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The role of preprints Crossref provides infrastructure services and therefore we support scholarly communications as it evolves over time. Today, preprints are increasingly discussed as a valuable part of the research story (beyond physics, math, and a small set of sub-disciplines). Preprints might play a positive role in catalyzing research discovery, establishing priority of discoveries and ideas, facilitating career advancement, and improving the culture of communication within the scholarly community.

We now have linked clinical trials deposits coming in from five publishers: BioMedCentral, BMJ, Elsevier, National Institute for Health Research and PLOS. It’s still a relatively small pool of metadata - around 4000 DOIs with associated clinical trial numbers - but we’re delighted to see that “threads” of publications are already starting to form. If you look at this article in The Lancet and click on the Crossmark button you will see that in the Clinical Trials section there are links to three other articles reporting on the same trial: two from the American Heart Journal and one from BMJ’s Heart.

Known unknowns If you follow this blog, you are going to notice a theme over the coming months- Crossref supports the deposit and distribution of a lot more kinds of metadata than people usually realise. We are in the process of completely revamping our web site, help documentation, and marketing to better promote our metadata distribution capabilities, but in the mean time we think it would be useful highlight one of our most under-promoted functions- the ability to distribute references via Crossref.

The act of registering a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) for scholarly content is sometimes conflated with the notion of conferring a seal of approval or other mark of good quality upon an item of content. This is a fundamental misunderstanding. A DOI is a tool, not a badge of honor. The presence of a Crossref DOI on content sends a signal that: The owner of the content would like to be formally cited if the content is used in a scholarly context.

Last week a bunch of Crossref’s staff traveled to the 2016 Society for Scholarly Publishing Annual Meeting in Vancouver, BC. After we returned en masse, all nine of us put our heads together to share some of our personal memories of the event. Crossref’s Rosa and Susan at the Fun Walk/Run sponsored by High Wire. 5K before breakfast! On Cybersecurity and the Scholarly World —“The session described the many and complicated security threats that IT systems face and how threat detection and defense is a constantly ongoing activity.

This is a joint blog post with Dario Taraborelli, coming from WikiCite 2016.

In 2014 we were taking our first steps along the path that would lead us to Crossref Event Data. At this time I started looking into the DOI resolution logs to see if we could get any interesting information out of them. This project, which became Chronograph, showed which domains were driving traffic to Crossref DOIs.

You can read about the latest results from this analysis in the “Where do DOI Clicks Come From” blog post.

Having this data tells us, amongst other things:

• where people are using DOIs in unexpected places
• where people are using DOIs in unexpected ways
• where we knew people were using DOIs but the links are more popular than we realised

As part of our Event Data work we’ve been investigating where DOI resolutions come from. A resolution could be someone clicking a DOI hyperlink, or a search engine spider gathering data or a publisher’s system performing its duties. Our server logs tell us every time a DOI was resolved and, if it was by someone using a web browser, which website they were on when they clicked the DOI. This is called a referral.

It’s here. After years of hard work and with a huge cast of characters involved, I am delighted to announce that you will now be able to instantly link to all published articles related to an individual clinical trial through the Crossmark dialogue box. Linked Clinical Trials are here! In practice, this means that anyone reading an article will be able to pull a list of both clinical trials relating to that article and all other articles related to those clinical trials – be it the protocol, statistical analysis plan, results articles or others – all at the click of a button.

TL;DR

By August 2016, Crossref will enable its members to assign Crossref DOIs to preprints. Preprint DOIs will be assigned by the Crossref member responsible for the preprint and that DOI will be different from the DOI assigned by the publisher to the accepted manuscript and version of record. Crossref’s display guidelines, tools and APIs will be modified in order to enable researchers to easily identify and link to the best available version of a document (BAV). We are doing this in order to support the changing publishing models of our members and in order to clarify the scholarly citation record.

Background

It can be a pain when companies rebrand as it usually requires some coordinated updating of wording and logos on websites, handouts, and slides. Nevermind changing habits and remembering to use the new names verbally in presentations. Why bother? As our infrastructure and services expanded, we sometimes branded services with no reference to Crossref. As explained in our The Logo Has Landed post last November, this has led to confusion, and it was not scalable nor sustainable.