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Encouraging even greater reporting of corrections and retractions

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.

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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.