On behalf of the Nominating Committee, I’m pleased to share the slate of candidates for the 2025 board election.
Each year we do an open call for board interest. This year, the Nominating Committee received 51 submissions from members worldwide to fill five open board seats.
We have four large member seats and one small member seat open for election in 2025. We maintain a balanced board of 8 large member seats and 8 small member seats. Size is determined based on the organization’s membership tier (small members fall in the $0-$1,650 tiers and large members in the $3,900 - $50,000 tiers).
In 2022, we wrote a blog post “Rethinking staff travel, meetings, and events” outlining our new approach to staff travel, meetings, and events with the goal of not going back to ‘normal’ after the pandemic and said that in the future we would report on our efforts to balance online and virtual events, work life balance for staff, and track our carbon emissions. In December 2024, we wrote a blog post, “Summary of the environmental impact of Crossref,” that gave an overview of 2023 and provided the first report on our carbon emissions. Our report on 2023 only just made it into 2024, so we are happy to report on 2024 a little sooner in the year.
To date, there are about 100 Crossref members who have made use of our co-access service for one or more of their books. The service was designed to be a last-resort measure when multiple parties - book publishers, aggregators, and other members - had rights to register book content. Unfortunately, the service allowed members to register multiple DOIs for shared books and book chapters, thereby violating our own core tenet of one DOI per content item. We should not have created a service that violated that tenet, resulting in duplicate DOIs. As we are able to offer an alternative in the form of the multiple resolution service, it is time to switch co-access off. Among other benefits – for the publisher and the authors, creation of a single DOI for each item, regardless of where it might be hosted, will result in more accurate citation counts and usage statistics. We’re retiring co-access at the end of 2026.
This month marks one year since the Dutch Research Council (NWO) introduced grant IDs—an important milestone in our journey toward more transparent and trackable research funding. We created over 1,600 Crossref Grant IDs with associated metadata. We are beginning to see them appear in publications. These early examples show the enormous potential Grant IDs have. They also highlight that publishers could extend their efforts to improve the quality of funding metadata of publications.
It can be a pain when companies rebrand as it usually requires some coordinated updating of wording and logos on websites, handouts, and slides. Nevermind changing habits and remembering to use the new names verbally in presentations.
Why bother?
As our infrastructure and services expanded, we sometimes branded services with no reference to Crossref. As explained in our The Logo Has Landed post last November, this has led to confusion, and it was not scalable nor sustainable.
With a cohesive approach to naming and branding, the benefits of changing to (some) new names and logos should help everyone. Our aim is to stem confusion and be in a much better position to provide clear messages and useful resources so that people don’t have to try hard to understand what Crossref enables them to do.
So while it may be a bit of a pain short-term, it will be worth it!
What are the new names?
As a handy reference, here is a slide-shaped image giving an overview of our services with their new names:
Overview of brand name changes, April 2016
It’s a lowercase ‘r’ in Crossref
That’s right, you’ve spent fifteen years learning to capitalize the second R in Crossref, and now we’re asking you to lowercase it! Please say hello to and start to embrace the more natural and contemporary Crossref.
I’m hoping we can count on our community to update logos and names on your end, keeping consistent with new brand guidelines. And I hope we can make it as easy as possible to do:
This Content Delivery Network (CDN) at assets.crossref.org allows you to reference logos using a snippet of code. Please do not copy/download the logos.
We also have a new website in development which will put support and resources front and center of the user experience. More on that in the next month or two.
By using the snippets of code provided via our new CDN at assets.crossref.org, these kind of manual updates should never be a problem in the future if the logo changes again (no plans anytime soon!).
Of course, we don’t expect people to update new logos and names immediately, there is always a period of transition. Please let us know let us know if we can help you to update your sites and materials in the coming weeks.
Also, check out the launch video, which presents five key Crossref brand messages:
