, and a number of members have indicated that they are ready and waiting to send us CRediT roles. To support this, as in my initial proposal, we’re adding a new role element and role_type attribute that supports existing Crossref-defined roles and CRediT roles, as well as a required vocab attribute to specify which vocabulary is being supplied.

<role role_type="author" vocab="crossref">author</role> <role role_type="writing-original_draft" vocab="credit"/>

CRediT as it exists now is an informal standard coordinated by CASRAI, but a formal standard is in the works via NISO. CRediT is currently a list of well considered and defined roles that are not particularly machine-readable. I’ve created a list for implementation that eliminates spaces and ampersands. CRediT also lacks reliable PIDs or persistent URLs for the role definitions, so that has been omitted from our implementation. We’ll adopt any changes resulting from the NISO standard, but have decided to go forward with it as-is, as many of our members are eager to implement.

Beyond CRediT, we’ll also be expanding and refining our contributor support in a number of ways:

We’ll be expanding our affiliation metadata beyond a simple string to include organisation identifiers like ROR, and allow markup of organisation names and locations.
We’re expanding the contributor identifiers as well - in addition to ORCID iDs, members can send us Wikidata, ISNI, and other identifiers.
We’re adding support for multiple names to support contributors whose names can be expressed in multiple alphabets, or who have aliases or nicknames.
We’re changing surname to family_name and will be relaxing the requirement that all person names have a “surname” - a given name may be supplied on its own to support contributors who do not have family names.
The current element for corporate/group authors, organisation, will be replaced by collab as the term “organisation” was widely confusing (we have a lot of affiliation info registered as group authors!), and the collab section will also allow organisation identifiers.

Many of these updates align with how JATS supports contributors - I hope these changes will allow our members to supply robust contributor metadata without the burden of complicated conversions.

I’m also including the proposed changes to support data citation and typing of citations. Additionally, we’ll be adding support for members who want to:

supply Grant IDs in their metadata records
register identifiers for conferences.

A draft 5.0 xsd file is available in a branch of our GitLab schema repository with the details of the planned updates, and more robust documentation and examples are forthcoming.

Implementation plans

My house was built in 1890 and there are always surprises whenever we need to fix or renovate anything. Our system is just as old in technology years - it’s been chugging along since the aughts. This means while we don’t think it’s powered by knob-and-tube wiring, we can’t be sure until we open up the walls. We want to implement our plans (in fact we want to do more!) but if we run into any big blockers or crucial issues, we may roll out the changes over several iterations. These updates are fairly conservative and I remain optimistic we’ll be able to implement them as-is. Our update will help us build a foundation for future updates, allowing us to continuously evolve our schema as we move forward.

Some of you are understandably worried about our implementation schedule and backwards incompatibility. We’re aware that changes are expensive and inconvenient, and making them on our schedule doesn’t always work for your schedule. That’s why we’ve sustained 12+ versions of our schema over the past 12 years. We won’t be mandating a change any time soon, and definitely won’t do so without sufficient warning and community involvement. In the future we’ll need to make a sustained effort to retire older schema, but now isn’t the time for that.

We intend to commence work in Q2 but won’t have a firm timeline for a few more weeks. I will be providing regular updates as we progress, and will be asking for volunteers to test the updates when we’re ready. I’ll also be sharing more documentation and information about how the changes will be represented in our metadata outputs.

Have more to say?

Our feedback period has finished and we do plan to implement the changes as described, but if you have opinions, please share them.

Encouraging even greater reporting of corrections and retractions

Kirsty Meddings — Mon, 30 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR: We no longer charge fees for members to participate in Crossmark, and we encourage all our members to register metadata about corrections and retractions - even if you can’t yet add the Crossmark button and pop-up box to your landing pages or PDFs.

–

Research doesn’t stand still; even after publication, articles can be updated with supplementary data or corrections. When research outputs are is changed in this way the publisher should report and link it, so that those accessing and citing the content know if it’s been updated, corrected or even retracted. This also emphasizes the member’s commitment to the ongoing stewardship of research outputs.

Many people find and store articles to read later, either as PDFs on their laptop or on one of any number of reference management systems - when they come back to read and cite these articles, possibly many months later, they want to know if the version they have is current or not.

Removing Crossmark fees

To encourage even wider adoption of Crossmark, and to promote best practice around better reporting of corrections and retractions, we will no longer be charging additional fees for our Crossmark service. This change applies to all Crossmark metadata registered from 1 January 2020. All members are now encouraged to add Crossmark metadata and add the Crossmark button and pop-up box to their publications - and you can do so as part of your regular content registration.

Richer metadata gives important context

We know that there are many more corrections and retractions that are not yet being registered, and to address this, we are now asking all of our members to start registering metadata for significant updates to your publications, even if you don’t implement the Crossmark button and pop-up box on your content. Remember, anyone can access the Crossmark metadata through our public REST API, and start using it straight away - even if you’re not ready to implement the Crossmark button.

