Ambassadors on Crossref

Do you want to be a Crossref Ambassador?

Vanessa Fairhurst — Thu, 14 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A re-cap

We kicked off our Ambassador Program in 2018 after consultation with our members, who told us they wanted greater support and representation in their local regions, time zones, and languages.

We also recognized that our membership has grown and changed dramatically over recent years and that it is likely to continue to do so. We now have over 16,000 members across 140 countries. As we work to understand what’s to come and ensure that we are meeting the needs of such an expansive community, having trusted local contacts we can work closely with is key to ensuring we are more proactive in engaging with new audiences and supporting existing members.

We know that Crossref still remains inaccessible to many around the world, and in line with our strategic goal to engage communities, we want to lower the barriers to participation. Our Ambassadors are essential to us achieving this goal as we look to develop additional content in languages other than English, identify organisations to work closer with to support local research ecosystems, provide more in-person and online events in local time zones and languages, and do more in terms of open support via our community forum.

What are our ambassadors up to now?

We currently have a team of 30 ambassadors, spanning Indonesia, Turkey, Ukraine, India, Bangladesh, Colombia, Mexico, Tanzania, Cameroon, Nigeria, Russia, Brazil, USA, UAE, Australia, China, Malaysia, Mongolia, Singapore, and Taiwan. The program is reviewed annually, welcoming new faces and sometimes sadly saying goodbye to others. This enables us to continue improving how we work together and ensures the Ambassador team remains a diverse group of committed individuals that have the time and support from Crossref to fully participate in the program.

Over the last 3 years, we’ve had some great successes alongside a few challenges, not least of which has been working across 15 countries during a pandemic. We have all experienced the additional personal and professional strain that COVID-19 brought along, including shifts in the way we work and anxieties in the way we go about our lives. Of course, it has also meant that all our interactions have been restricted to Zoom, which has many benefits but doesn’t compare to face-to-face interactions when it comes to building strong working relationships, particularly across language and cultural barriers.

Despite this, our ambassador team helped us run 15 multi-lingual webinars last year, including Content Registration in Arabic, Getting Started with Books in Brazilian Portuguese, and an Introduction to Crossref in Chinese. They also helped us translate various materials and content into other languages, provided feedback on our new developments, took part in beta-testing, provided support to members on our community forum, and participated in calls to contribute to the program’s future.

I love helping people get to know Crossref’s products and services.

I was proud to work as Ambassador and give an online Chinese webinar to introduce Crossref and the services in Oct. 2021.

I am glad to be of help to Spanish speakers who are not able to grasp all the Crossref information correctly because of a language barrier or because they don’t have the time to read and explore all the information available.

Muy contento de poder formar parte como Embajador y con ello poder promover el uso y aprovechamiento de los productos de Crossref.

I feel so blessed meeting with many diverse friends in Crossref ranging from Europe to Asia continents.

Feeling happy by giving back knowledge to my regional community.

The future is ours to co-create

As countries are slowly dropping restrictions and we are taking our first cautious steps into a potential ‘post-pandemic’ world, our Community Engagement and Communication team has been looking at what this means for our activities in 2022 and beyond.

A big part of this is identifying local communities and groups to engage with to learn what challenges our members are facing, what barriers to participation in Crossref still exist, and how we can overcome these together. This practice is also fundamental to our vision of the Research Nexus––a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organisations, people, things, and actions––which can only become a reality if everyone can fully contribute to the scholarly record.

As such, we would like to expand our Ambassador Program and particularly encourage applications from those based in the following countries:

Argentina
Chile
Canada
Croatia
El Salvador
Germany
Ghana

Iraq
Kenya
Nicaragua
Nigeria
Peru
Poland
Vietnam

By being one of our ambassadors, you will become a key part of the Crossref community; our first port of call for updates or to test out new products or services, become well connected to our wide network of members, and work closely with us to make scholarly communications better for all.

If you are interested in participating, please read more on our Ambassadors page. You can submit an application letting us know why you are interested, how you work with Crossref currently, and a bit more about yourself. We will then follow up with you to discuss your ideas and the program in more detail.

