Member Briefing on Crossref

Express your interest in joining our Board of Directors

Lucy Ofiesh — Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Crossref Nominating Committee is inviting expressions of interest to join the Board of Directors of Crossref for the term starting in January 2027. The committee will gather responses from those interested and create the slate of candidates that our membership will vote on in an election in September.

Expressions of interest will be due Monday, June 22, 2026

This is an exciting time to join the board, as we have a number of active projects underway. Our focus is on how our community and metadata can contribute to ensuring the integrity of the scholarly record. We are redesigning our content system to better serve the changing needs of our community. We’re broadening our metadata record to capture richer funding and institutional affiliations. We envision a future where the scholarly record prioritizes relationships between research outputs to build a holistic research nexus. The board helps guide this work.

About our board elections

The board is elected through the “one member, one vote” policy wherein every member organization of Crossref has a single vote to elect representatives to the Crossref board. Board terms are for three years, and this year, there are seven seats open for election.

The board maintains a balance of seats, with eight seats for smaller members and eight seats for larger members (based on total revenue to Crossref). This is an effort to ensure that the scholarly community’s diversity of experiences and perspectives is represented in decisions made at Crossref.

This year, we will elect one large seat (membership tiers $600 and above) and six small member seats (membership tiers $550 and below). You don’t need to specify which seat you are applying for; we will provide that information to the Nominating Committee.

The board election takes place online and will open in September, with results announced at the annual meeting on October 22nd. New members will begin their term in January 2027.

About the Nominating Committee

The Nominating Committee reviews the expressions of interest and selects a slate of candidates for election. This year’s committee includes:

Nick Lindsay*, MIT Press, chair
Oscar Donde*, Pan Africa Science Journal
Shaharima Parvin, East West University
Nicolas Mejia Torres, Universidad de la Sabana
Amanda Ward*, Taylor & Francis

Staff liaison: Lucy Ofiesh, Crossref

(*) indicates Crossref board member

Board roles and responsibilities

Crossref’s services provide a central infrastructure for scholarly communications. Crossref’s board helps shape the future of our services and by extension, impacts the broader scholarly ecosystem. We are looking for board members to contribute their experience and perspective.

The role of the board at Crossref is to provide strategic and financial oversight of the organization, as well as guidance to the Executive Director and the executive team, with the key responsibilities being:

Setting the strategic direction for the organization;
Providing financial oversight; and
Approving new policies and services.

The board is representative of our membership base and guides the staff leadership team on trends affecting scholarly communications.

The work of the board takes place in board meetings and board committees. Board members attend four meetings each year that typically take place in January, March, July, and November. January, March, and November board meetings are held virtually, and all committee meetings take place virtually. The July meeting is in-person and takes place in a variety of international locations; travel support is provided when needed. Each board member sits on at least one Crossref committee. Care is taken to accommodate the wide range of time zones in which our board members live.

While the expressions of interest are specific to an individual, the seat that is elected to the board belongs to the member organization. The primary board member also names an alternate who may attend meetings in the event that the primary board member is unable to. There is no personal financial obligation to sit on the board. The member organization must remain in good standing.

Board members are expected to be comfortable assuming the responsibilities listed above and to prepare and participate in board meeting discussions.

Who can apply to join the board?

Any active member of Crossref can apply to join the board. Crossref membership is open to organizations that produce content, such as academic presses, commercial publishers, standards organizations, and research funders. If you’re considering submitting an expression of interest to serve on our Board of Directors, attend our drop-in session on 17 June at 12:00 UTC.

What does the committee look for?

The committee looks for skills and experience that will complement the rest of the board. Candidates from countries and regions not currently reflected on the board are strongly encouraged to apply. Successful candidates often have some or all of these characteristics:

Demonstrate a commitment to or understanding of our strategic agenda or the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure;
Have expertise that may be underrepresented on the board currently;
Hold decision-making positions in their organizations;
Have experience with governance and/or community involvement;
Represent member organizations that are active in the scholarly communications ecosystem;
Demonstrate metadata best practices as shown in the member’s participation report

The committee aims to build a slate that represents a range of professional backgrounds, global diversity, and organizational sizes and types

What does the application evaluation process look like?

Open call for board interest, May 22nd to June 22nd:

Any active member in good standing can apply for a seat on the board. This includes direct members, sponsored members, and GEM members. Sponsoring organisations, service providers, and Metadata Plus subscribers who are not also members are not eligible to sit on the board.

Application review, June through August:

Applications will be reviewed by our Nominating Committee. We also gather internal information about the member organization, such as metadata habits, history with Crossref, any previous experience in Crossref working groups or community initiatives.

Brief interviews with final candidates, August:

The committee will hold brief virtual interviews with the top candidates before finalising the slate of nominations.

Announcement of the slate and election, September:

The committee will announce the final slate of candidates in September and the online election will begin, culminating at the annual meeting at the end of October.

How to apply

Please click here to submit your expression of interest.

The goal of the expressions of interest is to get to know the candidates. We will not use AI tools to evaluate your application. We ask that if you use AI tools to assist in writing your application that you please disclose how you’ve used them. We want to hear your original ideas, but understand the tools may be used to refine and polish your statement, provide support for translation, proofread for grammar, and improve readability.

Please contact me with any questions at voting@crossref.org

March 2026 board meeting summary

Lucy Ofiesh — Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We’re providing a summary of the board’s March 2026 meeting. At the meeting, the board reviewed progress in our key programs and initiatives, the strategic outlook for 2026, filled a vacancy on the Board, considered an additional legal entity for Crossref, and reviewed our governance structures. The resolutions are available on the dedicated section of our website, which also lists the members of the Board and offers further information about our governance.

Board business

January board minutes

The board voted unanimously to approve the minutes of the January 2026 board meeting.

March board meeting agenda

The board voted unanimously to approve the agenda for the March 2026 meeting. The board then voted to approve the consent agenda, which includes a package of routine board business items.

Vote to appoint a director to a vacated seat

Lisa Schiff of California Digital Library (CDL) stepped down from the board at the end of February, and CDL decided not to name a replacement. The board voted unanimously to take the most recent member election results and appoint Oscar Donde of Pan Africa Science Journal to fill the seat. Oscar will serve out the remaining years on CDL’s term, which is to the end of 2027.

2025 year in review & framing the strategy for 2026

Ed Pentz and Lucy Ofiesh presented a review of 2025, including our financial performance, member participation, and growth of metadata records, connections, and usage. Crossref ended 2025 in a healthy financial position, exceeding revenue by 6% and saving 3% on expenses as compared to the budget. Member participation and statistics on the metadata records are captured in our State of Research Nexus report.

We then turned the discussion to the strategic issues in focus for 2026. Ed discussed the projects in focus for each of the three program groups: Co-creation and Community Trends, Contributing to the Research Nexus, and Open and Sustainable Operations. Details of these programs can be found on the strategic agenda page and public roadmap.

The board discussed the ongoing work of the project known as Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability (RCFS). This multi-year effort, which began in 2023, aims to make our fees more accessible, equitable, and simpler to understand and operate. In January 2026, we rolled out a new, lower membership fee, removed little-used discounts that contributed to fee complexity, extended our GEM program to include zero-fee membership and content registration for 18 additional countries, and introduced a two-year fee waiver on back-year grants. In 2026, we are monitoring the effects of these changes and initiating the review of content registration fees.

We provided an update on community investments we’ve made in line with the use-of-surplus funds framework that the board adopted in November 2025. To date, Crossref has committed USD $447,000 to several organisations and initiatives that share our mission.

Establishing an additional legal entity in Europe

The board discussed the decision to broaden our operations by setting up an entity in Europe, specifically an AISBL (International Non-Profit Association) in Belgium. This entity will sit alongside our existing organization and share the same name, mission, and services. They will be connected through a managed agreement. This will help build organisational resiliency, create the capacity for future operations if needed, and reflect the global nature of our membership.

The board discussed the structure of the entities. The entity will be organized so that it may conduct business in the future in a way that maintains equal governance with the primary entity. Concurrently, the team is reviewing storing a back up of the system in the EU for redundancy purposes. A board discussion ensued, followed by a vote.

The board voted unanimously to approve proceeding with establishing a Crossref AISBL to sit alongside the primary entity and serve the goals described above.

Governance review

Periodically, the board conducts a review of the organization’s stakeholder governance. The board discussed the strengths and areas for improvement in the current board structure and options to adjust it in the future. Discussions were preliminary to scope the review and will continue in more detail at the July board meeting.

There being no other business, the meeting was adjourned.

Introducing board meeting summaries, starting with the January 2026 meeting

Lucy Ofiesh — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In an ongoing effort to make more of our operations transparent, we have decided to start sharing summaries of our board meetings on the blog. We already post our board resolutions, but the summaries will give a bit more information on what the board discusses that may or may not show up on the list of resolutions.

We do observe the Chatham House Rule for our board discussions, so we won’t disclose who says what, and there will still be executive sessions that discuss confidential matters that we can’t share. But those discussions constitute a minority of the time we spend together, so the summaries will cover much of what the board discusses.

Let’s start with our recent meeting in January, which is online and lasts one hour.

Crossref Board of Directors Meeting Executive Summary, January 22nd, 2026

The January meeting is held primarily to conduct board business at the start of the board term.

Board business

The board conducted elections for this year’s board leadership, and approved each of the following positions:

Board Chair: Marin Dacos
Board Treasurer: James Phillpotts
Executive Committee members (3 seats): Rose L’Huillier; Rebecca Wambua; and Aaron Wood
Board Secretary and Assistant Secretary: Lucy Ofiesh, Ed Pentz
Audit Committee Chair: Ashley Towne
Nominating Committee Chair: Nick Lindsay

The board then turned to review and adopt the minutes from the November board meeting, December board meeting, and October executive committee meeting.

The board discussed a proposal to update the financial authorization approval levels, a set of guidelines established by the board to define the limits on the approval of expenses that are part of Crossref’s Financial and Accounting Operating Policies. The board adopted changes to the policy that would bring it in line with the scale of Crossref’s business operations.