Check out how to get started; if you only want to deposit metadata, follow steps one through four. If you also want to add the Crossmark button and pop-up box to your web pages/PDFs so that readers can easily see when content has changed, then also follow the rest of the steps.

Crossmark

We launched Crossmark in 2012 to raise awareness of these critical changes, by asking Crossref members to:

record such updates in your metadata, either as part of your regular Crossref metadata deposit, or deposited as stand-alone data for back-year records
help readers find out about the changes by placing a Crossmark button and pop-up box (which is consistent across all members making it recognizable to readers) on your landing pages and in PDFs

Members can also use Crossmark to register additional metadata about content, giving further context and background for the reader. These metadata appear in the “More Information” section of the Crossmark box. 7 million DOIs have some additional metadata, the most common being copyright statements, publication history, and peer review methods.

Anyone can access the Crossmark metadata through our public REST API, providing a myriad of opportunities for integration with other systems, and analysis of changes to the scholarly record.

Who has implemented Crossmark?

440 Crossref members have implemented Crossmark to date. 11.4 million DOIs have some Crossmark metadata.

	Total DOIs	DOIs with Crossmark metadata	%
Journal articles	80,862,460	10,155,340	12.56%
Book chapters	14,040,646	792,953	5.65%
Conference Papers	6,175,733	457,237	7.40%
Datasets	1,862,852	19,206	1.03%
Books	753,298	239	0.03%
Monographs	469,333	23	0.00%

Of those, about 130,000 contain an update:

You can see which members or journals have implemented Crossmark by viewing the relevant Crossref Participation Report.

Events got the better of us

Bryan Vickery — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Publisher metadata is one side of the story surrounding research outputs, but conversations, connections and activities that build further around scholarly research, takes place all over the web. We built Event Data to capture, record and make available these ‘Events’ –– providing open, transparent, and traceable information about the provenance and context of every Event. Events are comments, links, shares, bookmarks, references, etc.

In September 2018 we said Event Data was ‘production ready.’ What we meant was development of the service had reached a point where we expected no further major changes to the code, and we encouraged you to use it. What normally would have followed was a detailed handover to our operations team, for monitoring and performance management, and for Product Management to expand Event Data by adding new Crossref member domains and evaluating additional event sources.

Why so quiet?

But many things changed on the staff front, meaning 2019 was a year of reinvention for the Technical and Product teams and of critical knowledge sharing and learning –– Event Data had to take a back seat as we focused resources on other key projects (more on that later). From a technical perspective, we’ve found the Elasticsearch index is not performing well and the approach taken to specifically support data citations through Scholix has not really scaled.

When things go wrong, whether in ways you can or can’t anticipate, the most important thing is communication –– in dealing with the challenges we forgot to do that. We understand how frustrating that can be and we’re extremely sorry to have gone so quiet.

So, where are we today?

Event Data is important to us and clearly important to you too as you’ve contacted us about your use-cases and the reliability of the service. Event Data remains available and you’re welcome to use it, but you should expect instability to continue and be aware that it does not find events for DOIs/domains of our newer members (who joined Crossref since 2019) –– so we’re conscious it might be hard to say whether it’s a good fit for your project at this point.

What are we doing?

We have brought in additional expert Elasticsearch resources to assist with a separate project to migrate our REST API from SOLR to Elasticsearch. We’re making fantastic progress on this. As soon as we’re confident we can make this switch, we will move those same Elasticsearch resources to shoring up Event Data. The REST API takes priority over Event Data because we need to add support for important new record types (like research grants) that aren’t yet available via the API.

We’re also concluding the process of hiring two new Product Managers which means we’ll be in a position to assign someone to head up the product management of Event Data. When we do return to Event Data in the coming months, our initial priority will be increased support for data citation and Scholix. If that means radical changes to the rest of the service, we’ll let you know.

Opening up the discussion

We will have more news on Event Data in mid-2020. We’d love you to join the Crossref Community Forum; we’ve created a new Category for Event Data where you can post details of how you are using, or plan to use Event Data; post questions to the group; suggestions for future development and provide general feedback on the Event Data service.

Metadata Manager Update

Bryan Vickery — Tue, 24 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

At Crossref, we’re committed to providing a simple, usable, efficient and scalable web-based tool for registering content by manually making deposits of, and updates to, metadata records. Last year we launched Metadata Manager in beta for journal deposits to help us explore this further. Since then, many members have used the tool and helped us better understand their needs.

What we’ve learned has made us realize how useful such a tool can be to both large and small publishers, but also that the approach we took with Metadata Manager needs to be changed - it’s not flexible enough to easily add other record types, like books/book chapters, or to include any changes we may make to our input schema.