The Ambassador Program is quite flexible, so you can choose how and when you contribute based on your comfort levels and other commitments. However, it does come with some minimum requirements of attending two team calls a year, being responsive and letting us know if anything is preventing you from participating, and completing our annual feedback survey so we can continue to improve the program going forward. A good level of English and a firm understanding of our services and systems at Crossref is also a must to participate fully in the program and provide support to others in your local community. If you have just joined Crossref or want to learn more about how to work with us, then the Ambassador program may be too much for you right now, but our documentation has lots of helpful information and step-by-step guides, and you could also look at attending one of our events or joining our community forum.

If you have any questions, you can always contact us at feedback@crossref.org. We look forward to hearing from you!

Community Outreach in 2020

Vanessa Fairhurst — Mon, 29 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

2020 hasn’t been quite what any of us had imagined. The pandemic has meant big adjustments in terms of working; challenges for parents balancing childcare and professional lives; anxieties and tensions we never had before; the strain of potentially being away from co-workers, friends, and family for a prolonged period of time. Many have suffered job losses and around the world, many have sadly lost their lives to the virus.

I’ve been very fortunate that my family and friends remain in good health and very grateful to work for a supportive and caring organisation such as Crossref. I don’t usually work from home every day, so adjusting to the ‘new normal’ these last few months has been difficult at times. I certainly miss seeing my colleagues in the Oxford office day-to-day, and now have a new appreciation for the challenges our remote working members of staff face, particularly when it comes to feeling quite isolated at times. I’ve also learnt about the importance of good communication and building in greater flexibility to projects, especially when you are not able to see people face-to-face.

My role as Outreach Manager is all about people; it often involves organising and attending industry events as well as running our own educational days, which we call our Crossref LIVE events. The global health crisis brought the majority of international travel to an abrupt halt, something the environment may thank us for, but that also requires a dramatic reimagining of how we can effectively and empathetically engage with our members and the wider community.

As our planned in-person events have been postponed, for now, we converted our LIVE events into an online format, which we have so far run in Arabic, Spanish, Korean and Brazilian Portuguese with help from our Ambassadors and technical support team. We have had better attendance and engagement than we ever dreamed, with lots of thoughtful questions and positive feedback. While an online format has its limitations it also brings new opportunities, particularly by enabling us to reach many members who would not be able to attend a physical event. We have more in the works for the rest of the year, so keep a lookout on our webinar and events pages.

We have all had to adapt to new ways of living and working this year, but vital research continues to be done and new content continues to be published. We embrace new ways of engaging with our international membership so we can continue to support them in their roles and in working with our systems, despite the uncertain circumstances we find ourselves in.

Lessons learned:

Online events need to be much shorter than physical ones. Zoom fatigue is real, no one can stay focused for long periods of time at the screen.
Flexibility is key, running events in multiple languages and time-zones make them more accessible for a geographically diverse audience, but also ensuring recordings and other materials are readily available means people can engage with the content in their own time. And they do. Our Spanish LIVE on May 19 saw 335 people attend, and a further 304 (so far) watch the recording in their own time.
Don’t forget to build in time for breaks.
Although it’s impossible to replicate the natural human interaction that occurs at a physical event, an online format can still bring hearts as well as minds together. Break-out rooms, polls, and clever use of chat functionality all help to build engagement and turn a passive audience into active participants.
People love an online quiz.
Partner with others –– an interesting guest speaker can bring a whole new dynamic to your planned content.
Take the opportunity to be a little more experimental. We can’t do business as usual right now, so embrace new ideas and see what works!

Hoping you all stay safe and healthy, and that we can meet again in person in 2021.

Here’s to year one!

Vanessa Fairhurst — Fri, 22 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Our Ambassador Program is now one year old, and we are thrilled at how the first 12 months have gone. In 2018 we welcomed 16 ambassadors to the team, based in Australia, Brazil, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, UAE, Ukraine, USA, and Venezuela.

