Blog

At the end of last year, we were excited to announce our renewed commitment to community and the launch of three cross-functional programs to guide and accelerate our work. We introduced this new approach to work towards better cross-team alignment, shared responsibility, improved communication and learning, and make more progress on the things members need.

Looking back over 2024, we wanted to reflect on where we are in meeting our goals, and report on the progress and plans that affect you - our community of 21,000 organisational members as well as the vast number of research initiatives and scientific bodies that rely on Crossref metadata.

In this post, we will give an update on our roadmap, including what is completed, underway, and up next, and a bit about what’s paused and why. We’ll describe how we have been making resourcing and prioritisation decisions, including a revised management structure, and introduce new cross-functional program groups to collectively take the work forward more effectively.

Earlier this year, we reported on the roundtable discussion event that we had organised in Frankfurt on the heels of the Frankfurt Book Fair 2023. This event was the second in the series of roundtable events that we are holding with our community to hear from you how we can all work together to preserve the integrity of the scholarly record - you can read more about insights from these events and about ISR in this series of blogs.

Great news to share: our Executive Director, Ed Pentz, has been selected as the 2024 recipient of the Miles Conrad Award from the USA’s National Information Standards organisation (NISO). The award is testament to an individual’s lifetime contribution to the information community, and we couldn’t be more delighted that Ed was voted to be this year’s well-deserved recipient.

During the NISO Plus conference this week in Baltimore, USA, Ed accepted his award and delivered the 2024 Miles Conrad lecture, reflecting on how far open scholarly infrastructure has come, and the part he has played in this at Crossref and through numerous other collaborative initiatives.

Metadata about research objects and the relationships between them form the basis of the scholarly record: rich metadata has the potential to provide a richer context for scholarly output, and in particular, can provide trust signals to indicate integrity. Information on who authored a research work, who funded it, which other research works it cites, and whether it was updated, can act as signals of trustworthiness. Crossref provides foundational infrastructure to connect and preserve these records, but the creation of these records is an ongoing and complex community effort. Crossref has always shown a deep commitment to preserving the integrity of the scholarly record in an open and scalable manner.

Have you attended any of our annual meeting sessions this year? Ah, yes – there were many in this conference-style event. I, as many of my colleagues, attended them all because it is so great to connect with our global community, and hear your thoughts on the developments at Crossref, and the stories you share.

Let me offer some highlights from the event and a reflection on some emergent themes of the day. You can browse the recordings and slides archived on our Annual Meeting page.

We’ve been spending some time speaking to the community about our role in research integrity, and particularly the integrity of the scholarly record. In this blog, we’ll be sharing what we’ve discovered, and what we’ve been up to in this area.

We’ve discussed in our previous posts in the “Integrity of the Scholarly Record (ISR)” series that the infrastructure Crossref builds and operates (together with our partners and integrators) captures and preserves the scholarly record, making it openly available for humans and machines through metadata and relationships about all research activity. This Research Nexus makes it easier and faster for everyone involved in research performance, management, and communications to understand information in context and make decisions about the trustworthiness of organisations and their published research outputs. Conversely, it can make it harder for parties to pass off information as trustworthy when the information doesn’t include that context.

The integrity of the scholarly record is an essential aspect of research integrity. Every initiative and service that we have launched since our founding has been focused on documenting and clarifying the scholarly record in an open, machine-actionable and scalable form. All of this has been done to make it easier for the community to assess the trustworthiness of scholarly outputs. Now that the scholarly record itself has evolved beyond the published outputs at the end of the research process – to include both the elements of that process and its aftermath – preserving its integrity poses new challenges that we strive to meet… we are reaching out to the community to help inform these efforts.

This announcement has been in the works for some time, but everything seems to take longer when there is a pandemic going on, including finding time and headspace to plan out our strategy for the next few years.

Over the last year or so we have had our heads down addressing how to scale our 20-yr-old system and operation – and adapting to new ways of working. But we’ve also spent time talking to people, forging alliances, looking ahead, and making plans. So we’re happy to now let everyone know exactly what we’ve been up to lately, what we are heading towards in 2025, and what projects and programs are prioritised on our near-term agenda.

It’s me! Back in January I wrote, The one constant in Crossref’s 20 years has been change. This continues to be true, and the latest change is that I’m happy to say that I will be staying on as Executive Director of Crossref. At the recent Crossref board meeting, I rescinded my resignation and the board happily accepted this.