With that in mind, we’re pausing development on Metadata Manager to allow us to properly evaluate what we’ve learned. If you’re currently using Metadata Manager for journal deposits without any problems, please do continue - you’re helping us learn a lot! But if you haven’t used Metadata Manager before, or are having problems, please:

use our existing Web Deposit Form instead, or
upload XML directly through the deposit system admin interface

We won’t be fixing bugs in Metadata Manager, except for providing any essential security updates. Of course, if you still need help please read our Content Registration help pages, or contact the Support team.

Metadata Manager’s features will be reimagined as part of our planned Member Center (working title, subject to change) project, where we will start to bring together all business and technical information for our members, service providers and metadata users. The Member Center will be the heart of our strategy to make it easier for you to work with Crossref to:

register and update metadata
view, update and transfer titles
visualize your activity/participation and act on problems with metadata
understand your bills and invoices
manage your users and service providers and their access and entitlements
and more

We’re in the early stages of planning for the Member Center and will be seeking feedback from members, service providers and metadata users in the coming months.

Double trouble with DOIs

Dominika Tkaczyk — Tue, 10 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Detective Matcher stopped abruptly behind the corner of a short building, praying that his loud heartbeat doesn’t give up his presence. This missing DOI case was unlike any other before, keeping him awake for many seconds already. It took a great effort and a good amount of help from his clever assistant Fuzzy Comparison to make sense of the sparse clues provided by Miss Unstructured Reference, an elegant young lady with a shy smile, who begged him to take up this case at any cost.

The final confrontation was about to happen, the detective could feel it, and his intuition rarely misled him in the past. He was observing DOI 10.2307/257306, which matched Miss Reference’s description very well. So far, there was no indication that DOI had any idea he was being observed. He was leaning on a wall across the street in a seemingly nonchalant way, just about to put out his cigarette. Empty dark streets and slowly falling snow together created an excellent opportunity to capture the fugitive.

Suddenly, Matcher heard a faint rustling sound. Out of nowhere, another shady figure, looking very much like 10.5465/amr.1982.4285592, appeared in front of the detective, crossed the street and started running away. Matcher couldn’t believe his eyes. These two DOIs had identical authors, year and title. They were even wearing identical volume and issue! He quickly noticed minor differences: slight alteration in the journal title and lack of the second page number in one of the DOIs, but this was likely just a random mutation. How could have he missed the other DOI? And more importantly, which of them was the one worried Miss Reference simply couldn’t live without?

TL;DR

Crossref metadata contains duplicates, i.e. items with different DOIs and identical (or almost identical) bibliographic metadata. This often happens when there is more than one DOI pointing to the same object. In some cases, but not all of them, one of the DOIs is explicitly marked as an alias of the other DOI.
In this blog post, I analyze those duplicates, that are not marked with an alias relation. The analysis shows that the problem exists, but is not big.
Among 524,496 DOIs tested in the analysis, 4,240 (0.8%) were flagged as having non-aliased duplicates. I divided those duplicates into two categories:
- Self-duplicate is a duplicate deposited by the same member as the other DOI, there were 3,603 (85%) of them.
- Other-duplicate is a duplicate deposited by a different member than the other DOI’s depositor, there were only 637 (15%) of them.
I used three member-level metrics to estimate the volume of duplicates deposited by a given member:
- Self-duplicate index is the fraction of self-duplicates in member’s DOIs: on average 0.67%.
- Other-duplicate index is the fraction of other-duplicates in a member’s DOIs: on average 0.13%.
- Global other-duplicate index is the fraction of globally detected other-duplicates involving a given member: on average 0.34%.

Introduction

In an ideal world, the relationship between research outputs and DOIs is one-to-one: every research output has exactly one DOI assigned and each DOI points to exactly one research output.

As we all know too well, we do not live in a perfect world, and this one-to-one relationship is also sometimes violated. One way to violate it is to assign more than one DOI to the same object. This can cause problems.

First of all, if there are two DOIs referring to the same object, eventually they both might end up in different systems and datasets. As a result, merging data between data sources becomes an issue, because we no longer can rely on comparing the DOI strings only.

Reference matching algorithms will also be confused when they encounter more than one DOI matching the input reference. They might end up assigning one DOI from the matching ones at random, or not assigning any DOI at all.

And finally, more than one DOI assigned to one object is hugely problematic for document-level metrics such as citation counts, and eventually affects h-indexes and impact factors. In practice, metrics are typically calculated per DOI, so when there are two DOIs pointing to one document, the citation count might be split between them, effectively lowering the count, and making every academic author’s biggest nightmare come true.

It seems we shouldn’t simply cover our eyes and pretend this problem does not exist. So what are we doing at Crossref to make the situation better?

It is possible for our members to explicitly mark a DOI as an alias of another DOI, if it was deposited by mistake. This does not remove the problem, but at least allows metadata consumers to access and use this information.
Whenever a DOI is registered or updated in Crossref, we automatically compare its metadata to the metadata of existing DOIs. If the metadata is too similar to the metadata of another DOI, this information is sent to the member and they have a chance to modify the metadata as they see fit.