Our ambassadors are volunteers with a good knowledge of Crossref and the wider scholarly community, they are well connected and passionate about the work that we do. Participating in the ambassador program is complementary to people’s existing roles and enables those who already work with Crossref to have a mechanism to feed back to us and to provide support for their communities.

We reflected on the successes and challenges of the first 12 months and discovered quite a lot has been achieved so far.

The Ambassador Program better equips me to support researchers to conduct outreach and collaborate in multidisciplinary discovery!

– Woei Fuh Wong, Research 123, Singapore

Within the framework of the Ambassador Crossref program, I ran a seminar, webinar, and held several meetings in Ukrainian scientific organisations.

– Andrii Zolkover, Internauka, Ukraine

In my role as ambassador, I am able to provide a greater level of support in Russian. Alongside translated materials, we have also received over 400 tickets to our Russian electronic support system and made over 300 consultations by phone.

– Maxim Mitrofanov, NEICON, Russia

Being an ambassador has enabled me to increase knowledge of Crossref within my community.

– Edilson Damasio, Department of Mathematics Library of State University of Maringá-UEM, Brazil

The ambassador program has helped in vastly raising the awareness of Crossref and its services all over the world. Based in the Middle East, I see the need in the Arab region to know more about Crossref in their mother tongue (Arabic). The program has proven success and its positive impact is tangible.

– Mohamad Mostafa, Knowledge E, UAE

Highlights

Over the course of 2018, there were a number of big achievements which would not have been possible without the help of our ambassadors.

Due to your feedback, we’re very keen to expand the level of multi-language support we offer our diversifying community. In addition to translating key messages, slide decks, and other educational materials, our ambassadors (and some members - thanks also!) helped us in the production of a series of short videos. We now have videos available for each of the Crossref services in nine languages including English, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, and Bahasa Indonesia. You can see in the chart below, that although our English videos have the most views (this is the default language), others have also experienced a lot of visitors, particularly notable are the Chinese and Spanish language videos. This underscores the importance of further support in non-English languages, as our series of multi-lingual webinars also demonstrated.

In 2018 we ran webinars in Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish and Arabic. Several ambassadors have taken a lead in running these webinars in their local languages with assistance from Crossref staff on producing materials and answering questions on the day. Spanish language webinars saw record numbers of attendees from a range of different countries, and our Russian webinar recordings have been viewed over 200 times. We will be continuing to offer more webinars in different time zones and languages, and the recordings are always available for anyone who can’t attend on the day.

Our ambassadors have also been helping us improve and expand our LIVE local events. Last year we held events in Japan, South Africa, Russia, Germany, Brazil and India. Ambassadors help by providing recommendations on venues, accommodation, guest speakers, or even attending and speaking at the event themselves. Some run their own Crossref events which we can help provide materials and also represent Crossref at related industry events in their region. You may have had the chance to meet some of our ambassadors at our annual event in Toronto last November as well.

As our ambassadors are our representatives, acting as our eyes and ears in the wider community, it is important that they are kept up to date with new developments and have good opportunities to report back to us. The ambassador team has participated in beta-testing of a number of new initiatives including our new Metadata Manager and Participation Reports and our upcoming Community Forum. By providing feedback from their own user perspective and from how they anticipate those in their communities will view and use these tools, it enables us get better insights into how an initiative might work before launching it more widely.

Future Plans

Initial feedback on the program has been overwhelmingly positive, both from the ambassadors themselves and the wider Crossref community, so we’re looking at what we can do to hone the program over time. In 2019 we will be welcoming some more ambassadors to the team to further support our global community. We want to support our ambassadors, so we don’t foresee the group growing to the point where there are too many ambassadors for us to be able to engage with. You can read about the team and where they are based, as well as all about the new ambassadors we have welcomed so far this year, on Our Ambassadors page.

This year our ambassadors will be involved when we launch our online community forum (more to come on that soon). They’re already helping with the task-force that is advising on our new documentation, and we’ll be providing them with further training on Crossref tools and services. We also have more webinars and LIVE locals in the pipeline. Keep an eye on our webinars and events pages for more details as they come.

So a final thank you to our ambassador team - it has been great to work with you over the last year, and we look forward to how we can continue to work together!

Crossref LIVE and local (to you)

Vanessa Fairhurst — Wed, 18 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The last few months have been busy for the Crossref community outreach team. We’ve been out and about from Cape Town to Ulyanovsk—and many places in between—talking at ‘LIVE locals’ to members about all things metadata. Our LIVE locals are one-day events, held around the world—but local to you—that provide both deeper insight into Crossref, and information on our services and how to benefit from them. These events are always free to attend, and whether you are a long-established member, totally new, or not even a member at all, we welcome you all to join us.

At our most recent events we collaborated with some fantastic organisations and welcomed attendees from a variety of backgrounds including editors, publishers, service providers, researchers and other metadata users.

South Africa

In April Chuck Koscher, Director of Technology, and I travelled to South Africa for two LIVE locals, one in Pretoria and the other in Cape Town—and both in collaboration with the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf). ASSAf also provided two excellent speakers, Nadine Wubbeling (ASSAf) and Pierre de Villiers (AOSIS), who shared their experiences with Crossref and presented valuable insights into the work that they do.

Delivering events for a varied audience like this means there are often differing levels of knowledge and experience. So, to make sure everyone benefited from our sessions, we covered the different ways you can work with the Crossref deposit system as an XML pro, or an absolute beginner. This included a live demonstration of our new deposit tool Metadata Manager (currently in beta) which should help those less technically-minded people (like myself), and be a big improvement upon our current web deposit form.

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The day ended with a technical session, where attendees discussed specific issues they needed help with, which mainly focussed on retrieving metadata in the Crossref system, interpreting reports, and support with XML.

Images left to right: Dr. Pierre de Villiers talks about the Crossref Experience at AOSIS, and the stunning scenery of Table Mountain provided a nice backdrop to our Cape Town event.

Russia

Just back from a few days in Russia 🇷🇺. We ran a @CrossrefOrg LIVE local in Ulyanovsk for 60 editors, made plans to do more education and outreach in the region and caught a #FifaWorldCup2018 game... pic.twitter.com/GSdNEujJXa
— Rachael Lammey (@rachaellammey) June 22, 2018

The World Cup wasn’t the only big event in Russia last month. That’s right, we were there too—with our very first Russian LIVE local! On the 19th June, 60 attendees from a range of academic and publishing institutions joined us at The Ulyanovsk State Pedagogical University. Rachael Lammey and I introduced Crossref, the role of identifiers, and how to register different resource types with us. We also discussed the use and importance of providing accurate and comprehensive metadata, and shared some interesting use cases.

Guest speaker Professor Zinaida Kuznetsova talked about her experiences of working with Crossref and the benefits of being a member. This was complimented by a talk by fellow guest speaker Maxim Mitrofanov from Crossref sponsoring organisation, NEICON. Maxim explained how NEICON works with Crossref, and provide services for the smaller members they support. Maxim is also one of our Crossref Ambassadors - and he will be running more Russian webinars on our services in the near future, so look out for those listed on our webinar page!

We’d like to say a big thank you to the team at Ulyanovsk State Pedagogical University for their support and help with the event. Also thanks to our fantastic interpreters who helped us immensely by relaying the information to the audience in Russian, as well as helping to translate and answer questions.

Germany

Najko Jahn from Göttingen State and University Library talks about how he uses @CrossrefOrg metadata in his work #CRLIVEGermany pic.twitter.com/Y89ZkBMoSh
— Vanessa Fairhurst (@NessaFairhurst) June 27, 2018

One week later and we were in Hannover, Germany. Crossref’s Laura Wilkinson, Joe Wass and Jennifer Kemp joined me for this event, which was held in collaboration with the German National Library of Science and Technology (Technische Informationsbibliothek - TIB at their impressive venue in on the 27th June.

The day focused on all things metadata - how it can be used and why good metadata is important. This included taking a look at our new Participation Reports tool and a fascinating talk from guest speaker Najko Jahn from Göttingen State and University Library on the benefits of using Crossref metadata for libraries and scientists.

Datacite’s Britta Dreyer also spoke about how DataCite and Crossref support research data sharing, before Joe Wass and I presented updates to the collaborative Org ID project and Event Data service. The day concluded with us sharing more ways to participate in Crossref and other community initiatives.

Questions? Вопросов? Fragen?

Over the course of these events we were asked many questions—and here are some of the more interesting/common ones posed to the team:

Q. Do I have to join Crossref directly, or can I join as part of a group of smaller organisations?
A. You don’t have to be a direct member, you can join via a Sponsor. See our sponsors page for a list of Sponsors in your area, and for more information on becoming a Sponsor.

Q. Can I link translations of works together?
A. Yes, a journal article published in two languages can each be assigned its own DOI, and then linked in the metadata using the relationship type TranslationOf from our schema.

Q. Does the web deposit form support depositing abstracts and references?
A. No, it doesn’t. However, our new Metadata Manager tool does and if you are in interested in trying it out in beta, let us know.

Q. Can I share your new Participation Report tool with my colleagues?
A. Yes you can! It’s open and available for use, just come along and search for a member.

Q. Can I also register book chapters, dissertations and other record types under the same prefix?
A. Yes you can. You can register any of the different resource types we support under one prefix.

Q. Will you be doing more events in this region in future?
A. We hope so, and we are always happy to hear from those who wish to collaborate on future events, so just contact us to get involved.

Crossref ambassador program

Vanessa Fairhurst — Thu, 04 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

We have listened to the feedback from you, our members, and you’ve told us of a need for local experts to provide support in your timezone and language, and to act as liaisons with the Crossref team. You’ve also asked for an increased number of training events both online and in person close to you, and for more representatives from Crossref at regional industry events.

We want to make sure we can reach members around the globe, and as such, a wide team of people is required who are knowledgeable in the languages, cultures, and member needs in a variety of countries. This is why we’re launching our Ambassador Program.

What are Crossref Ambassadors?

Crossref Ambassadors are volunteers who work within the international scholarly research community in a variety of different roles such as librarians, researchers or editors to name but a few. They are individuals who are well connected, value the work that Crossref does and are passionate about improving scholarly communication and the role Crossref plays within this system.

Some of the activities our ambassadors will undertake:

Staying up-to-speed with Crossref developments, for example, by attending webinars and maintaining regular check-ins with the Crossref team.
Engaging in the online community platform; providing feedback, joining in discussions and helping other members to resolve issues posted to the group.
Writing blog posts, or contributing to newsletters.
Participating in beta-testing of new products and services.
Helping with local LIVE events; for example, providing recommendations on speakers or venues, helping with logistics and presenting at the event.
Helping with the translation of Crossref material and content into local languages.
Running webinars on different Crossref services in local languages.
Running training sessions locally with Crossref members
Representing Crossref at relevant industry events

It is important that our ambassadors enjoy the work they are doing with Crossref by contributing in ways in which they feel comfortable, according to their interests, skills and the time they feel they want to contribute. For this reason, the role comes with a high degree of flexibility.

We see our ambassadors as valued members of the Crossref network and will provide them with:

A dedicated contact for any upcoming news, or to share ideas, queries or concerns.
Help with content for proposal calls, presentations, training and written articles.
Crossref materials and giveaways (plus ambassador-branded materials).
Personal endorsement via Crossref
Training on Crossref services and on wider relevant skills as necessary.
First look at new Crossref developments
Certification from Crossref on ambassador and training status.
Personal ambassador logo or badge for use on email, website and profile on the Crossref online community forum (launching later this year).

Crossref Ambassadors will become an increasingly key part of the Crossref community - the first port of call for updates or to test out new products or services, and the eyes and ears within the local academic community - working closely with Crossref to make scholarly communications better for all.

Meet our first ambassadors!

