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The integrity of the scholarly record is an essential aspect of research integrity. Every initiative and service that we have launched since our founding has been focused on documenting and clarifying the scholarly record in an open, machine-actionable and scalable form. All of this has been done to make it easier for the community to assess the trustworthiness of scholarly outputs. Now that the scholarly record itself has evolved beyond the published outputs at the end of the research process – to include both the elements of that process and its aftermath – preserving its integrity poses new challenges that we strive to meet… we are reaching out to the community to help inform these efforts.

As a distributed, global, and community-led organisation, sharing information and listening to our members both online and in person has always been integral to what we do.

For many years Crossref has held both in-person and online meetings and events, which involved a fair amount of travel by our staff, board, and community. This changed drastically in March 2020, when we had to stop traveling and stop having in-person meetings and events. Due to the hard work and creativity of our team and the support of our Ambassadors and Sponsors, we were able to move to exclusively online meetings and events and maintain connections with colleagues, members, and much of the scholarly research community.

Tl;dr

Forthcoming amendments to Crossref’s membership terms will include:

1. Removal of ‘reference distribution preference’ policy: all references in Crossref will be treated as open metadata from 3rd June 2022.

2. An addition to sanctions jurisdictions: the United Kingdom will be added to sanctions jurisdictions that Crossref needs to comply with.

Reference distribution preferences

In 2017, when we consolidated our metadata services under Metadata Plus, we made it possible for members to set a preference for the distribution of references to Open, Limited, or Closed. Prior to the 2017 change, we acted as a broker of 1:1 feeds of parts of metadata for parts of our community - clearly a role that was not scalable.

Join us for the first in our Perspectives blog series. In this series of blogs, we will be meeting different members of our diverse, global community at Crossref. We learn more about their lives, how they came to know and work with us, and we hear insights about the scholarly research landscape in their country, challenges they face, and plans for the future.

In collaboration with California Digital Library and DataCite, Crossref guides the operations of the Research Organisation Registry (ROR). ROR is community-driven and has an independent sustainability plan involving grants, donations, and in-kind support from our staff.

ROR is a vital component of the Research Nexus, our vision of a fully connected open research ecosystem. It helps people identify, connect, and analyze the affiliations of those contributing to, producing, and publishing all kinds of research objects. Crossref added support for ROR to its schema and REST API in 2021 and we are asking Crossref members to use ROR IDs for author affiliations in the metadata they deposit with Crossref. But this post is about how the Crossref community can support ROR in another way.

We’ve just added to our input schema the ability to include affiliation information using ROR identifiers. Members who register content using XML can now include ROR IDs, and we’ll add the capability to our manual content registration form, participation reports, and metadata retrieval APIs in the near future. And we are inviting members to a Crossref/ROR webinar on 29th September at 3pm UTC.

The background

We’ve been working on the Research Organisation Registry (ROR) as a community initiative for the last few years. Along with the California Digital Library and DataCite, our staff has been involved in setting the strategy, planning governance and sustainability, developing technical infrastructure, hiring/loaning staff, and engaging with people in person and online. In our view, it’s the best current model of a collaborative initiative between like-minded open scholarly infrastructure (OSI) organisations.

22 June 2021, London, UK and Boston, MA, USA — The future of global open access publishing received a boost today with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and Crossref. The MOU formalizes an already strong partnership between the two organisations and furthers their shared pursuit of an open scholarly communications ecosystem that is inclusive of emerging publishing communities.

Both organisations aim to encourage the dissemination and use of scholarly research using open infrastructure, online technologies, regional and international networks, and community partners - all supporting local institutional capacity and sustainability around the world.

This announcement has been in the works for some time, but everything seems to take longer when there is a pandemic going on, including finding time and headspace to plan out our strategy for the next few years.

Over the last year or so we have had our heads down addressing how to scale our 20-yr-old system and operation – and adapting to new ways of working. But we’ve also spent time talking to people, forging alliances, looking ahead, and making plans. So we’re happy to now let everyone know exactly what we’ve been up to lately, what we are heading towards in 2025, and what projects and programs are prioritised on our near-term agenda.

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.

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.