Despite these efforts, we still see duplicates that are not explained by anything in the metadata. In this blog post, I will try to understand this problem better and assess how big it is. I also define three member-level metrics that can show how much a given member contributes to duplicates in the system and can flag members with unusually high fractions of duplicates.

Gathering the data

The data for this analysis was collected in the following way:
Only journal articles were considered in the analysis.
Only members with at least 5,000 journal article DOIs were considered in the analysis.
For each member, a random sample of 1,000 journal article DOIs was selected.
DOIs with no title, title shorter than 20 characters or shorter than 3 words were removed from each sample. This was done because items with short titles typically result in incorrectly flagged duplicates (false positives).
For each remaining DOI in the sample, a simple string representation was generated. This representation is a concatenation of the following fields: authors, title, container-title, volume, issue, page, published date.
This string representation was used as query.bibliographic in Crossref’s REST API and the resulting item list was examined.
If the original DOI came back as the first or the second hit, the relevance score difference between the first two hits is less than 1, they are both journal articles, and there is no relation (alias or otherwise) between them, the other one of the two is considered a duplicate of the original DOI. The score difference threshold was chosen through a manual examination of a number of cases. Most detected duplicates came back scored identically.

Overall results

In total, I tested 590 members and 524,496 DOIs. Among them, 4,240 DOIs (0.8%) were flagged as duplicates of other DOIs. This shows the problem exists, but is not huge.

I also analyzed separately two categories of duplicates:

self-duplicates are two DOIs with (almost) identical metadata, deposited by the same member,
other-duplicates are two DOIs with (almost) identical metadata, deposited by two different members.

Self-duplicates are more common: 3,603 (85%) of all detected duplicates are self-duplicates, and only 637 (15%) are other-duplicates. This is also good news: self-duplicates involve one member only, so they are easier to handle.

Self-duplicates

To explore the levels of self-duplicates among members, I used a custom member-level metric called self-duplicate index. Self-duplicate index is the fraction of self-duplicates among the member’s DOIs, in this case calculated over a sample.

On average, members have a very small self-duplicate index of 0.67%. In addition, in the samples of 44% of analyzed members no self-duplicates were found. The histogram shows the skewness of the distribution:

As we can see in the distribution, there are only a few members with high self-duplicate index. The table shows all members with the self-duplicate higher than 10%:

Name	Total DOIs	Sample size	Self-duplicate index
University of California Press	129,741	798	36%
Inderscience Publishers	127,729	998	29%
American Society of Hematology	137,124	990	24%
Pro Reitoria de Pesquisa, Pos Graduacao e Inovacao - UFF	7,756	919	19%
American Diabetes Association	49,536	946	18%

Other-duplicates

Other-duplicate index is the fraction of other duplicates among the member’s DOIs, in this case calculated from a sample.

On average, members have a very low other-duplicate index of only 0.13%. What is more, 89% members have no other-duplicates in the sample, and the distribution is even more skewed than in the case of self-duplicates:

Here is the list of all members with more than 2% of other-duplicates in the sample:

Name	Total DOIs	Sample size	Other-duplicate index
American Bryological and Lichenological Society	5,593	844	41%
Maney Publishing	15,342	832	6%
JSTOR	1,612,174	864	4%
American Mathematical Society (AMS)	83,015	844	4%

American Bryological and Lichenological Society is a clear outlier with 41% of their sample flagged as duplicates. Interestingly, all those duplicates come from one other member only (JSTOR) and JSTOR was the first to deposit them.

Similarly, all other-duplicates detected in the American Mathematical Society’s sample are shared with JSTOR, and JSTOR was the first to deposit them.

Maney Publishing’s 51 other-duplicates are all shared with a member not listed in this table: Informa UK Limited.

JSTOR is the only member in this table, whose 36 other-duplicates are shared with multiple (8) members.

Another interesting observation is that the members in this table (apart from JSTOR) are rather small or medium, in terms of total DOIs registered by them. It is also worrying that Informa UK Limited, a member that shares 51 other-duplicates flagged in Maney Publishing’s sample, was not flagged by this index. The reason might be differences in the overall number of registered DOIs: two members that deposited the same number of other-duplicates, but have different overall numbers of registered DOIs, will have different other-duplicate indexes.

To address this issue, I looked at a third index called global other-duplicate index. Global other-duplicate index is the fraction of globally detected other-duplicates involving a given member.

Global other-duplicate index has a useful interpretation: it tells us how much the overall number of other-duplicates would drop, if the given member resolved all its other-duplicates (for example by setting appropriate relations or correcting the metadata so that it is no longer so similar).