Jae Hwa Chang has been working at infoLumi as a manuscript editor in academic journals since 2010. Prior to joining infoLumi, she was a medical librarian at International Vaccine Institute and was engaged in medical information management and service. Her interests in information control and management started when she was doing work indexing newspaper articles at JoonAng Ilbo. She was fascinated by Crossref’s persistent efforts and contribution in developing new services to “make content easy to find, cite, link, and assess” and has been introducing them to Korean scholarly publishing communities. Jae earned her MA in Library and Information Science from Ewha Womans University, Korea. She serves as a vice chair of the Committee on Planning and Administration at the Korean Council of Science Editors. In her spare time, she enjoys traveling and experiencing new cultures.

장재화는 2010년부터 인포루미에서 의학학술지 원고편집을 담당하고 있다. 그전에는 국제백신연구소 도서관에서 사서로 일하면서 의학정보와 학술지논문 유통에 관심을 가졌으며, 그에 앞서서는 중앙일보에서 신문기사 DB 색인을 하면서 정보관리와 활용에 대해 연구하였다. 정보의 검색, 평가, 활용을 위해 꾸준히 새로운 서비스를 개발하는 Crossref에 매력을 느꼈고, 그 서비스들을 한국의 학술지 출판 관계자들에게 소개해왔다. 이화여자대학교에서 문헌정보학을 전공하였고, 한국과학학술지편집인협의회 기획운영위원회 부위원장을 맡고 있다. 여행과 다양한 문화 체험을 즐긴다.

Edilson Demasio has been a librarian since 1995, with PhD. in Information Science at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro-UFRJ/IBICT. He works in the Department of Mathematics Library of State University of Maringá-UEM, Brazil. With 20 years’ experience in scientific metadata and publishing. His expertise is various including knowledge in scientific communication, Crossref services, research integrity, misconduct prevention in science, publishing on Latin America, biomedical information, OJS-Open Journal Systems, Open Access journals, scientific journals quality and indexing, and scientific bibliographical databases. He is enthusiastic about presenting and disseminating information about Crossref services to his community in Brazil and working within the community, exchanging ideas and experience.

Eu sou bibliotecário desde 1995, Doutor em Ciência da Informação pela Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro-UFRJ/convênio IBICT. Eu trabalho na Biblioteca do Departamento de Matemática da Universidade Estadual de Maringá-UEM. Com 20 anos de experiência em metadados científicos e editoração, entre outros. Meus conhecimentos são diversos sobre comunicação científica, cientometria, metadados XML, serviços Crossref, integridade em pesquisa, prevenção de más condutas na ciência, editoração, editoração na América Latina, informação biomédica, OJS-Open Journal Systems, revistas de Acesso Aberto, qualidade de periódicos científicos e indexação, bases de dados bibliográficas. Gosto de disseminar meu conhecimento a outras regiões e pessoas e de trabalhar em comunidade junto as instituições e outros países, de planejar novas apresentações, de trocar experiências como palestrante ou convidado e trabalhar na disseminação do conhecimento para todos.

Lauren Lissaris has dedicated much of her career to the dissemination of valuable content on a robust platform. She takes pride in her achievements as the Digital Content Manager at JSTOR. JSTOR provides access to more than 10 million academic journal articles, books, and primary sources in 75 disciplines. JSTOR is part of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organisation helping the academic community use digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways.

Lauren successfully works with all aspects of journal content to effectively assist publishers with their digital content. This includes everything from XML markup, Content Registration/multiple resolution, and HTML website updates. Lauren has been involved in hosting current content on JSTOR since the program’s launch in 2010. She continues to collaborate with organisations to successfully contribute to the evolution of digital content. The natural spread from journals to books has set Lauren up for developing and planning the book Content Registration program for JSTOR. She is a member of the Crossref Books Advisory Group and she helped successfully pilot Crossref’s new Co-access book deposit feature.

If you want to find out more information on the Ambassador Program, or you would like to express your interest in being an ambassador, you can either contact us at [feedback@crossref.org](mailto:feedback@crossref.org?subject=Ambassador Program) or complete our online form.