Scholarly metadata, deposited by thousands of our members and made openly available can act as âtrust signalsâ for the publications. It provides information that helps others in the community to verify and assess the integrity of the work. Despite having a central responsibility in ensuring the integrity of the work that they publish, editorial teams tend not be fully aware of the value of metadata for integrity of the scholarly record. How can we change that?
Crossref was created back in 2000 by 12 forward-thinking scholarly publishers from North America and Europe, and by 2002, these members had registered 4 million DOI records. At the time of writing, we have over 23,600 members in 164 different countries. Half of our members are based in Asia, and 35% are universities or scholar-led. These members have registered over 176 million open metadata records with DOIs (as of today). What a difference 25 years makes!
In our 25th anniversary year, I thought it would be time to take a look at how we got here. And soâhold tightâweâre going to go on an adventure through space and time1, stopping every 5 years through Crossref history to check in on our members. And weâre going to see some really interesting changes over the years.
The Frankfurt Book Fair is the largest book fair in the world, and therefore a key event on our calendar. Held annually in Frankfurt, Germany, the 77th Frankfurt Book Fair (October 15â19, 2025) saw 118,000 trade visitors and 120,000 private visitors from 131 countries. The Crossref booth was located, as usual, in Hall 4.0 where all the stands with information about academic publishing can be found. Four Crossref colleagues attended the Book Fair this year, and in this blog post, you can read more about their meetings, experiences, and plans.Â
TL;DR. Metadata Manager will be retired at the end of 2025. Over the past four years, we have been developing a new helper tool to replace it, and that tool has now reached a stage of maturity that means we will be able to switch off Metadata Manager by the end of the year.
Test out the early preview of Event Data while we continue to develop it. Share your thoughts. And be warned: we may break a few eggs from time to time!
Chicken by anbileru adaleru from the The Noun Project
Want to discover which research works are being shared, liked and commented on? What about the number of times a scholarly item is referenced? Starting today, you can whet your appetite with an early preview of the forthcoming Crossref Event Data service. We invite you to start exploring the activity of DOIs as they permeate and interact with the world after publication.
But first, a bit of background
Discussion around scholarly research increasingly occurs online after publication, for example on blogs, sharing services, social media, and wikis. These âeventsâ occur across the web on numerous platforms and are a critical part of the scholarly enterprise. We are developing an infrastructure service (Crossref Event Data) that collects, stores, and delivers raw data of the events occurring with Crossref DOIs. We will store the data in an open, auditable and portable form for the community to access. Publishers, platforms, funders, bibliometricians and service providers may benefit from access to this raw data, and it can be used to feed into research records or proprietary tools and services that offer aggregation and analysis.
Developers Martin Fenner (DataCite) and Joe Wass (Crossref) enjoy a tofu break
Lagotto, the software originally developed at PLOS, has been extended and improved in a joint effort between DataCite and Crossref. The two DOI Registration Agencies have partnered to envision, build and release the service. On the 13th of April, after a year ofcollaboration, we jointly released Lagotto 5.0. You can read about the collaboration on the DataCite blog post.
Crossref and DataCite will continue to work closely together to develop Lagotto and the Event Data service. Although Crossref Event Data has mostly Crossref DOIs at launch, you will be able to find DataCite DOIs if they are cited in Crossref or Wikipedia.
All of the software that runs Event Data, including Lagotto, is developed in the open and is open source. Please refer to the Crossref Event Data Technical User Guide for full details.
Preview the data
This service is currently under development with a full launch expected the second half of 2016. Before it is launched however, we invite you to take a look around and preview a subset of the data sources we plan to include. You may experience occasional hiccups while we continue building the service.
At this stage, we are working with data from three sources although we will greatly expand the variety of platforms from which we collect data as development progresses. At this stage, you can view Mendeley bookmarks, Wikipedia references, and Crossref to DataCite links.
Mendeley
Mendeley is a reference manager and academic social network for scholars. View the number of social bookmarks from scholars or groups on Mendeley.
Wikipedia is an online encyclopaedia, the Internetâs largest and most popular general reference work. View references in Wikipedia of Crossref publications in Wikipedia articles in all languages.
DataCite is a global consortium that assigns DOIs to research data. This enables people to find, share, use, and cite data. You can view all the data citations to DataCite research outputs found in Crossref publications (work is underway to make the links found in DataCite metadata available in Event Data).Â
This service is currently under development and as such we welcome your thoughts and feedback on the data we are collecting currently from our three active sources. As a reminder, we expect to include the following sources as part of our full service launch later this year (pending confirmation):
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Weâre also on the lookout for new data sources to investigate for future inclusion in the Event Data service so please do get in touch with requests and recommendations. As we continue to build the service throughout 2016, we will be committing to a model of continuous development so that we can make new sources available as they are completed.
Watch this blog for regular updates on our progress, or subscribe to receive new blog posts by email (just add your details to the upper right side of this page).