Here is the list of members with global-duplicate index higher than 2%:

Name	Total DOIs	Global other-duplicate index
JSTOR	1,612,174	69%
American Bryological and Lichenological Society	5,593	54%
Informa UK Limited	4,275,507	15%
Maney Publishing	15,342	8%
American Mathematical Society (AMS)	83,015	6%
Project Muse	326,300	5%
Wiley	8,003,815	3%
Elsevier BV	16,268,943	3%
Liverpool University Press	31,870	3%
Cambridge University Press (CUP)	1,621,713	2%
Ovid Technologies (Wolters Kluwer Health)	2,152,723	2%
University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress)	46,778	2%

Note that the values add up to more than 100%. This is because in every other-duplicate there are two members involved, so the involvement adds up to 200%.

As we can see, all the members from the previous table are in this one as well. Apart from them, however, this index flagged several large members. Among them, Informa UK Limited, that was missing from the previous table.

All the indexes defined here are useful in identifying members that contribute a lot of duplicates to the Crossref metadata. They can be used to help to clean up the metadata, and also to monitor the situation in the future.

Limitations

It is important to remember that index values presented here were calculated on a single sample of DOIs drawn for a given member. The values would be different if a different sample was used, and so they shouldn’t be treated as exact numbers.

The tables include members with the index exceeding a certain threshold, chosen arbitrarily, for illustrative purposes. Different runs with different samples could result in different members being included in the tables, especially in their lower parts.

To obtain more stable values of indexes, multiple samples could be used. Alternatively, in the case of smaller members, exact values could be calculated from all their DOIs.

Can you help us to launch Distributed Usage Logging?

Kirsty Meddings — Mon, 02 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Update: Deadline extended to 23:59 (UTC) 13th March 2020.

Distributed Usage Logging (DUL) allows publishers to capture traditional usage activity related to their content that happens on sites other than their own so they can provide reports of “total usage”, for example to subscribing institutions, regardless of where that usage happens.

We are looking for a consultant to take the lead with DUL outreach, promoting the service and its benefits in order to solicit participation from publishers (receivers) and content-hosting platforms/scholarly collaboration networks (senders).

Crossref provides the infrastructure for DUL. The call for participation is being led by COUNTER and the selected consultant will be representing COUNTER, with additional support from Crossref

If you are interested in this opportunity, please download the request for information (RFI).

The RFI response deadline is 23:59 (UTC) 13 March 2020.

Crossref metadata for bibliometrics

Ginny Hendricks — Fri, 21 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Our paper, Crossref: the sustainable source of community-owned scholarly metadata, was recently published in Quantitative Science Studies (MIT Press). The paper describes the scholarly metadata collected and made available by Crossref, as well as its importance in the scholarly research ecosystem.

Containing over 106 million records and expanding at an average rate of 11% a year, Crossref’s metadata has become one of the major sources of scholarly data for publishers, authors, librarians, funders, and researchers. The metadata set consists of 13 record types, including not only traditional types, such as journals and conference papers, but also data sets, reports, preprints, peer reviews, and grants. The metadata is not limited to basic publication metadata, but can also include abstracts and links to full text, funding and license information, citation links, and the information about corrections, updates, retractions, etc. This scale and breadth make Crossref a valuable source for research in scientometrics, including measuring the growth and impact of science and understanding new trends in scholarly communications. The metadata is available through a number of APIs, including REST API and OAI-PMH.

In the paper, we describe the kind of metadata that Crossref provides and how it is collected and curated. We also look at Crossref’s role in the research ecosystem and trends in metadata curation over the years, including the evolution of its citation data provision. We summarize the research that used Crossref’s metadata and describe plans that will improve metadata quality and retrieval in the future.

Leaving Crossref

Ed Pentz — Fri, 14 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Where does the time go…

In my blog post on January 14th about Crossref’s 20th anniversary I said, “The one constant in Crossref’s 20 years has been change”. It’s true that there has been constant change, but there has been another constant at Crossref –– me (and DOIs, to be fair). I started as Crossref’s first employee and Executive Director on February 1st, 2000, so I just marked my 20th anniversary with the organisation.

This milestone prompted me to reflect on where I am and where I’m heading. After 20 years leading the organisation, I’ve decided to leave Crossref. It’s time for a new challenge. I’m still very committed to the mission and very proud of my time at Crossref, the culture we’ve created and what the organisation has achieved. It’s been an honor serving as Executive Director and a pleasure working with so many great people over the years. And to be clear –– I’m not ill, being pushed or having a midlife crisis (yet).

It’s a difficult and emotional decision but I think the transition can be positive for me, the staff, the board, and the organisation. I’ll be working with the Crossref board, Chair, Treasurer and staff on the transition –– the plan is for me to be around through September or October to enable the recruitment and handover to a new Executive Director. There will be more information about the transition and recruitment process after the Crossref board meeting March 11-12 in London.

Crossref has a bright future and many opportunities to do new things. Crossref provides essential, open scholarly infrastructure and services that benefit its members and the wider scholarly research ecosystem –– and we’ve got a lot of interesting things in development and ambitious plans. To anyone who might be interested in being Crossref’s next Executive Director, I can honestly say it is fantastic, challenging, fun, and very fulfilling –– that’s why I’ve done it for 20 years.