Looking ahead to 2026

Ed Pentz gave a brief overview of what the board can expect at the 2026 board meetings and reviewed topics that will be discussed at each meeting.

The board next meets in early March.

Reduction of Grant DOI registration fees: a boost for the Research Nexus

Ginny Hendricks — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce that—effective 1st January 2026—we have made two changes to grant record registration fees that aim to accelerate adoption of Crossref’s Grant Linking System (GLS) and provide a two-year window of opportunity to increase the number and availability of open persistent grant identifiers and boost the matching of relationships with research objects.

Launched in 2019 with close input from several funders and other infrastructure organisations, the GLS primarily offers the ability to create and steward Crossref Grant DOIs, along with several benefits such as dedicated grant/award metadata like funding type, value, contributors, and projects, as well as hosted landing pages, tools to create and update metadata, and of course both member-asserted and Crossref-automatic matching of relationships within the global corpus of 180 million other research objects. Essentially, we need to identify what research objects are produced as a result of the award, and these objects could be articles, preprints, data, code, blogs, posters, and more.

This connected network is what we call the Research Nexus, essential for exploring research activity in general, as well as evaluating reach and return on funding and other support like use of facilities/equipment.

A fee reduction and a two-year fee waiver pilot

Following a review by our Membership & Fees Committee, the Board met in December and passed two related motions:

Current-Year (CY) grant registration fee has been cut in half to match other record types: The board approved the adjustment of the Current-Year (CY) grant registration fee down from $2.00 to $1.00 USD, effective 1st January 2026.
Back-Year (BY) grant registration fee is waived through 2027: The board approved a time-limited fee waiver as a pilot for Back-Year (BY) grant registration fees, bringing that per-record fee down from $0.30 to $0.00 for 2026 and 2027.

We aim to boost registration of Back-Year (BY) records and accelerate the growth of the Research Nexus with millions more grant<->output matches. During the course of the two-year pilot, the Membership & Fees Committee and our fee project work that started in 2023 and also brought in other fee reductions, will consider more adjustments across BY registration fees for the benefit of members beyond just funders and beyond just grants.

All Board motions are publicly available and we encourage questions from the community about our governance processes and the decisions on our members’ behalf; email us via feedback@crossref.org anytime, or post on the forum.

Supercharging the Grant Linking System

Leading up to the GLS launch in 2019, we worked with a group of funders and metadata experts to inform the design and implementation of the new service, including a funder governance and fees working group. That was seven years ago, and our Funder Advisory Group now includes nearly 100 funding community representatives the GLS has grown to almost 50 funder members that have registered more than 185,000 open grant metadata records. But they are mostly research councils and agencies or charities from Europe and North America, and we know that for a truly comprehensive and interconnected Research Nexus, more needs to be done to include organisations from all parts of the world. The other key driver is simply to boost more metadata connections; the more grant metadata we gather, the better we can match it to all kinds of research outputs, and this metadata directly feeds thousands of services available in our community, from Dimensions and Scopus, to OA.Report and OpenAlex, as well as funders’ own analytics tools. See our recent report about the latest dataset and of course use api.crossref.org directly.

Relatedly, we just added a new Grant DOI field to our schema for all record types, to give our members a precise and accurate way of capturing funding metadata for all research outputs. With the new lower CY registration fee and a pilot waiver of BY fees for grant records, we hope to boost the creation of more Grant DOIs by more funders from more parts of the world—so that others also see and can build on the momentum and reuse the data in their own tools and services. All actors need to play their role, and Crossref’s part is in running the global linking infrastructure at scale, connecting research objects and making them openly available while ensuring that the barriers for the registration, use and reuse of metadata remain as low as possible.

We feel we’re at a tipping point that only needs a small nudge to truly scale the Grant Linking System.

By waiving BY fees entirely for two years, we’re hoping to see members fill in historical data and create more comprehensive grant<->outcome connections. There is often a long period of time between funding being awarded, and the resulting research objects being generated and communicated. That is why historical grant metadata is so important; we think that there will be many funding outcome relationships and insights just waiting to be uncovered!

Why give funders a fee break and not others?

We’re not ruling out this kind of fee incentive in future for other members and other object types, but that needs more analysis (which we plan to do) and right now, the relatively small number of grant records, combined with a growing need for this kind of metadata, means the changes are small enough to have almost no impact on Crossref’s healthy financial position.

This decision is consistent with the goals of our Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability (RCFS) to review our fees to make sure they are equitable and clear, while ensuring Crossref retains a sustainable business model. Our fees can encourage or discourage the community to participate in Crossref. The RCFS project has also resulted in the creation of a lower membership fee tier for the very lowest-resourced members, and the tidying up of things like outlier volume discounts.

The BY fee waiver is positioned as a pilot to allow us to measure its impact over the next two years and feed into the Membership & Fees Committee and RCFS project. We will evaluate the pilot results (i.e. does it indeed supercharge funding metadata connections and adoption?) and consider additional adjustments to other BY registration fees and whether such fee incentives might be extended to other members.

We encourage all funders to take advantage of these reduced rates to contribute to the Research Nexus and help us build a more complete picture of the relationship between research funding and outcomes.

Take a look at the recent case studies from early GLS adopters FWF (Austria), NWO (The Netherlands), FCCN|FCT (Portugal), and Wellcome/EuropePMC, reach out to them or us with any questions, or peruse the GLS community forum!

The sunset is on the horizon for Metadata Manager. What's next?

Lena Stoll — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR. Metadata Manager will be retired at the end of 2025. Over the past four years, we have been developing a new helper tool to replace it, and that tool has now reached a stage of maturity that means we will be able to switch off Metadata Manager by the end of the year.

How did we get here?

In 2021, we said that we would be retiring the deprecated Metadata Manager as soon as we can offer members a suitable replacement for registering their journal content. So this news has been a long time coming - Metadata Manager has been very challenging for us to support, and we have found it impossible to develop additional features. However, we did not want to take the final step of switching off the interface until we were able to offer a suitable replacement for members who rely on manual helper tools to register their journal content.

That replacement, our new record registration form, has now been used by many members for over a year to register their journal content. The feedback so far has been positive, and we have been able to add functionality to the tool at a pace that we are happy with.

In July 2025, we contacted those members who are still using Metadata Manager to let them know that the tool will no longer be available after December 2025. So if you are affected by this news, you were probably already aware of it. But we wanted to go into a little more detail on the sunsetting of Metadata Manager, why we are doing it, and what’s next for Crossref’s content registration helper tools.

What has happened since 2021?

We have been developing the record registration form ever since that announcement in 2021. It began its life as a helper tool for registering grant records, but we knew we wanted to expand it to cover journal articles and other record types as soon as we could.

To see whether the concept behind the grants form could be applied to journal content, we first built an initial prototype and tested it with a number of Crossref ambassadors and volunteers. We wanted to ensure that the tool was intuitive to use, and to understand what functionality it would need to support for it to be truly useful to our members. Following some iteration on the invaluable feedback we received from our testers, we finally released the tool to production in September 2024 and began encouraging members to use it for their real-life article deposits.

We have been continuously adding new functionality since then, from additional fields for registering richer metadata to a feature that allows members to edit their articles’ metadata without having to re-enter everything into the form.

Now, about two months from the target date for retiring Metadata Manager, the record registration form is used by members to register about 200 articles per day, while Metadata Manager still sees about double that volume of submissions. So we have some way left to go.

Why is now the right time to retire Metadata Manager?

2025 has been a year of addressing technical debt for Crossref. My colleague Sara wrote about this co-ordinated push towards modernising our system in her post about our cloud migration in the summer.

Having the long-awaited replacement for Metadata Manager in place will allow us to free up the resources that have been tied up for years by troubleshooting Metadata Manager, in terms of both technology and user support, so that we can focus on projects and initiatives that align with our longer-term strategy.

How will we avoid the new tool developing the same problems as Metadata Manager?

As stated above, Metadata Manager has caused us many issues and headaches in different ways - but we have also learned a lot from dealing with these problems. As Bryan Vickery wrote in 2020, Metadata Manager is “not flexible enough to easily add other record types, like books/book chapters, or to include any changes we may make to our input schema.” To address this, we built the record registration form in a schema-driven way, which makes it adaptable to any future schema changes. It also means that we can spin up prototypes of new forms for additional record types quite quickly.

So while Metadata Manager was custom-built in a way that could only ever work for journal content, the record registration form already supports two record types and will support more in future. This is key for our goal of building a complete research nexus, which extends far beyond journal content, and even beyond “content” as such (did someone say grants?).

What happens next?

Metadata Manager will no longer be available from January 2026.
Starting next year, if you attempt to access Metadata Manager at https://www-crossref-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/metadatamanager/, you will be redirected to a deprecation note on https://www-crossref-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/deprecated/ which will link out to the new tool.

What options do I have for registering my journal content going forward?

If your organisation still uses Metadata Manager to register metadata for your journal articles, now is a good time to begin familiarising yourself with the alternatives available to you from 2026 forward - these include, but are not limited to, the new record registration form.

If your journal has an ISSN

We recommend you begin using the record registration form as soon as possible. Simply go to https://manage-crossref-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/records and sign in with your Crossref account credentials to register a journal article. You can also see a list of all the journal article records you have previously registered using our manual helper tools at https://manage-crossref-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/records/edit and edit their metadata using the form.

To help you make the switch from Metadata Manager, we will be hosting an interactive webinar on 13 November about how to transition to the new tool. Register here or look out for the recording, which will be shared in our events archive.

If your journal does not have an ISSN

The record registration form currently only supports ISSNs as journal identifiers. Title-level and volume/issue-level DOIs, which are at the core of how Metadata Manager handles journal metadata, have been the cause for some of the problems we have had over the years with that particular tool. Also, Crossref DOIs have always been intended primarily as citation identifiers, and entire journals/volumes/issues are very rarely cited. For that reason, we built the Record Registration Form such that it doesn’t support registering or using journal-level DOIs.

With that being said, if you do not (yet) have an ISSN for your journal for whatever reason, you can use our web deposit form to register your articles with journal DOI. If you do obtain an ISSN for your title later on, you can then simply begin using the record registration form from that point onward.

How will the new tool continue to be developed?

We will continue to work with our members and community to develop additional functionalities for the journal article form. Currently we are working on allowing relationships metadata to be registered using the form.

Ultimately, the goal is for the record registration form to become the one-stop shop for members who manually register and update their metadata. To this end, we are working on expanding the tool to cover additional record types - we have recently developed a prototype for registering books and chapters, and we will be looking to test this in the coming months with volunteers who are currently registering their book metadata via other avenues such as the web deposit form.

If you would like to support these efforts, or you have begun using the new tool and would like to share your feedback, come join the discussion in our community forum.

References

Bowman, S. (2021). Next steps for Content Registration. Crossref. https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.64000/30vzx-r5x16
Bowman, S. (2025). We’ve migrated to the cloud; we hope you didn’t notice (but maybe you did). Crossref. https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.64000/wd6rx-vpq73
Vale, P. (2022). Forming new relationships: Contributing to Open source. Crossref. https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.64000/cvq2e-q8t24

New tool to report on completeness of open research information globally

Kornelia Korzec — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Wednesday 22nd October 2025—Crossref, the open scholarly infrastructure nonprofit, today releases an enhanced dashboard showing metadata coverage and individual organisations’ contributions to documenting the process and outputs of scientific research in the open. The tool helps research-performing, funding, and publishing organisations identify gaps in open research information, and provides supporting evidence for movements like the Barcelona Declaration for Open Research Information, which encourages more substantial commitment to stewarding and enriching the scholarly record through open metadata.

Crossref’s Participation Reports now offer expanded features and provide full coverage of all members and all resource types registered with Crossref DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers)—over 175 million records representing a significant share of global research production from organisations in 164 countries. Each of Crossref’s 23,000 members has a dashboard to visualise their metadata contributions, display coverage of key information for scholarly works, and get actionable feedback via a gap report that specifies records that need enrichment, all helping to make more transparent the work that goes into creating and curating the scholarly record.

For any Crossref member—whether journal publisher, research funder, university, or museum—coverage of up to 11 key elements is public and visible to everyone, including: references, abstracts, ORCID iDs, affiliation strings, ROR IDs, Open Funder Registry IDs, funding award numbers, text-mining URLs, licence URLs, Similarity Check URLs (for text-based plagiarism checking) and the presence of a Crossmark policy, indicating the organisation’s commitment to declare corrections and retractions. These metadata elements provide greater context and visibility for research objects such as journal articles and preprints, grants and awards, books and book chapters, standards, datasets, conference papers and various ‘other’ content such as scholarly blogs, images, and even physical museum artefacts.

Mochammad Tanzil Multazam, Library Director of Universitas Muhammadiyah Sidoarjo, and Secretary of the Supervisory Board of Relawan Jurnals, says, “As a sponsoring organisation for several thousand small publishers across Indonesia, we support Crossref members to register complete metadata for their works. Despite time and resource constraints, this new actionable open report on key metadata elements will help drive improvements in the information they share for their publications. This has wide-reaching implications for the visibility of that research and trust among the community, and therefore has the potential to support Indonesian scholarship in the global context.”

Lena Stoll, Program Lead at Crossref, explains, “We are happy to have extended participation reports to cover more diverse record types, including grants, datasets, dissertations, and more, and to make it easier for our members to act on their ongoing improvements to enrich their records and build towards the vision of an open and more complete Research Nexus.”

Ludo Waltman, Scientific Director and Professor of Quantitative Science Studies at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University, comments, “As a representative of the researcher and metascience communities, this data is of great importance for us to analyse the trends and effects of global research activity. Crossref is one of the main driving forces in open infrastructure, and its commitment to supporting metadata completeness through this open reporting dashboard is a significant step for the open research information movement.”

Access Crossref Participation Reports and search for any Crossref member organisation.

Participation report for a typical Crossref member, Universidad La Salle Arequipa in Peru

About Crossref

Crossref runs an open infrastructure to link research objects, entities, and actions, creating a lasting and reusable scholarly record that underpins open science. Together with their 23,000 members in 164 countries, Crossref drives metadata exchange and supports nearly 2 billion monthly API queries, facilitating global research communication, for the benefit of society.

Meet the candidates and cast your vote in our 2025 Board elections

Lucy Ofiesh — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

On behalf of the Nominating Committee, I’m pleased to share the slate of candidates for the 2025 board election.

Each year we do an open call for board interest. This year, the Nominating Committee received 51 submissions from members worldwide to fill five open board seats.

We have four large member seats and one small member seat open for election in 2025. We maintain a balanced board of 8 large member seats and 8 small member seats. Size is determined based on the organization’s membership tier (small members fall in the $0-$1,650 tiers and large members in the $3,900 - $50,000 tiers).

We were pleased to see the diversity in candidates, with applicants from 19 countries. The committee was keen to prepare a diverse slate of organization types, individual skills and perspectives, and global representation.

Tier 1, Small member seats (electing one candidate)

Rebecca Wambua, Distance, Open and e-Learning Practitioners’ Association of Kenya
Oscar Donde, Pan Africa Science Journal
Nwachukwu Egbunike, Pan-Atlantic University Press

Tier 2, Large member seats (electing four candidates)

Damian Bird, CABI
Rose L’Huillier, Elsevier
John Sivo, IEEE
Nick Lindsay, The MIT Press
Anjalie Nawaratne, Springer Nature

Please read the candidates’ statements

Every member has a vote

If your organisation is a voting member in good standing as of September 5th, 2025, you are eligible to vote.

The voting contact for your organisation will receive a ballot from eBallot, a third party election platform. You should receive your ballot by Wednesday, September 17th, and you will have until 12:00 UTC on October 22nd to submit your ballot.

The election results will be announced at Crossref2025, our annual online meeting on October 22nd, 2025.

Special thanks to the committee: James Phillpotts of Oxford University Press, Wendy Patterson of Beilstein Institut, Abiodun Falodun of University of Benin, Amanda Ward of Taylor & Francis, and Chaerul Umam of the National Library of Indonesia for the time they dedicated to reviewing the expressions of interest and participating in committee meetings.

If you have any questions about our election process, please contact me

Happy voting!

Our annual open call for expressions of interest to join our board

Lucy Ofiesh — Wed, 14 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Crossref Nominating Committee invites expressions of interest to join the Board of Directors of Crossref for the term starting in January 2026. The committee will gather responses from those interested and create the slate of candidates that our membership will vote on in an election in September.

Expressions of interest will be due Monday, June 9th, 2025

This is an exciting time to join the board, as we have a number of active projects underway. Our focus is on how our community and metadata can contribute to ensuring the integrity of the scholarly record. We are redesigning our content system to better serve the changing needs of our community. We’re broadening our metadata record to capture richer funding and institutional affiliations. New board members will be part of on-going discussions about how to make our fees simpler and more equitable. Additionally, we envision a future where the scholarly record prioritizes relationships between research outputs to build a holistic research nexus. The board helps guide this work.

About our board elections

The board is elected through the “one member, one vote” policy wherein every member organisation of Crossref has a single vote to elect representatives to the Crossref board. Board terms are for three years, and this year, there are five seats open for election.

This year, we will elect four of the larger member seats (membership tiers $3,900 and above) and one of the smaller member seats (membership tiers $1,650 and below). You don’t need to specify which seat you are applying for; we will provide that information to the nominating committee.

The online election will open in September, with results announced at the annual meeting scheduled for October 22nd. New members will begin their term in January 2026.

About the Nominating Committee

The Nominating Committee reviews the expressions of interest and selects a slate of candidates for election. The slate put forward will exceed the total number of open seats. The committee considers the statements of interest, organisational size, geography, and experience.

James Phillpotts*, Oxford University Press, committee chair
Abiodun Falodun, University of Benin
Wendy Patterson*, Beilstein Institut
Chaerul Umam, National Library of Indonesia
Amanda Ward*, Taylor & Francis

(*) indicates Crossref board member

Board roles and responsibilities

The role of the board at Crossref is to provide strategic and financial oversight of the organisation, as well as guidance to the Executive Director and the staff leadership team, with the key responsibilities being:

Setting the strategic direction for the organisation;
Providing financial oversight; and
Approving new policies and services.

The board represents of our membership base and guides the staff leadership team on trends affecting scholarly communications.

The work of the board takes place in board meetings and board committees. The board sets strategic directions for the organisation while also providing oversight into policy changes and implementation. Board members join four meetings each year that typically take place in January, March, July, and November. The July meeting is in-person and may take place in a variety of international locations; travel support is provided when needed. January, March, and November board meetings are held virtually, and all committee meetings take place virtually. Each board member should sit on at least one Crossref committee. Care is taken to accommodate the wide range of time zones in which our board members live.

While the expressions of interest are specific to an individual, the seat that is elected to the board belongs to the member organisation. The primary board member also names an alternate who may attend meetings in the event that the primary board member is unable to. There is no personal financial obligation to sit on the board. The member organisation must remain in good standing.

Board members are expected to be comfortable assuming the responsibilities listed above and to prepare and participate in board meeting discussions.

Who can apply to join the board?

What does the committee look for?

Demonstrate a commitment to or understanding of our strategic agenda or the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure
Have expertise that may be underrepresented on the board currently;
Hold decision-making positions in their organisations;
Have experience with governance or community involvement;
Represent member organisations that are active in the scholarly communications ecosystem;
Demonstrate metadata best practices as shown in the member’s participation report

The board is also encouraging Crossref members who are research funders to apply.

What does the application evaluation process look like?

Open call for board interest, May 14 to June 9th: Any active member in good standing can apply for a seat on the board. This includes direct members, sponsored members, and GEM members. Sponsoring organisations, service providers, and Metadata Plus subscribers who are not also members are not eligible to sit on the board.

Application review, June through August: Applications will be reviewed by our Nominating Committee. We also gather internal information about the member organisation, such as metadata habits, history with Crossref, any previous experience in Crossref working groups or community initiatives.

We might also refer to external information to help the committee’s review including LinkedIn profiles or member organisation websites and publications.

Brief interviews with final candidates, August: The committee will hold brief virtual interviews with the top candidates before finalising the slate of nominations.

Announcement of the slate and election, September: The committee will announce the final slate of candidates in September and the online election will begin, culminating at the annual meeting at the end of October.

How to apply

Please click here to submit your expression of interest by Monday, June 9th. We ask for a brief statement about how your organisation could enhance the Crossref board and a brief personal statement about your interest and experience with Crossref.

Please contact me with any questions at voting@crossref.org

Notice of amendments to Crossref membership terms and bylaws

Amanda Bartell — Sun, 11 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In its March 2025 meeting, the Crossref board unanimously voted to update both the Crossref bylaws and the Crossref membership terms to:

Provide more clarity and alignment between our bylaws and membership terms, where they had become out of sync over the years.
Reflect previous board motions and bring both documents up-to-date with current processes for suspending and revoking membership, and reviewing those decisions.
Work towards being more explicit about what “Member Practices” should look like in terms of preserving the integrity of the scholarly record.

Link to updated membership terms and link to updated bylaws

The bylaw changes are effective immediately, and the updated version of the membership terms will come into effect on 11th July 2025.

In accordance with the 60-day notice period, we have emailed the Primary contact on all our active member accounts today. Note: Members do not need to do anything in response to these changes - by continuing to use our services after 11th July, they are accepting the latest version of the terms.

Changes to the membership terms

The membership terms will be updated on 11th July to be clearer on, among other things, the importance of accurate metadata, using DOI links everywhere, the all-important reference linking obligation, and the process for suspending and revoking/terminating membership. It also introduces the new concept of “Member Practices”, which a dedicated community committee will propose for board approval. More information about this will follow soon.

You can find the specific changes below, or take a look at this marked-up PDF showing the changes between the current (from June 2022) terms and the revised (July 2025) terms.

Topic	Section	Summary of Change(s)
Terminology	Various sections (e.g., 1, 2(i), 2(k), 5)	Streamlines some legal language to enhance clarity and readability.
Member Practices	2(a)	Establishes an obligation of Members to comply with Member Practices, to be established soon through a dedicated committee.
Unauthorised use of metadata	2(d)	Highlights the harmful impact of unauthorised use or deposit of metadata on Crossref, its Members, and the integrity of the scholarly record.
Reference linking	2(f), (g)	Updates the language referring to reference linking, and makes explicit Members’ obligation to maintain reference linking throughout membership, not only upon first joining Crossref. It also makes it clear that members should use DOI links wherever they communicate about any item with a DOI.
Displaying identifiers	2(h)	Strengthens Members’ obligation to display DOIs in accordance with Crossref’s Display Guidelines (by eliminating the “commercially reasonable efforts” qualifier).
Fees	3	Expands the definition of “Fees” to include all usage fees and fees for optional services, in addition to annual fees and Content Registration fees. Crossref’s right to suspend or terminate a Member’s account for non-payment extends to any of these fees.
Termination of Membership	9	Significantly revises the provision regarding termination of a Member’s membership by Crossref:
		Updates the bases for ‘for-cause’ termination, to include ongoing misrepresentations in a Member’s practices; misleading use or creation of DOIs; and failure to pay fees due (without the former 120-day minimum duration of nonpayment);
		Clarifies the distinction between suspension and termination (also referred to as revocation or expulsion) of a Member’s Crossref membership;
		Eliminates the existing procedures for automatic Board review of a termination or extended suspension. (Crossref’s bylaws have been amended to prescribe a new suspension/termination process and right to request Board review);
		Adds a termination trigger for cases where a Sponsor cancels its agreement with a Sponsored Member. (The member, of course, has the option to move to a new Sponsor, or re-join Crossref as an independent member).
Notice contacts	8(d)	Updates Crossref’s Notice contact; updates the list of required Member contacts.

Changes to the bylaws

Our bylaws have needed updating for a while, but since these seldom change, we’ve saved up a few changes, also to bring them in line with the revised membership terms.

We’ve now modernised the language, ensured that the bylaws match what’s in the membership terms, and we’ve added in motions that have been agreed by the board but not updated in the bylaws over the last few years. We’ve also updated the bylaws in line with the new membership revocation process in the new July 2025 membership terms. The new bylaws also allow for a new group of members to be created to help Crossref define Member Practices.

You can find a summary of the changes below, or take a look at this marked-up PDF showing all the changes to the bylaws.

Topic	Section	Summary of Changes
Terminology	Various sections	Eliminates gender-specific terminology, e.g. replaces “Chairman” with “Chair”.
		Makes minor clean-up edits (e.g. deletion of unused “Reserved” section and renumbering).
Membership Qualification	Art. I Sec. 1	Replaces “publishes” professional and scholarly materials with “produces” professional and scholarly materials to match the language in the already-current membership terms.
Non-Voting Membership	Art. I Sec. 2; Art. IV Secs. 7, 8; Art. VII Sec. 4	Reflects the establishment of a non-voting Member category as previously approved by the Board.
Membership Procedures	Art. I Sec. 3; Art. I Sec. 5	Clarifies that acceptance of new Members is delegable to Crossref personnel generally, replacing a narrow reference to the Executive Director.
		Eliminates superfluous procedural steps regarding Member resignation.
Suspension and Termination of Membership	Art. I Sec. 6	Significantly revises the provision regarding termination of a Member’s membership by Crossref:
		Updates the bases for ‘for-cause’ termination, to include various specific prongs (matching those already in the Member Terms), while maintaining the catch-all for conduct prejudicial to Crossref’s best interests.
		Authorises the Board to define standards and procedures for ‘for-cause’ terminations, or establish a committee (which can be comprised of both Board members and non-Board members) for that purpose.
		Specifies that Crossref staff is responsible for implementing the ‘for-cause’ termination standards.
		Eliminates the existing procedures for automatic Board review of a termination or extended suspension; specifies the Board’s authority to delegate discretionary appeals/review to the ExCo or other committee of Board members.
		Restates that temporary suspension may be used in lieu of, or in advance of, termination.
Annual Meeting	Art. IV Sec. 1	Updates language around the timing of the annual Member meeting:
		Replaces reference to the “second week of November” with “during the month of October or November”.
		Eliminates language regarding avoiding legal or religious holidays; given Crossref’s global footprint, this is not feasible.

Thanks for reading this far!

Don’t forget, members do not need to do anything in response to these changes - by continuing to register metadata after 11th July, they are accepting the latest version of the terms. But do let us know if you have any questions by emailing member@crossref.org.

Meet the candidates and vote in our 2024 Board elections

Lucy Ofiesh — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

On behalf of the Nominating Committee, I’m pleased to share the slate of candidates for the 2024 board election.

Each year we do an open call for board interest. This year, the Nominating Committee received 53 submissions from members worldwide to fill four open board seats.

We maintain a balanced board of 8 large member seats and 8 small member seats. Size is determined based on the organisation’s membership tier (small members fall in the $0-$1,650 tiers and large members in the $3,900 - $50,000 tiers). We have two large member seats and two small member seats open for election in 2024.

We were pleased to see the diversity in candidates, with applicants from 24 countries. We also received three applications from research funders, which we specifically identified as a priority in the committee’s remit for this year. The committee was keen to prepare a diverse slate of organisation types, individual skills, and global representation.

The Nominating Committee presents the following slate.

The 2024 slate

Tier 1 candidates (electing two seats):

Katharina Rieck, Austrian Science Fund (FWF)
Lisa Schiff, California Digital Library
Ejaz Khan, Health Services Academy, Pakistan Journal of Public Health
Karthikeyan Ramalingam, MM Publishers

Tier 2 candidates (electing two seats):

Aaron Wood, American Psychological Association
Dan Shanahan, PLOS
Amanda Ward, Taylor and Francis

Please read the candidates’ statements

Every member has a vote

If your organisation is a voting member in good standing as of September 11th, 2024, you are eligible to vote.

The voting contact for your organisation will receive a ballot from eBallot, a third party election platform. You should receive your ballot by Wednesday, September 25th, and you will have until 15:00 UTC on October 29th to submit your ballot.

The election results will be announced at Crossref2024, our anual online meeting on October 29th, 2024.

If you have any questions about our election process, please contact me

Happy voting!

This year's call for expressions of interest to join our board

Lucy Ofiesh — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The Crossref Nominating Committee is inviting expressions of interest to join the Board of Directors of Crossref for the term starting in January 2025. The committee will gather responses from those interested and create the slate of candidates that our membership will vote on in an election in September.

Expressions of interest will be due Monday, May 27th, 2024

This is an exciting time to join the board, as we have a number of active projects underway: We are considering resourcing Crossref for a sustainable future and board members will be part of deciding any changes to our fees scheme and overseeing its implementation. We’re focusing on how our community and metadata can contribute to ensuring the integrity of the scholarly record. We’re broadening our metadata record to capture richer funding and institutional affiliations. We’re working towards a future where the scholarly record prioritizes relationships between research outputs to build a holistic research nexus. The board helps guide this work.

About the board elections

This year, we will elect two of the larger member seats (membership tiers $3,900 and above) and two of the smaller member seats (membership tiers $1,650 and below). You don’t need to specify which seat you are applying for; we will provide that information to the nominating committee.

The online election will open in September, with results announced at the annual meeting on October 29th, 2024. New members will begin their term in January 2025.

About the Nominating Committee

2024 Nominating Committee

James Phillpotts*, Director of Content Transformation and Standards, Oxford University Press, committee chair
Oscar Donde*, Editor in Chief, Pan Africa Science Journal
Rose L’Huillier*, Senior Vice President Researcher Products, Elsevier
Ivy Mutambanengwe-Matanga, Chief Operating Officer, African Journals Online
Adam Sewell, Chief Technology Officer, IOP Publishing

(*) indicates Crossref board member

What is the committee looking for this year

Demonstrate a commitment to or understanding of our strategic agenda or the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure;
Have expertise that may be underrepresented on the board currently;
Hold senior/director-level positions in their organisations;
Have experience with governance or community involvement;
Represent member organisations that are active in the scholarly communications ecosystem;
Demonstrate metadata best practices as shown in the member’s participation report

The board is also encouraging Crossref members who are research funders to apply.

Board roles and responsibilities

Setting the strategic direction for the organisation;
Providing financial oversight; and
Approving new policies and services.

The board is representative of our membership base and guides the staff leadership team on trends affecting scholarly communications. The board sets strategic directions for the organisation while also providing oversight into policy changes and implementation. Board members have a fiduciary responsibility to ensure sound operations. They do this by attending board meetings as well as joining more specific board committees.

Who can apply to join the board?

What is expected of board members?

Board members attend four meetings each year that typically take place in January, March, July, and November. Meetings have taken place in a variety of international locations and travel support is provided when needed. January, March, and November board meetings are held virtually, and all committee meetings take place virtually. Each board member should sit on at least one Crossref committee. Care is taken to accommodate the wide range of time zones in which our board members live.

Board members are expected to be comfortable assuming the responsibilities listed above and to prepare and participate in board meeting discussions.

How to apply

Please click here to submit your expression of interest. We ask for a brief statement about how your organisation could enhance the our board and a brief personal statement about your interest and experience with Crossref.

Please contact me with any questions at lofiesh@crossref.org

2023 board election slate

Lucy Ofiesh — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’m pleased to share the 2023 board election slate. Crossref’s Nominating Committee received 87 submissions from members worldwide to fill seven open board seats.

We maintain a balance of eight large member seats and eight small member seats. A member’s size is determined based on the membership fee tier they pay. We look at how our total revenue is generated across the membership tiers and split it down the middle. Like last year, about half of our revenue came from members in the tiers $0 - $1,650, and the other half came from members in tiers $3,900 - $50,000. We have two large member seats and five small member seats open for election in 2023.

The Nominating Committee presents the following slate.

The 2023 slate

Tier 1 candidates (electing five seats):

Beilstein-Institut, Wendy Patterson
Korean Council of Science Editors, Kihong Kim
Lujosh Ventures Limited, Olu Joshua
NISC Ltd, Mike Schramm
OpenEdition, Marin Dacos
Universidad Autónoma de Chile, Dr. Ivan Suazo
Vilnius University, Vincas Grigas

Tier 2 candidates (electing two seats):

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Scott Delman
Oxford University Press, James Phillpotts
Public Library of Science (PLOS), Dan Shanahan
University of Chicago Press, Ashley Towne

Here are the candidates’ organisational and personal statements

You can be part of this important process by voting in the election

If your organisation is a voting member in good standing of Crossref as of September 10th, 2023, you are eligible to vote when voting opens on September 27th, 2023.

How can you vote?

Your organisation’s designated voting contact will receive an email from eBallot the week of September 25th with the Formal Notice of Meeting and Proxy Form with concise instructions on how to vote. The email will include a username and password with a link to our voting platform.

The election results will be announced at the LIVE23 online meeting on October 31st, 2023. Save the date! Incoming members will take their seats at the March 2024 board meeting.

Our annual call for board nominations

Lucy Ofiesh — Tue, 30 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Crossref Nominating Committee invites expressions of interest to join the Board of Directors of Crossref for the term starting in March 2024. The committee will gather responses from those interested and create the slate of candidates that our members will vote on in an election in September.

Expressions of interest will be due Monday, June 26th, 2023.

About the board elections

The board maintains a balance of seats, with eight seats for smaller members and eight seats for larger members (based on total revenue to Crossref). This is to ensure that the diversity of experiences and perspectives of the scholarly community are represented in decisions made at Crossref.

This year we will elect two of the larger member seats (membership tiers $3,900 and above) and five of the smaller member seats (membership tiers $1,650 and below). You don’t need to specify which seat you are applying for. We will provide that information to the nominating committee.

The election takes place online, and voting will open in September. Election results will be shared at the annual meeting on October 31st. New members will commence their term in March 2024.

About the Nominating Committee

2023 Nominating Committee:

Aaron Wood, American Psychological Association, chair*
Oscar Donde, Pan Africa Science Journal*
David Haber, American Society for Microbiology
Rose L’Huillier, Elsevier*
Marie Souliere, Frontiers

(*) indicates Crossref board member

What does the committee look for

demonstrate a commitment to or understanding of our strategic agenda or the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure;
have expertise that may be underrepresented on the board currently;
hold senior/director-level positions in their organisations;
have experience with governance or community involvement;
represent member organisations that are active in the scholarly communications ecosystem;
demonstrate metadata best practices as shown in the member’s participation report

Board roles and responsibilities

Crossref’s services provide a central infrastructure to scholarly communications. Crossref’s board helps shape the future of our services and, by extension, impacts the broader scholarly ecosystem. We are looking for board members to contribute their experience and perspective.

Setting the strategic direction for the organisation;
Providing financial oversight; and
Approving new policies and services.

The board is representative of our membership base and guides the staff leadership team on trends affecting scholarly communications. The board sets strategic directions for the organisation while also providing oversight into policy changes and implementation. Board members have a fiduciary responsibility to ensure sound operations. Board members do this by attending board meetings, as well as joining more specific board committees.

Who can apply to join the board?

What is expected of board members?

Board members attend three meetings each year that typically take place in March, July, and November. Meetings have taken place in various international locations, and travel support is provided when needed. March and November board meetings are held virtually, and all committee meetings take place virtually. Each board member should sit on at least one Crossref committee. Care is taken to accommodate the wide range of timezones in which our board members live.

While the expressions of interest are specific to an individual, the seat that is elected to the board belongs to the member organisation. The primary board member also names an alternate who may attend meetings if the primary board member cannot. There is no personal financial obligation to sit on the board. The member organisation must remain in good standing.

Board members are expected to be comfortable assuming the responsibilities listed above and to prepare and participate in board meeting discussions.

How to apply

Please click here to submit your expression of interest. We ask for a brief statement about how your organisation could enhance the Crossref board and a brief personal statement about your interest and experience with Crossref.

Please contact me with any questions at lofiesh@crossref.org

2022 Board Election

Lucy Ofiesh — Fri, 16 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’m pleased to share the 2022 board election slate. Crossref’s Nominating Committee received 40 submissions from members worldwide to fill five open board seats.

We maintain a balance of eight large member seats and eight small member seats. A member’s size is determined based on the membership fee tier they pay. We look at how our total revenue is generated across the membership tiers and split it down the middle. Like last year, about half of our revenue came from members in the tiers $0 - $1,650, and the other half came from members in tiers $3,900 - $50,000. We have four large member seats and one small member seat open for election in 2022.

The Nominating Committee presents the following slate.

The 2022 slate

Tier 1 candidates (electing one seat):

eLife, Damian Pattinson, Executive Director
Pan Africa Science Journal, Oscar Donde, Editor in Chief

Tier 2 candidates (electing four seats):

Clarivate, Christine Stohn, Director of Product Management
Elsevier, Rose L’Huillier, Senior Vice President Researcher Products
The MIT Press, Nick Lindsay, Journals and Open Access Director
Springer Nature, Anjalie Nawaratne, VP Data Transformation & Chief Business Architect
Wiley, Allyn Molina, Group Vice President, Research Publishing

Here are the candidates’ organisational and personal statements

You can be part of this important process by voting in the election

If your organisation is a voting member in good standing of Crossref as of September 6th, 2022, you are eligible to vote when voting opens on September 20th, 2022.

How can you vote?

Your organisation’s designated voting contact will receive an email the week of September 19th with the Formal Notice of Meeting and Proxy Form with concise instructions on how to vote. You will also receive a username and password with a link to our voting platform.

The election results will be announced at the LIVE22 online meeting on October 26th, 2022. Save the date! Incoming members will take their seats at the March 2023 board meeting.

Annual call for board nominations

Lucy Ofiesh — Tue, 31 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The Crossref Nominating Committee is inviting expressions of interest to join the Board of Directors of Crossref for the term starting in March 2023. The committee will gather responses from those interested and create the slate of candidates that our membership will vote on in an election in September.

Expressions of interest will be due Friday, June 24th, 2022.

About the our board elections

The board maintains a balance of seats, with eight seats for smaller members and eight seats for larger members (based on total revenue to Crossref). This is in an effort to ensure that the diversity of experiences and perspectives of the scholarly community are represented in decisions made at Crossref.

This year we will elect four of the larger member seats (membership tiers $3,900 and above) and one of the smaller member seats (membership tiers $1,650 and below). You don’t need to specify which seat you are applying for. We will provide that information to the Nominating Committee.

The election takes place online and voting will open in September. Election results will be shared at the annual meeting in October. New members will commence their term in March 2023.

About the Nominating Committee

2022 Nominating Committee:

Abel Packer, SciELO, Brazil, chair*
Patrick Alexander, Penn State University Press, US
Nisha Doshi, Cambridge University Press, UK
Marc Hurlbert, Melanoma Research Alliance , US*
Kihong Kim, Korean Council of Science Editors, South Korea*

(*) indicates Crossref board member

What does the committee look for

The committee looks for skills and experience that will complement the rest of the board. Candidates from countries and regions that are not currently reflected on the board are strongly encouraged to apply. Successful candidates often demonstrate a commitment to or understanding of our strategic agenda or the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure; hold positions within their organisations that may be underrepresented on the board currently; and/or have experience with governance or community involvement. The Nominating Committee will also review the member organisation’s participation report.

Who can apply to join the board?

Board roles and responsibilities

Crossref’s services provide central infrastructure to scholarly communications. Crossref’s board helps shape the future of our services, and by extension, impacts the broader scholarly ecosystem. We are looking for board members to contribute their experience and perspective.

Setting the strategic direction for the organisation;
Providing financial oversight; and
Approving new policies and services.

The board is representative of our membership base and guides the staff leadership team on trends affecting scholarly communications. The board sets strategic directions for the organisation while also providing oversight into policy changes and implementation. Board members have a fiduciary responsibility to ensure sound operations. Board members do this by attending board meetings, as well as joining more specific board committees.

What is expected of board members?

Board members attend three meetings each year that typically take place in March, July, and November. Meetings have taken place in a variety of international locations and travel support is provided when needed. Following travel restrictions as a result of COVID-19, the board adopted a plan to convene at least one of the board meetings virtually each year and all committee meetings take place virtually. Most board members sit on at least one Crossref committee. Care is taken to accommodate the wide range of timezones in which our board members live.

While individuals apply to join the board, the seat that is elected to the board ultimately belongs to the member organisation. The primary board member also names an alternate who may attend meetings in the event that the primary board member is unable to. There is no personal financial obligation to sit on the board. The member organisation must remain in good standing.

Board members are expected to be comfortable assuming the responsibilities listed above and to prepare and participate in board meeting discussions.

How to apply

Please contact me with any questions at lofiesh@crossref.org

More new faces at Crossref

Lindsay Russell — Thu, 21 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Looking at the road ahead, we’ve set some ambitious goals for ourselves and continue to see new members join from around the world, now numbering 16,000. To help achieve all that we plan in the years to come, we’ve grown our teams quite a bit over the last couple of years, and we are happy to welcome Carlos, Evans, Fabienne, Mike, Panos, and Patrick.

Our Software Development team has seen the most growth with the addition of Carlos, Mike, Panos, and Patrick; collectively, they bring specialist skills that are helping us to pay down technical debt, modernize our underlying infrastructure, and prepare for a consistent front-end experience. As a member of the Product team, Fabienne has a fresh take on our Similarity Check service, steering the upgrade to iThenticate v2. And Evans brings a scientific researcher perspective to our Member Experience team along with experience as a member who’s worked with our tools.

And now some words from each of them.

Carlos Del Ojo Elias

I am a computer scientist with a master’s degree in Bioinformatics. Previously I used to work as a security auditor. I’ve got experience in research and software development both in academia and industry. It’s very exciting for me to join Crossref as a Senior software developer on the technology team. My current project involves working on the authentication and authorization subsystems, exploring state-of-the-art technologies in order to improve our services. I have always enjoyed contributing to the open-source community, so it is a pleasure for me to work in an organisation that promotes the principles of openness and transparency of software and data.

Evans Atoni

I am a member of the Technical Support team having joined Crossref just a few weeks ago. I’m passionate about advancing open access and POSI. Helping our members sort through knotty technical queries and building relations with them to service their very diverse needs is what I’m most excited about in my role. In my spare time, I enjoy anything outdoors, family time, and traveling. I work remotely from Nairobi, Kenya.

Fabienne Michaud

I joined Crossref in April 2021 as a Product Manager for scholarly stewardship which includes the content comparison tool Similarity Check and I am thrilled to be a member of such a lovely, supportive and international team. I have a background in teaching and have worked in academic, research, and not-for-profit libraries in the UK for over 20 years in academic liaison, customer services, and management roles. These experiences have given me a user-centered approach and a drive to find collaborative, reliable, and pertinent technological solutions to support the research and scholarly community. Since starting at Crossref and, through my work with the Similarity Check Advisory Group, I have developed a good understanding of the current ethical issues facing the publishing sector (such as paper mills and other manipulations of the publication process) and a particular interest in how AI and automation tools can play a part in addressing these challenges.

Mike Gill

I’ve been a software developer for twenty years, having studied software engineering at university. During my career, I have worked mostly in the banking and engineering industries so this is my first time working in scholarly publishing. I confess that before joining Crossref I wasn’t aware that the community existed so I was excited to see how I could ply my trade in this new (to me!) field. The role also appealed as, having primarily been a team leader/line manager in my recent career, this was an opportunity to be hands-on again and work with modern languages such as Kotlin. In the end, though, what really sealed it for me was reading on the Crossref website that ‘we take the work seriously but not necessarily ourselves’ which basically sums me up. So I knew I’d be in good company and that has proven to be the case!

Panos Pandis

I joined Crossref as a Senior Software Developer in 2020, in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. Moving to Crossref has been a much-needed breath of fresh air. I’m a big fan of open-source, and at Crossref, it just feels like home. Even more so after our recent commitment to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI). My main focus at the moment is Crossref’s Event Data service. I’m fascinated by the potential of Event Data and the broad audience I get to support and communicate with through the project. So if you spot me in a room, feel free to ask me anything about Clojure/Kotlin, Event Data, obscure technology, or kombucha recipes.

Patrick Vale

I’m delighted to have joined Crossref as the first Frontend Developer. My role covers the inauguration of a scalable framework in which we can build future User Interfaces, and generally making people’s lives easier as they interact with our products and services - if a human uses it, I’m interested! It’s my intention to provide a platform on which we can quickly iterate to build and adapt our interfaces to suit the rapidly changing needs of our community. It’s been a pleasure to learn about the impact Crossref has across the scholarly spectrum; and to work with a team of open, practical, and downright friendly colleagues is a privilege. Outside of work, I enjoy cycling, growing things, and most recently, avoiding two small cats while moving from anywhere to anywhere around the house.

Your contributions have been impactful and it will be fun to see all that you will surely contribute to our road ahead!

2021 Board Election

Lucy Ofiesh — Tue, 28 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to share the 2021 board election slate. Crossref’s Nominating Committee received over 60 submissions from members worldwide to fill five open board seats. It was a fantastic group of applicants and showed the strength of our membership community.

There are five seats open for election (three small, two large), and the Nominating Committee presents the following slate.

The 2021 slate

Candidate organisations, in alphabetical order, for the Small category (three seats available):

California Digital Library, University of California, Lisa Schiff
Center for Open Science, Nici Pfeiffer
Melanoma Research Alliance, Kristen Mueller
Morressier, Sebastian Rose
NISC, Mike Schramm

Candidate organisations, in alphabetical order, for the Large category (two seats available):

AIP Publishing (AIP), Penelope Lewis
American Psychological Association (APA), Jasper Simons
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Scott Delman

Here are the candidates’ organisational and personal statements

You can be part of this important process by voting in the election

If your organisation is a voting member in good standing of Crossref as of September 20, 2021, you are eligible to vote when voting opens on September 29, 2021.

How can you vote?

On September 29, 2021, your organisation’s designated voting contact will receive an email with the Formal Notice of Meeting and Proxy Form with concise instructions on how to vote. You will also receive a user name and password with a link to our voting platform.

The election results will be announced at the LIVE21 online meeting on November 9, 2021. Save the date!

Similarity Check news: iThenticate v2.0 ready for launch

Fabienne Michaud — Mon, 20 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Crossref Similarity Check news: iThenticate v2.0 ready for launch

Last year, we announced the upcoming launch of a new version of iThenticate, the product from Turnitin that powers Crossref Similarity Check. We know some of you have been waiting a long time for this upgrade and we are very happy to share with you that we are now ready to release it.

We will be rolling out this new version in stages, so not everyone will be able to upgrade to the new version immediately. We’ll start with new Crossref Similarity Check subscribers who use iThenticate in the browser, and one member who uses iThenticate via the eJournalPress API integration.

Next month, we will reach out to existing Crossref Similarity Check subscribers who use iThenticate in the browser (rather than through a manuscript tracking system), and further eJournalPress users. From then on, we’ll be contacting those of you who use Similarity Check through your manuscript tracking system, as and when your providers are ready to work with the new version.

Crossref Similarity Check - first things first

Crossref Similarity Check is a content comparison tool, powered by iThenticate and produced by Turnitin, to check the originality of scholarly works and detect potential cases of plagiarism. Crossref members are eligible for this service, which offers them a reduced rate for document checking (plus enhanced functionality) in exchange for making their own published content available to be indexed into the iThenticate database.

The Crossref Similarity Check service continues to grow in membership (1,531 members in 2020; 1,964 members in 2021, to date) and in the number of documents checked (1,922,621 manuscripts checked between January and July 2020 and 2,419,612 over the same period this year).

Just as with the current version of iThenticate, Crossref Similarity Check subscribers will be able to compare documents against a vast database of internet sources and over 78 million full-text documents contributed by the Crossref members that use the service:

Crossref - research articles, books, and conference proceedings provided by publishers of scholarly content all over the world
Crossref posted content - preprints, eprints, working papers, reports, dissertations, and many other types of content that has not been formally published but has been registered with Crossref
Internet - a database of archived and live publicly-available web pages, including billions of pages of existing content, and with tens of thousands of new pages added each day
Publications - third-party periodical, journal, and publication content including many major professional journals, periodicals, and business publications from sources other than Crossref Similarity Check members
Your Indexed Documents - other documents you have uploaded for checking (within your Crossref Similarity Check user account only, and not added to iThenticate’s main indexes)

What’s new

We are delighted to introduce the following new features and enhancements with iThenticate v2.0:

Increased document upload capacity
Suspicious and hidden character detection
Preprint exclusion filter
Refreshed and responsive interface
Similarity reports - save and share
Annotations
Content portal
Improved API

Increased document upload capacity

This new version of iThenticate has an increased document upload capacity of up to 800 pages/200 MB and a Google Drive document upload functionality. Please note that per-document fees allow for a maximum of 25,000 25,000 ~~characters~~ (EDIT 21/11/4: words), as one billable unit (25,001-50,000 25,000 ~~characters~~ (EDIT 21/11/4: words) is two billing units, and so on).

