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For the third year in a row, Crossref hosted a roundtable on research integrity prior to the Frankfurt book fair. This year the event looked at Crossmark, our tool to display retractions and other post-publication updates to readers.

Since the start of 2024, we have been carrying out a consultation on Crossmark, gathering feedback and input from a range of members. The roundtable discussion was a chance to check and refine some of the conclusions we’ve come to, and gather more suggestions on the way forward. As in previous years, we were able to include a range of organisations, which led to lively and interesting discussions. See below for the full participant list.

In the first half of this year we’ve been talking to our community about post-publication changes and Crossmark. When a piece of research is published it isn’t the end of the journey—it is read, reused, and sometimes modified. That’s why we run Crossmark, as a way to provide notifications of important changes to research made after publication. Readers can see if the research they are looking at has updates by clicking the Crossmark logo. They also see useful information about the editorial process, and links to things like funding and registered clinical trials. All of this contributes to what we call the integrity of the scholarly record.

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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You can’t go far on this blog without reading about the importance of registering rich metadata. Over the past year we’ve been encouraging all of our members to review the metadata they are sending us and find out which gaps need filling by looking at their Participation Report.

The metadata elements that are tracked in Participation Reports are mostly beyond the standard bibliographic information that is used to identify a work. They are important because they provide context: they tell the reader how the research was funded, what license it’s published under, and more about its authors via links to their ORCID profiles. And while this metadata is all available through our APIs, we also display much of it to readers through our Crossmark service.

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.

On September 1st we completed the final stage of the Crossmark v2.0 release and sent an email to all participating publishers containing instructions for upgrading. The first phase of v2.0 happened when we changed the design and layout of the Crossmark box back in May of this year. That allowed us to better display the growing set of additional metadata that our members are depositing, and saw the introduction of the Linked Clinical Trials feature.

TL;DR… In a few weeks, publishers can upgrade to the new and improved Crossmark 2.0 including a mobile-friendly pop-up box and new button. We will provide a new snippet of code for your landing pages, and we’ll support version v1.5 until March 2017.

We recently revealed a new look for the Crossmark box, bringing it up-to-date in design and offering extra space for more metadata. The new box pulls all of a publication’s Crossmark metadata into the same space, so readers no longer have to click between tabs. Linked Clinical Trials and author names (including ORCID iDs) now have their own sections alongside funding information and licenses. Feedback so far tells us that the new box is a vast improvement.

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. Readers can navigate between these four articles in three separate journals using the Crossmark functionality- a new set of links and routes for discovery have appeared.

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.

We will shortly be adding a new feature to Crossmark. In a section called “Clinical Trials” we will be using new metadata fields to link together all of the publications we know about that reference a particular clinical trial.

Most medical journals make clinical trial registration a prerequisite for publication. Trials should be registered with one of the fifteen WHO-approved public trial registries , or with clinicaltrials.gov which is run by the US National Library of Medicine. Once registered, a trial is assigned a clinical trial number (CTN) which is subsequently used to identify that trial in any publications that report on it.