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.
eLife recently won a Crossref Metadata Award for the completeness of its metadata, showing itself as the clear leader among our medium-sized members. In this post, the eLife team answers our questions about how and why they produce such high-quality open metadata. For eLife, the work of creating and sharing excellent metadata aligns with their mission to foster open science and supports their preprint-centred publication model, but it also lays the groundwork for all kinds of exciting potential uses.
Hablamos con Nacho Pérez Alcalde, Vicedirector Técnico de Editorial CSIC, la editorial al mando de ´Boletín Geológico y Minero’, ganadora del Crossref Metadata Award en la categoría de Metadata Enrichment. Miembro de Crossref desde 2008, Editorial CSIC publica 41 revistas en acceso abierto Diamante, y juega un papel esencial en la diseminación del conocimiento científico a nivel internacional. Exploramos lo que este premio ha significado para Editorial CSIC y qué planes para el futuro tienen para seguir mejorando la calidad y uso de sus metadatos.
Crossref and DOAJ share the aim to encourage the dissemination and use of scholarly research using online technologies and to work with and through regional and international networks, partners, and user communities for the achievement of their aims to build local institutional capacity and sustainability.
Both organisations agreed to work together in 2021 in a variety of ways, but primarily to ‘encourage the dissemination and use of scholarly research using online technologies, and regional and international networks, partners and communities, helping to build local institutional capacity and sustainability around the world.’ Some of the fruits of this labour are:
DOAJ added support for Crossref XML to make it easier for publishers to upload metadata
Closer collaboration between customer/member support at both organisations, making it easier for publishers and journal editors to navigate both service’s technologies
the launch of PLACE: ‘a ‘one-stop shop’ for information to support publishers in adopting best practices the industry developed’ (together with other partners)
a pilot gap analysis of the journals in DOAJ with the possibility of helping them start to use and resolve DOIs.
The new agreement, signed earlier this month, will slightly shift focus to build upon existing collaborations, particularly around metadata. One of the primary sections of the MOU is enhancing support for the least-resourced journals by:
Assigning DOIs and depositing the metadata with Crossref
Finding ways to improve their DOAJ application experience to help them become indexed
Collect and ingest their Crossref metadata into DOAJ
Help them to get preserved via JASPER or similar initiatives
Help identify other local partners, such as Crossref Sponsoring Organisations, to support their use of Crossref services
It’s great that we can further underpin what is already a good working relationship. Both Crossref and DOAJ are central to discovery so it’s a natural partnership. Helping journals meet better standards and become indexed to make them more discoverable on a global scale is at the heart of our strategy. This agreement opens up a new avenue that allows the community to really focus on supporting those journals and the research they publish.’
– Joanna Ball, Managing Director of DOAJ
‘The collaborations with DOAJ so far only reconfirmed our shared goal to help make the global scholarly communications system more equitable wherever we can. Our joint projects aim to seek out and devise support for resource-constrained journals in multiple ways. DOAJ’s work is essential in helping journals to develop good practice, while Crossref offers an open infrastructure to ensure all journals can be included and discoverable in the global scholarly record.’
– Ginny Hendricks, Director of Member and Community Outreach at Crossref
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About DOAJ
DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer reviewed journals. DOAJ deploys around one hundred carefully selected volunteers from the community of library and other academic disciplines to assist in curating open access journals. This independent database contains over 20,400 peer-reviewed open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts and humanities. DOAJ is financially supported worldwide by libraries, publishers and other like-minded organisations. DOAJ services (including the evaluation of journals) are free for all, and all data provided by DOAJ are harvestable via OAI/PMH and the API. See https://doaj.org/ for more information.
About Crossref
Crossref is a global community-governed open scholarly infrastructure that makes all kinds of research objects easy to find, assess, and reuse through a number of services critical to research communications, including an open metadata API that sees over 1.5 billion queries every month. Crossref’s ~20,000 members come from 155 countries and are made up of universities, publishers, funders, government bodies, libraries, and research groups. Their ~155 million DOI records contribute to the collective vision of a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organisations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society.