Suspicious or hidden character detection

A new ‘Red flag’ feature, highlighted at the top right hand side of the Similarity report and with in-line markers, signals the detection of hidden text such as text/quotation marks in white font or suspicious character replacement e.g., the substitution of a Latin e for a Cyrillic е or a Latin o for a Greek ο, which may have been deliberately added to avoid text-matching detection.

Red flag feature: Hidden characters in the iThenticate v2.0 Similarity report

Preprint exclusion filter

Increasingly, authors are making available a preprint of their article, either before or at the same time as submitting it to a journal. With Turnitin, we have therefore developed a new exclusion filter for ‘Preprint Sources’, which can be applied directly from your Similarity report.

Refreshed and responsive interface

The new iThenticate has a cleaner, more intuitive and accessible interface, with responsive design for ease of use on different screen sizes. The Similarity report is no longer a static image but a text that can be searched, copied and pasted. The display of matches has been improved and simplified with two views only: ‘Sources overview’ and ‘All sources’.

Similarity report in iThenticate v2.0

You can now save Similarity reports as a PDF file and share them via email through the iThenticate interface with authors. Please note: this is still work in progress and enhancements to this feature will be released in the coming months.

Annotations

Annotations in Similarity reports is a brand new feature available in private mode only (in shared folders) in this initial release. Annotations will display the date, time and comments and can be edited or deleted as required. These private annotations will not be included in the ‘save and share’ features mentioned above. Public, shareable, annotations will be included in a future release.

Private annotations in the new Similarity report

Content portal

The new ‘Content portal’ is a useful tool to check how much of your own published content has been successfully indexed into the iThenticate database and is now searchable. It will also help you self-diagnose and fix the content that has failed to be indexed.

Improved API for subscribers who integrate Similarity Check with their manuscript tracking system

API users will benefit from a new integration with manuscript tracking systems which will allow the display of the largest matching word count and the top 5 source matches alongside the Similarity score.

What’s next

We’re expecting a number of new features and enhancements to iThenticate version 2.0 as well as further manuscript tracking system API integrations in the coming months:

User/usage reporting functionality
Editorial Manager API integration
Further enhancements to the Similarity report user interface
Parent/child account management reporting, to assist Crossref Sponsors
Public vs. private annotations
Document resubmission flow
Customisable welcome email

We’ll keep you posted

We will post updates here as soon as new features, enhancements and API integrations are available and/or we are ready to upgrade the next group of members.

We’ll be contacting subscribers in stages to upgrade you to the new version, so keep your eyes open for an email from us. As you know, you have to supply full-text Similarity Check URLs in your Crossref metadata for over 90% of your own published content in order to be eligible for the service. We’ll be checking that anyone who wants to upgrade to v2.0 is still at 90% or above. You can check this yourself in advance on our eligibility checker - if you’ve fallen below 90%, the tool will give you instructions for adding your missing full-text Similarity Check URLs.

In the meantime, you will find the Similarity Check service documentation for the current version of iThenticate on our website. The documentation for the new version can be found on the Crossref Similarity Check site provided by Turnitin.

✏️ Do get in touch via support@crossref.org if you have any questions or suggestions or start a discussion on our Community Forum

Our annual open call for board nominations

Lucy Ofiesh — Thu, 27 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Crossref’s Nominating Committee is inviting expressions of interest to join the Board of Directors of Crossref for the term starting in 2022. The committee will gather responses from those interested and create the slate of candidates that our membership will vote on in an election in September. Expressions of interest will be due Friday, June 25th, 2021.

Board roles and responsibilities

Setting the strategic direction for the organisation;
Providing financial oversight; and
Approving new policies and services.

The board is representative of our membership base and guides the staff leadership team on trends affecting scholarly communications. The board sets strategic directions for the organisation while also providing oversight into policy changes and implementation. Board members have a fiduciary responsibility to ensure sound operations. Board members do this by attending board meetings, as well as joining more specific board committees.

Who can apply to join the board?

Any active member of Crossref can apply to join the board. Crossref membership is open to organisations that produce content, such as academic presses, commercial publishers, standards organisations, and research funders. In fact, this year the board has specifically included in the committee’s remit to “propose at least one name from a funder member for the current round of elections.”

There is a link at the bottom of this post to submit your expression of interest.

What is expected of board members?

Board members are expected to be comfortable assuming the responsibilities listed above and to prepare and participate in board meeting discussions.

About the election

This year we will elect two of the large member seats (membership tiers $3,900 and above) and three of the small member seats (membership tiers $1,650 and below). You don’t need to specify which seat you are applying for. We will provide that information to the nominating committee.

The election takes place online and voting will open in September. Election results will be shared at the November board meeting and new members will commence their term in 2022.

About the nominating committee

The nominating committee will review the expressions of interest and select a slate of candidates for election. The slate put forward will exceed the total number of open seats. The committee considers the statements of interest, organisational size, geography, gender, and experience.

2021 Nominating Committee:

Liz Allen, F1000/Taylor & Francis, London, UK, committee chair
Melissa Harrison, eLife, Cambridge, UK
Andrew Joseph, Wits University Press, Johannesburg, South Africa
Abel Packer, SciELO, São Paulo, Brazil
Lisa Scott, New England Journal of Medicine, Boston, USA

How do you apply to join the board?

Please click here to submit your expression of interest or contact me.

404: Support team down for essential maintenance

Amanda Bartell — Fri, 04 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

2020 has been a very challenging year, and we can all agree that everyone needs a break. Crossref will be providing very limited technical and membership support from 21st December to 3rd January to allow our staff to rest and recharge. We’ll be back on January 4th raring to answer your questions. Amanda explains more about why we made this decision.

As we all know, 2020 has been an unprecedented year, with the COVID-19 pandemic affecting lives across the globe.

It’s been amazing to watch our members pivot their working practices and continue to publish content and register it with Crossref to keep the wheels of research and scholarly communications moving.

Since January, we’ve seen 9,079,082 items registered with Crossref, up 13% on 2019. 2628 new members have also joined during that time and we now have almost 13.5k members from 139 countries. We’ve seen over 337 million requests to our REST API on average per month in 2020, a 9% increase over 2019 (and over 600 million total metadata queries on average per month across all our APIs and services).

Of course, all this activity brings an increasing number of requests for help and support. Since the start of 2020, we have answered almost 24,000 support tickets from the community. Sometimes these just need a quick answer or a link to our documentation. Sometimes it’s a straightforward new member application or a routine query. But sometimes a prospective member needs a lots of advice, sometimes a long-standing member or user needs in-depth investigations and consultancy. Sometimes the request highlights a problem in one of our systems that needs input from our product and development colleagues. But either way, it’s keeping our small team of five full-time employees very busy.

Vanessa wrote earlier in the year about how our Community Outreach team has changed its working practices this year. As Head of Member Experience I’ve been incredibly impressed by the way our membership, support and billing staff have done the same - remaining really focused on the needs of the Crossref community while (at the same time) balancing this with the demands of working from home, childcare, home-schooling, and supporting those affected by the pandemic in their own community. Isaac’s thoughtful post on our forum about his first week working at home because of the pandemic really highlighted some of these challenges.

We take work/life balance seriously at Crossref. We want to make sure that we’re are able to continue to help the Crossref community effectively in 2021, but are also able to continue to look after ourselves, our families, and our own communities in this difficult time. We all hope that 2021 will be a very different year, but there’s still likely to be disruption ahead for all of us, and one thing is sure: there will continue to be plenty more requests coming in for our small team to stay on top of in the meantime.

With this in mind, we want to make sure that our support staff are able to properly rest and recharge during what is a holiday period for many of us coming up. We’ll be operating with just one person each on the technical support and membership support side between 23rd December and 3rd January. This means that while we’ll be able to answer urgent queries, non-urgent questions will be left unanswered until 4th January. And we’ll not take on any new members between 21st December and 3rd January too.

We know many of you will be continuing to work during this period. If you have a non-urgent question, do take a look at our support documentation in the meantime, or see if other members (or our amazing Ambassadors) are able to help on our forum. If you can’t find what you’re looking for and it’s urgent, we hope that the limited staff who are on call will still be able to help you out.

Colleagues in the US have recently celebrated their Thanksgiving, and I remain enormously thankful for our team here at Crossref, and for you all in the scholarly community for your enthusiasm for working together collectively to help the world find, cite, link, assess, and reuse scholarly content. We all really appreciate your patience while we reset ready for 2021. Happy Holidays!

2020 Board Election

Lucy Ofiesh — Mon, 28 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This year, Crossref’s Nominating Committee assumed the task of developing a slate of candidates to fill six open board seats. We are grateful that in the midst of a challenging year, we received over 70 expressions of interest from all around the world, a 40% increase from last year’s response. It was an extraordinary pool of applicants and a testament to the strength of our membership community.

There are six seats open for election (two large, four small), and the Nominating Committee is pleased to present the following slate.

The 2020 slate

Candidate organisations, in alphabetical order, for the Small category (four seats available):

Beilstein-Institut, Wendy Patterson
Korean Council of Science Editors, Kihong Kim
OpenEdition, Marin Dacos
Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO), Abel Packer,
The University of Hong Kong, Jesse Xiao

Candidate organisations, in alphabetical order, for the Large category (two seats available):

AIP Publishing, Jason Wilde,
Oxford University Press, James Phillpotts,
Taylor & Francis, Liz Allen

Here are the candidates’ organisational and personal statements

You can be part of this important process, by voting in the election

If your organisation is a voting member in good standing of Crossref as of September 14, 2020, you are eligible to vote when voting opens on September 30, 2020.

How can you vote?

On September 30, 2020, your organisation’s designated voting contact will receive an email with the Formal Notice of Meeting and Proxy Form with concise instructions on how to vote. You will also receive a user name and password with a link to our voting platform.

The election results will be announced at LIVE20 virtual meeting on November 10, 2020.

Similarity Check news: introducing the next generation iThenticate.

