Preserving the integrity of the scholarly record is an important component of the overall endeavour to protect research integrity. Open scholarly infrastructure enables persistent recording of research objects and associated metadata, which provides an evidence trail for these objects for all in the research community. Crossref and DataCite – as providers of essential infrastructure for preservation of the scholarly record – we share our joint expertise in the new guide on “Why metadata matters for research integrity and how to contribute”.
As our global community continues to grow, it is important for us to build and maintain our connections within it. In March this year, we had the opportunity to visit São Paulo for a community event at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas. The content of our presentations is available online. Events such as this provide an opportunity for us to update our members on Crossref fundamentals and developments, and help us better tune in to the varied needs of our communities and learn how we can work together more effectively. This was our third visit to Brazil, with previous events held in Campinas and São Paulo in 2016, and Goiânia and Fortaleza in 2018.
Each organization in the global community of Crossref members (that’s currently over 24k organizations in 166 different countries) plays a key role in building the Research Nexus. Any opportunity we have to meet with our members in person is a highlight and a way for us to learn more from each other. The month of January saw three of us travel to Bangkok to attend the first-ever Charleston Conference organised in Asia and to meet with our growing community in Thailand.
This year, we placed a spotlight on the Latin American community, hosting the second Crossref Metadata Sprint in São Paulo, Brazil from 4 - 6 March 2026. In our first tri-lingual event, we brought together 31 participants from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico. Our goal was to foster community co-creation using the open scholarly metadata. The Sprint was an opportunity to pose questions, share ideas, collaborate on research, and propose innovative solutions that enhance the use of metadata in scholarly communication and beyond.
Read on for more details about the content of the Sprint, and the resulting projects. You can also register to join our Sprint Showcase call on 22nd April to hear directly from the team about their creations.
Many researchers want to carry out analysis and extraction of information from large sets of data, such as journal articles and other scholarly content. Methods such as screen-scraping are error-prone, place too much strain on content sites and may be unrepeatable or break if site layouts change. Providing researchers with automated access to the full-text content via DOIs and Crossref metadata reduces these problems, allowing for easy deduplication and reproducibility. Supporting text and data mining echoes our mission to make research outputs easy to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse.
In 2013 Crossref embarked on a project to better support Crossref members and researchers with Text and Data Mining requests and access. There were two main parts to the project:
To collect and make available full-text links and publisher TDM license links in the metadata.
To provide a service (TDM click-through service) for Crossref members to post their additional TDM terms and conditions and for researchers to access, review and accept these terms.
To date, 37.5 million works registered with Crossref have both full-text links and TDM license information. We continue to encourage all members to include full-text links and license information in the metadata they register to assist researchers with TDM. You can see how each member is doing via its Participation Report (e.g. Wiley’s).
Members are also making subscription content available for text mining (temporarily or otherwise) for specific purposes, such as to help the research community with its response to COVID-19. Back in April we highlighted how this can be achieved by including:
A “free to read” element in the access indicators section of publisher metadata indicating that the content is being made available free-of-charge (gratis)
An assertion element indicating that the content being made available is available free-of-charge.
To access Crossref’s click-through tool for text and data mining, users could log in via their ORCID iD. They could then review TDM license agreements posted by Crossref members and accept, reject or postpone their decisions until later. Having agreed to a publisher’s terms and conditions this action was logged against the user’s API token which they could use when requesting full-text from the publisher.
Since the pilot in 2014, only 2 publishers have continued with the tool and fewer than 300 API tokens have been issued.
Publishers have since developed their own mechanisms for managing TDM requests. The introduction of UK (2014) / EU (2019) copyright exceptions for TDM has significantly reduced the number of requests and at the same time, more and more content is published under an open access license.
Given the low take-up of the click-through by both publishers and researchers, its goals are no longer being met. Therefore we will retire the TDM click-through in December 2020. Until that date, it will still operate for the two publishers and various researchers who use it while they finish implementing their alternative plans.
Crossref will continue to collect member-supplied TDM licensing information in metadata for individual works, and researchers can continue to find this via the Crossref APIs.