What’s next for me? I don’t know but it’s something I’ll be thinking about over the coming months. I do know that working for a mission driven organisation and staying involved with scholarly communications and research –– a fascinating and worthy field –– will be top of my list.

Anyway - it’s back to work and full steam ahead for Crossref!

Using the Crossref REST API (with Open Ukrainian Citation Index)

Rachael Lammey — Wed, 05 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past few years, I’ve been really interested in seeing the breadth of uses that the research community is finding for the Crossref REST API. When we ran Crossref LIVE Kyiv in March 2019, Serhii Nazarovets joined us to present his plans for the Open Ukrainian Citation Index, an initiative he explains below.

But first an introduction to Serhii and his colleague Tetiana Borysova.

Serhii Nazarovets is a Deputy Director for Research at the State Scientific and Technical Library of Ukraine. Serhii has a Ph.D. in Social Communication Science. His research interests lie in the area of scientometrics and library science. Serhii is the Associate Editor for DOAJ (www.doaj.org) and the Regional Editor for E-LIS (Eprints in Library and Information Science). Serhii has worked in different scientific libraries of Ukraine for more than 10 years. Tetiana Borysova is a Senior Researcher at the State Scientific and Technical Library of Ukraine. Her research interests are focused on topics such as research data management, journal management and scientometrics.

Introducing OUCI

OUCI (Open Ukrainian Citation Index) is a new search engine and a citation database based on publication metadata from Crossref members.

OUCI is intended to simplify the search of scientific publications, to attract the editors’ attention to the problem of completeness and quality of the metadata of Ukrainian scholarly publications, and will allow bibliometricians to freely study the relations between authors and documents from various disciplines, in particular in the field of social sciences and humanities. OUCI is open for every user in the world without any restrictions.

OUCI launched in November 2019. The project is being implemented by the State Scientific and Technical Library of Ukraine with the support of the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine.

In Ukraine, we do not have a national citation database, and this significantly impedes the search and analysis of information about Ukrainian publications. According to preliminary estimates, more than 3,000 titles of scientific journals are currently published in Ukraine. At the same time, only around 100 Ukrainian journal titles are indexed in authoritative citation databases, such as Scopus and Web of Science Core Collection. Thus, researchers and managers lack this citation data to understand the impact of Ukrainian journals and their demand in the scientific communication system. Our approach is that OUCI database contains metadata from all publishers that use the Crossref’s Cited-by service and who support the Initiative for Open Citations by making the reference metadata they publish with Crossref openly available.

How is Crossref metadata used in OUCI?

A publication can only be indexed in OUCI if there is a DOI. At first glance, the idea of creating an index of national publications based on this condition may seem too optimistic. However, in January 2018, a new requirement was adopted by the List of scientific publications of Ukraine (a list of Ukrainian journals recognized by experts as qualitative for publishing their research results for a scientific degree), which listed a DOI as one of the requirements for inclusion. After that, the number of publishers who received the DOI prefix from Crossref has tripled, to 352 in November 2019.

Another important feature of OUCI is that publishers have to use Crossref’s Cited-by service and support the Initiative for Open Citations. We are working to build a new fair infrastructure where everyone who is interested in the dissemination of scientific knowledge can present their publications to the community, develop expert judgment skills and access citations to explore the links between documents. The philosophy of the index is to use only open resources to fill it.

In addition to standard filters from Crossref metadata (such as publisher, publication, type, year), OUCI offers to refine search results by:

indexation in Web of Science and/or Scopus,
journal category (A or B according to the List of scientific publications of Ukraine),
the field of knowledge and scientific specialties (according to the Ukrainian legislation) and other aspects important to Ukrainian users characteristics.

Figure 1: OUCI search and filter options

Beyond the ability to search articles, OUCI displays profiles for Ukrainian journals (the titles of these journals will include hyperlinks in the search results). Administrators can manage them, add and edit information about their journals: web-site, aims and scope, scientific fields of the journal according to the Ukrainian classification. Also, you can see some quantitative characteristics of journals: number of publications, number of citations, h-index, i10-index etc.

Figure 2: Display of journal information in OUCI

In addition, we have implemented an analytics module. Using the data about the number of articles and citations from Crossref, it allows users to analyze Ukrainian journals by field.

Figure 3: Publication and citation information

What are the future plans for OUCI?

In the near future, we plan to add:

the ability to export search results for further analysis;
integration with Unpaywall;
alternative metrics from Crossref Event Data.

In the ideal future for our index, every Ukrainian article will be registered with Crossref and have open references. We plan to promote the importance of reach and quality metadata in Crossref among Ukrainian publishers. We also encourage all publishers to support the Initiative for Open Citations.

What else would OUCI like to see in Crossref metadata?

