Blog

Hi, I’m Isaac. I’m new here. What better way to get to know me than through a blog post? Well, maybe a cocktail party, but this will have to do. In addition to giving you some details about myself in this post, I’ll be introducing our status page, too.

Continuing our blog series highlighting the uses of Crossref metadata, we talked to the team behind new search and discovery tool Dimensions: Daniel Hook, Digital Science CEO; Christian Herzog, ÜberResearch CEO; and Simon Porter, Director of Innovation. They talk about the work they’re doing, the collaborative approach, and how Dimensions uses the Crossref REST API as part of our Metadata Plus service, to augment other data and their workflow.

Next in our Meet the members blog series is INASP, who isn’t a direct member, but acts as a Sponsor for hundreds of members. Sioux Cumming, Programme Specialist at INASP tells us a bit about the work they’re doing, how they use Crossref and what the future plans for INASP are.

The Crossref graph of the research enterprise is growing at an impressive rate of 2.5 million records a month - scholarly communications of all stripes and sizes. Preprints are one of the fastest growing types of content. While preprints may not be new, the growth may well be: ~30% for the past 2 years (compared to article growth of 2-3% for the same period). We began supporting preprints in November 2016 at the behest of our members. When members register them, we ensure that: links to these publications persist over time; they are connected to the full history of the shared research results; and the citation record is clear and up-to-date.

From time to time we get questions from members asking what the difference is between reference linking and registering references as part the Content Registration process.

Here’s the distinction:

Linking out to other articles from your reference lists is a key part of being a Crossref members - it’s an obligation in the membership agreement and it levels the playing field when all members link their references to one another.

What do you think of when you think of Chicago? Deep dish pizza? Art Deco architecture?

Well for one week only this year you can add scholarly publishing to the list as the #SSP2018 Conference comes to town. Some Crossref people are excited to be heading out for the conference, and we’re looking forward to meeting as many of our members as possible.

Come along to stand 212A and talk to Anna Tolwinska about Participation Reports. Although this new tool is still in beta, she’s giving SSP attendees a sneak peek and the chance to get an early look at whether they (and over 10 000 other members) are registering the ten key elements that add context and richness to the basic required metadata. You’ll get real insight into what metadata you’re registering, even if this work is done by a third party or other department.

Exciting news! We are getting very close to the beta release of a new tool to publicly show metadata coverage. As members register their content with us they also add additional information which gives context for other members and for services that help e.g. discovery or analytics.

Richer metadata makes content useful. Participation reports will give—for the first time—a clear picture for anyone to see the metadata Crossref has. This is data that’s long been available via our Public REST API, now visualized.

Crossref has decided to change the HTTP redirect code used by our DOIs from 303 back to the more commonly used 302. Our implementation of 303 redirects back in 2010 was based on recommended best practice for supporting linked data identifiers. Unfortunately, very few other parties have adopted this practice.

Continuing our blog series highlighting the uses of Crossref metadata, we talked to Gavin Reddick, Chief Analyst at Researchfish about the work they’re doing, and how they’re using our REST API as part of their workflow.

Aliaksandr Birukou is the Executive Editor for Computer Science at Springer Nature and is chair of the Group that has been working to establish a persistent identifier system and registry for scholarly conferences. Here Alex provides some background to the work and asks for input from the community:

Roughly one year ago, Crossref and DataCite started a working group on conference and project identifiers. With this blog post, we would like to share the specification of conference metadata and Crossmark for proceedings and are inviting the broader community to comment.