Hello, readers! My name is Luis, and I’ve recently started a new role as the Technical Community Manager at Crossref, where I aim to bridge the gap between some of our services and our community awareness to enhance the Research Nexus. I’m excited to share my thoughts with you.
My journey from research to science communications infrastructure has been a gradual transition. As a Masters student in Biological Sciences, I often felt curious about the behind-the-scenes after a paper is submitted and published. For example, the fate of data being stored in the drawer or copied and forgotten in the hard drive after the paper is online. I come from a university that shares its name with at least three completely different universities in Latin America, and that also is pretty similar to another one with multiple offices across the region, which made me wonder if there was a standard way of identifying our affiliations. And then we have the topic of our names in hispanoamerica. We use two family names, and more often than not, we have a middle name (and then I could tell you stories about multiple-word middle names), which inevitably leads to authors having many combinations of full names and hyphenations.
Audrey Kenni-Nemaleu, Kora Korzec, Johanssen Obanda, Rosa Morais Clark – 2023 October 05
Our Perspectives blog series highlights different members of our diverse, global community at Crossref. We learn more about their lives and how they came to know and work with us, and we hear insights about the scholarly research landscape in their country, the challenges they face, and their plans for the future.
Notre série de blogs Perspectives met en lumière différents membres de la communauté internationale de Crossref. Nous en apprenons davantage sur leur vie et sur la manière dont ils ont appris à nous connaître et à travailler avec nous, et nous entendons parler du paysage de la recherche universitaire dans leur pays, des défis auxquels ils sont confrontés et de leurs projets pour l’avenir.
We were delighted to engage with over 200 community members in our latest Community update calls. We aimed to present a diverse selection of highlights on our progress and discuss your questions about participating in the Research Nexus. For those who didn’t get a chance to join us, I’ll briefly summarise the content of the sessions here and I invite you to join the conversations on the Community Forum.
You can take a look at the slides here and the recordings of the calls are available here.
Do you want to help make research communications better in all corners of the globe? Come and join the world of nonprofit open infrastructure and be part of improving the creation and sharing of knowledge.
We are recruiting for three new staff positions, all new roles and all fully remote and flexible. See below for more about our ethos and what it’s like working at Crossref.
🚀 Technical Community Manager, working with our ‘integrators’ so all repository/publishing platforms and plugins, all API users incl. managing contracts with subscribers, and generally helping a very nice bunch of RESTful API dabblers, both novice and intermediate. The goal is to offer more interactive engagement such as sprints, and more technical consultation to help the community with things like query efficiency, public data dump ingestion, etc. Thousands of users exist, from individual researchers and small academic tools to giant technology companies. Researching and analysing usage and building tools to meet their needs is key, so this role works closely with Product and R&D colleagues and likely needs a developer or developer-advocacy background.
The Publishers Learning And Community Exchange (PLACE) at theplace.discourse.group is a new online public forum created for organisations interested in adopting best practices in scholarly publishing. New scholarly publishers can access information from multiple agencies in one place, ask questions of the experts and join conversations with each other.
Scholarly publishing is an interesting niche of an industry – it appears at the same time ancillary and necessary to the practice and development of scholarship itself. The sooner and more easily a piece of academic work is shared, the greater the chance that others will find and build upon it. Many practices of the publishing industry have been developed to support discovery and integrity of the scholarship that produces shareable works, and as the landscape of scholarly communications constantly evolves, a number of agencies arose to promote and continuously update the standards and best practices within it.
At Crossref, we care a lot about the completeness and quality of metadata. Gathering robust metadata from across the global network of scholarly communication is essential for effective co-creation of the research nexus and making the inner workings of academia traceable and transparent. We invest time in community initiatives such as Metadata 20/20 and Better Together webinars. We encourage members to take time to look up their participation reports, and our team can support you if you’re looking to understand and improve any aspects of metadata coverage of your content.
What’s in the metadata matters because it is So.Heavily.Used.
You might be tired of hearing me say it but that doesn’t make it any less true. Our open APIs now see over 1 billion queries per month. The metadata is ingested, displayed and redistributed by a vast, global array of systems and services that in whole or in part are often designed to point users to relevant content. It’s also heavily used by researchers, who author the content that is described in the metadata they analyze. It’s an interconnected supply chain of users large and small, occasional and entirely reliant on regular querying.
Our Perspectives blog series highlights different members of our diverse, global community at Crossref. We learn more about their lives and how they came to know and work with us, and we hear insights about the scholarly research landscape in their country, the challenges they face, and their plans for the future.
In August 2022, the United States Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memo (PDF) on ensuring free, immediate, and equitable access to federally funded research (a.k.a. the “Nelson memo”). Crossref is particularly interested in and relevant for the areas of this guidance that cover metadata and persistent identifiers—and the infrastructure and services that make them useful.
Funding bodies worldwide are increasingly involved in research infrastructure for dissemination and discovery. While this post does respond to the OSTP guidelines point-by-point, the information here applies to all funding bodies in all countries. It will be equally useful for publishers and other systems that operate in the scholarly research ecosystem.
Preprints have become an important tool for rapidly communicating and iterating on research outputs. There is now a range of preprint servers, some subject-specific, some based on a particular geographical area, and others linked to publishers or individual journals in addition to generalist platforms. In 2016 the Crossref schema started to support preprints and since then the number of metadata records has grown to around 16,000 new preprint DOIs per month.