One of the main problems we encountered when creating OUCI was the metadata about the authors. Very few publications contain data about the author’s ORCID iD. Focusing publishers on the need to transmit full metadata to Crossref, as well as monitoring their quality is a must for the resources like this. Also we look forward to the growing usage of ROR (Research Organization Registry) - identifiers for research organisations, similar to the way that ORCID offers identifiers for researchers. We believe that the ROR will help to obtain reliable data for analyzing the scientific activity of Ukrainian institutions.

Another issue we’ve identified in some Ukrainian journals that some of the small publishers that register content via Crossref Sponsors did not take care getting their own prefix, so it can be difficult to see their publications - this is something that showing the metadata via an index can help them see and therefore fix.

Questions?

We’ve had lots of questions about OUCI in the run up to the launch and now that it’s live. Here is a selection of our FAQs, all available on our website. You can also get in touch directly if you have another question we haven’t answered yet.

Crossref is 20

Ed Pentz — Tue, 14 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It seems like only yesterday…

On January 19th, 2000 a new not-for-profit organisation was registered in New York State. It was called Publishers International Linking Association, Inc but was more commonly referred to as “CrossRef”. This means that Crossref will be 20 years old on January 19th, 2020 so I wanted to mark the occasion with a short post. We are planning more ways to mark our 20th anniversary later this year so keep a lookout.

Crossref becoming a legal entity was the result of developments over the previous few years and the DOI-X pilot in 1999. Moving quickly, the fledgling organisation issued its first news release on February 2nd, 2000 - Crossref Update Journal Reference Linking Service Names Executive Director, Board of Directors, New Members, and a “Go Live” Timetable - announcing the appointment of an Executive Director (me!), that there were 22 members, and a plan for launching the system. From these beginnings, Crossref has grown into one of the most successful examples of sustainable scholarly infrastructure. This is due to the hard work and support of many people and organisations, and an organisational structure and governance and sustainability model that has proven very robust.

Looking back, Crossref has achieved an amazing amount but it certainly wasn’t a forgone conclusion that we would be successful. On our tenth anniversary we wrote an overview of Crossref’s founding and early years The Formation of Crossref: A Short History, which highlights that vision, collaboration, trust and utility all contributed to Crossref’s success. I particularly want to recognize Eric Swanson, from Wiley, and Pieter Bolman, from Academic Press/Harcourt Brace for their critical role in the founding of Crossref and in its early success by providing the vision, bringing everyone together, serving as the first Chair and Treasurer of the organisation, and providing me with support and guidance in Crossref’s early start-up phase.

Our history document notes that Crossref grew more quickly than expected, “By the end of 2003, CrossRef had 300 members with 12 million DOIs assigned, compared to the initial projection of 60 participating publishers and 3 million DOIs assigned.” Looking at the 2010 annual report at the ten year mark, Crossref had 43 million content items, 943 members and 15 staff. Since then, Crossref has continued to grow faster than expected and, in fact, at the start of of 20th year, growth is increasing. Our latest annual report “Crossref Annual Report & Fact File 2018-19” highlights that there we have 111 million content items - an average annual increase of 15%; over 11,500 members with over 180 joining per month - an average annual increase of 112%; and 37 staff - an average annual increase of 7%. Crossref is also financially stable, having generated surpluses every year since 2003 and with no fee increases in 15 years - an effective 30%+ decrease for members.

Some of the most important statistics for me are those around DOI resolutions - humans and machines following persistent DOI links - and metadata dissemination via our open APIs and paid services. In 2010 there were around 470 million DOI resolutions for the entire year - we now see over 400 million resolutions per month. With metadata dissemination in 2010 there were on average about 40 million queries per month and there are now over 600 million per month meaning that huge amounts of metadata are flowing out into the ecosystem and improving persistent linking, discovery, and the research process. Also, very importantly, we are much more global and diverse than we were, with members and users from over 120 countries, representing all disciplines and all types of organisations (societies, commercial publishers, funders, start-ups, universities and other research institutions). And in a big change, the members in the top three fee categories accounted for 36% of revenue in 2019 - down from 56% in 2011, while the bottom three categories accounted for 46% of revenue in 2019 - up from 25% in 2011.

As we noted in our blog post from November 2019, A turning point is a time for reflection, “different people have always wanted different things from us and, since our founding, we have brought together diverse organisations to have discussions—sometimes contentious—to agree on how to help make scholarly communications better. Being inclusive can mean slow progress, but we’ve been able to advance by being flexible, fair, and forward-thinking.” While we’ve been very successful, there is a lot we can do better and it is tricky keeping all our stakeholders happy - but that’s what we’ve always done and we’ll continue to do it by being open, inclusive, collaborative, and willing to change and adapt. The one constant in Crossref’s 20 years has been change. The staff and board will be reviewing Crossref’s strategy in 2020 with the value research report and LIVE19 Amsterdam workshops as input. I’m confident we can continue to play a vital role in the scholarly research ecosystem.

A huge thank you to everyone over the years who has contributed to Crossref’s success - it’s a very long list and includes staff, board members, members, users, supporters, partners, consultants, and many others. Personally, I’m proud and honored to have played a role in Crossref’s success and development over the last 20 years and the best part is that there is more to come.

Keep an eye out for the publication of the outputs from our LIVE19 meeting and further 20th anniversary activities.

Metadata Corrections, Updates, and Additions in Metadata Manager

Shayn Smulyan — Mon, 13 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been a year since Metadata Manager was first launched in Beta. We’ve received a lot of helpful feedback from many Crossref members who made the switch from Web Deposit Form to Metadata Manager for their journal article registrations.

The most common use for Metadata Manager is to register new DOIs for newly published articles. For the most part, this is a one-time process. You enter the metadata, register your DOI, and success!

But everything doesn’t always go quite as expected. Humans make mistakes, and typos in metadata are bound to happen on occasion, even for the most careful users.

We always want to make it as easy as possible for our members to find and correct metadata errors, and to add additional metadata when it becomes available. Our Schematron, Conflict, and Resolution reports can help you identify existing metadata errors. We never charge content registration fees for metadata updates, additions, or corrections, so cost won’t be a barrier to getting the most accurate and thorough metadata possible. And, now, Metadata Manager can make those corrections easier to do.

Correcting Errors

Because accurate and comprehensive metadata is so important for the linking and discoverability of your publications, it’s important to catch these occasional errors and correct them.

We send out reports that automatically screen for particular types of metadata errors, and we pass along comments from users who contact us with concerns about metadata quality to our contacts at the relevant publisher.

The “Review all” feature in Metadata Manager also allows you to do a final check of all the metadata you entered right before you’re about to submit your deposits. So, we also rely on you to evaluate your own accuracy there as well.

Once you’ve identified an error, you’ll need to correct it. To do that, you must resubmit a whole new metadata deposit for the affected item. The newly deposited metadata will entirely overwrite the previously deposited metadata.

If you’re used to using the Web Deposit Form, you know that the redeposit can be a little tedious. For example, if you find that you misspelled an author’s last name, you’d have to manually type in or copy-paste not just the corrected last name, but all of the journal-level, issue-level, and article-level metadata that applies to the article.

Using Metadata Manager, the process is much simpler. The full metadata record is retained or imported and you only need to correct the error itself.

For articles originally registered using Metadata Manager

If you find a metadata error in an article which you initially registered in Metadata Manager itself, you can locate the article in one of two ways:

Navigate through the list of Accepted articles within a given journal
Or, search by article title in the Deposit History

Once you’ve located the relevant article, click on the article title to open the article’s metadata record. From there, you can make the necessary corrections. With the corrections complete, click “Continue” and then “Add to deposit.” After that, the process is exactly the same as depositing a new article.

For articles registered using the Web Deposit Form or any other deposit method

If you registered an article using the Web Deposit Form, an XML deposit, or the OJS plugin, you can still use Metadata Manager to quickly correct an error. But, first you have to import the article’s metadata into Metadata Manager.

To do this, click into the relevant journal from your Metadata Manager home page. Then, search for the article title using the “Add existing article” search box. Select “Add” next to the article title in the search results, which will import the article’s metadata record into Metadata Manager.

From here, make any necessary corrections and click “Continue” and then “Add to deposit.” Navigate to the “To deposit” tab and “Review all” to ensure that your metadata record is accurate. Then select “Deposit” to finalize your submission. You’ll receive immediate feedback as to whether your metadata deposit was successful or not.

Adding additional metadata

Perhaps there are no problems with your metadata, and everything is completely accurate. That’s great! But, we encourage our members to submit metadata that is not just accurate, but also as thorough as possible. Check your Participation Report to see if there are any types of metadata that you haven’t been submitting yet, or that you haven’t been submitting for certain journals.

Metadata Manager allows you to deposit references, licenses, and relationships between your articles and other DOIs, which weren’t possible to add using the Web Deposit Form. The same process described above for corrections will allow you to import previously registered articles and add in these new metadata elements.

We also know that many of our members register DOIs for their articles when they’re first published online, but aren’t yet included in an issue. When the articles are published in their final versions, there is important metadata added which wasn’t yet available when the DOI was first registered. This includes things like volume number, issue number, page numbers, and full publication date, all of which are extremely important for linking and discoverability. Sometimes the resolution URL changes when the article is moved from its pre-publication status to its final version.

So, when each issue is published, you can use Metadata Manager to pull up all the already-registered articles included in that issue and add in the newly relevant metadata like page numbers, issue number, URL, etc. Then add them to a new deposit, review, and submit.

Please check out the full Metadata Manager help documentation for more details, or join us on an upcoming workshop to test out Metadata Manager in real-time with us. And, as always, feel free to email us at support@crossref.org with any questions.