Kirsty Meddings — Tue, 28 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Crossref’s Similarity Check service is used by our members to detect text overlap with previously published work that may indicate plagiarism of scholarly or professional works. Manuscripts can be checked against millions of publications from other participating Crossref members and general web content using the iThenticate text comparison software from Turnitin.

The 2000 members who already make use of Similarity Check upload almost 2,000,000 documents each month to look for matching text in other publications.

We have some great news for those 2000 members –– a completely new version of iThenticate is on its way, and will start to roll out to users in the coming months.

New functionality has been developed based on your feedback over the past few years and includes:

An improved Document Viewer that makes PDFs searchable and accessible, with responsive design for ease of use on different screen sizes. All of the functionality of the Viewer and the Text-only reports in the previous version have been streamlined into just two views: Sources Overview and All Sources.
Improved exclusion options to make refining matches even easier. Smarter citation detection now identifies probable citations both inline and in reference sections.
A new “Content Portal” where you can see what percentage of your own content has been successfully indexed for the iThenticate comparison database, and download reports of indexing errors that need to be fixed.
A new API for integration with manuscript submission systems allows display of the largest matching word count and the top 5 source matches alongside the Similarity Score.
The maximum number of pages and file size per document has been doubled to 800 pages/200 MB.

The new document viewer in iThenticate v2.0

Improved reference exclusion

Crossref members can use Similarity Check directly by logging in, or via an integration with a submission/peer review system. We are working with many system providers to bring v2.0 to you as soon as possible. In the meantime, we are looking for members to help us test the new system directly in the iThenticate user interface. If you are interested and can spare a few hours some time in the next month please let me know.

And if your organisation is not yet using Similarity Check to assess the originality of the manuscripts you receive do take a look at the many benefits the service has to offer.

Meet the new Crossref Executive Director

Ed Pentz — Thu, 23 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

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.

What happened? Well, a lot has changed since I announced that I was leaving back in February. The pandemic has upended “business as usual” and everyone is rethinking pretty much everything. It’s clear that as a result of the crisis, there will be greater economic pressure on our community. These are difficult times and they are going to continue for the foreseeable future.

The people at Crossref are amazing and I’ve been impressed and inspired by everyone’s resilience and creativity in responding to these unusual challenges. Crossref has a very special organisational culture and I want to remain a part of it and continue to develop it.

I’ve also been inspired by the board. In particular, at its July meeting they passed a progressive motion based on a proposal from the leadership team:

RESOLVED: Crossref should proactively lead an effort to explore, with other infrastructure organisations and initiatives, how we can improve the scholarly research ecosystem. Crossref is committed to the collaborative development of open scholarly infrastructure for the benefit of our members and the wider research community.

This is the result of a process that started back in 2019. In the A turning point is a time for reflection blog post, we took a step back as we approached Crossref’s 20th anniversary. We conducted research into the perceived value of Crossref, reflected on what we had achieved, and what the future holds for Crossref. At our annual meeting, “the strategy one” and in our annual report fact file, we reminded people of the organisation’s original founding purpose:

To promote the development and cooperative use of new and innovative technologies to speed and facilitate scientific and other scholarly research.

Following on from 2019, as the pandemic hit, we held virtual strategic sessions with the board in March, May and June. These culminated in the motion above, which allows Crossref to fully embrace this simple, but ambitious, vision. This was a game changer for me, and I realized there was nothing else I wanted to do or that better suited my skills and experience than to continue to lead Crossref and work with the community through the next phase of transformation.

This is not the time for “business as usual”. We live in an interconnected, interdependent world and open infrastructure organisations have to collaborate more deeply and look at doing things differently in order to improve the scholarly research ecosystem. So - more to come!

New faces at Crossref

Crossref — Tue, 30 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Please help us welcome new faces at Crossref! Martyn, Sara, Laura, and Mark joined us very recently and we are happy they’re with us. Both Martyn and Sara have joined the Product team and this has given us the chance to reorganize the team into the following groups: content registration, scholarly stewardship, scholarly impact, metadata retrieval, and UX/UI leadership. Laura joined the Finance and Operations team to help make the billing process simple for our members. Mark joins the Technology team and one of his projects will be improving the Event Data service.

It is exciting to already see the impact of your contributions and look forward to what’s to come!

And now a few words from each of them.

Martyn Rittman

I am a former university researcher who worked on interdisciplinary projects around life sciences and analytical chemistry, with positions in the UK and Germany. I spent seven years at open access publisher MDPI doing everything from running journals to handling production, developing services for authors and publishers, and supporting preprints. I’m very excited to be joining Crossref as a Product Manager and developing some great products and services that focus on how Crossref-indexed research creates impact. This includes supporting the use of preprint metadata. I’m also looking forward to getting my teeth into event data, which looks at how those in the research community and beyond reference, use, and reuse research. If you are interested in making use of event data or have examples of event data applications, I would like to hear from you.

Sara Bowman

I’m thrilled to have joined Crossref at this exciting time in the organisation. As a member of the Product team, my primary area of focus is content registration, building, and improving tools for our members to deposit rich metadata. I’m particularly interested in how we can create a unified user experience for content registration while supporting the needs of our diverse membership. A scientist by training, I’ve spent the last 6 years working on open source technologies to support scholarly communication, most recently in the role of Product Manager at the Center for Open Science. I’m passionate about open tools and using data to drive product development, building innovative solutions to improve research and scholarly communication.

Laura Cuniff

I joined Crossref two months ago as a part-time Billing Support Specialist on the Finance and Operations team. With the help of my supportive and knowledgeable colleagues, I took on learning the various systems. My goal is to make the billing process as simple as possible for our members by researching, retrieving, and relaying billing information. This allows our members to focus on the reason for their engagement with Crossref. With several part-time jobs cobbled together at different times of the day, I have the flexibility to volunteer with a few organisations in my hometown of Ipswich, MA. If you find yourself at the Ipswich Visitor Center, I may greet you, recommend the most beautiful spots in town, give you a tour of the Ipswich Museum, or send you off with a wonderful Ipswich Humane Group cat or dog! I’m very excited to be here!

Mark Woodhall

I am an open-source enthusiast who has worked in a range of technology roles at a variety of companies as a polyglot programmer with experience in Clojure(Script), Java, C#, and JavaScript. It’s really exciting to be working at Crossref as a Senior Software Developer on the Technology team and I’m proud to be part of a team with open source at its heart. I’m really looking forward to getting more involved with event data and building a scalable solution to support its future uses.

Welcome to the Crossref community Martyn, Laura, Sara, and Mark.

Calling all prospective board members

Lucy Ofiesh — Thu, 21 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

English version –– Información en español –– Version Française

The Crossref Nominating Committee is inviting expressions of interest to join the Board of Directors of Crossref for the term starting in 2021. The committee will gather responses from those interested and create the slate of candidates that our membership will vote on in an election in September. Expressions of interest will be due Friday, June 19, 2020.

Setting the strategic direction for the organisation;
Providing financial oversight; and
Approving new policies and services.

The board is representative of our membership base and guides the staff leadership team on trends affecting scholarly communications. The board sets strategic directions for the organisation while also providing oversight into policy changes and implementation. Board members have a fiduciary responsibility to ensure sound operations. Board members do this by attending board meetings, as well as joining more specific board committees.

As an example, in 2019 the board decided to remove fees for the Crossmark service. This involved a strategic review of the service and its alignment with the mission by the Membership & Fees committee; followed by a review of the financial implications of removing the fee; and ultimately, a vote by the full board to remove the fee starting in 2020.

I’m interested but busy! What is expected of board members?

Starting in 2020, following travel restrictions as a result of COVID-19, the board introduced a plan to convene at least one of the board meetings virtually each year and all committee meetings take place virtually. Most board members sit on at least one Crossref committee. Care is taken to accommodate the wide range of timezones in which our board members live.

Board members are expected to be comfortable assuming the responsibilities listed above and to prepare and participate in board meeting discussions.

About the election

The board is elected through the “one member, one vote” policy wherein every member of Crossref has a single vote to elect representatives to the Crossref board. Board terms are for three years, and this year there are six seats open for election.

The board maintains a balance of seats, with eight seats for smaller publishers and eight seats for larger publishers, in an effort to ensure that the diversity of experiences and perspectives of the publishing community is represented in decisions made at Crossref. This year we will elect two of the larger publisher seats and four of the smaller publisher seats.

The election takes place online and voting will open in September. Election results will be shared at the November board meeting and new members will commence their term in 2021.

About the nominating committee

2020 Nominating Committee:
Melissa Harrison, eLife, Cambridge, UK, committee chair
Scott Delman, ACM, New York, NY
Susan Murray, AJOL, Grahamstown, South Africa
Tanja Niemann, Erudit, Montreal, Canada
Arley Soto, Biteca, Bogotá, Colombia

How to submit an expression of interest

Please click here to submit your expression of interest or contact me with any questions at lofiesh [at] crossref.org.

Versión en español

El Comité de Nominación de Crossref está invitando a expresiones de interés a unirse a la Junta Directiva de Crossref para el período que comienza en 2021. El comité recopilará las respuestas de los interesados y creará la lista de candidatos que nuestra membresía votará en una elección en septiembre. Las expresiones de interés vencen el viernes 19 de junio de 2020.

La función de la junta directiva de Crossref es proporcionar supervisión estratégica y financiera de la organización, así como orientación para el Director Ejecutivo y el equipo de liderazgo del personal, con responsabilidades importantes como:

Establecer la dirección estratégica para la organización;
Proporcionar supervisión financiera; y
Aprobar nuevas políticas y servicios.

La junta es representativa de nuestra base de miembros y guía al equipo de liderazgo del personal sobre las tendencias que afectan las comunicaciones académicas. La junta establece direcciones estratégicas para la organización mientras supervisa los cambios e implementación de políticas. Los miembros de la junta tienen la responsabilidad fiduciaria de garantizar operaciones sólidas. Los miembros de la junta hacen esto asistiendo a las reuniones de la junta, además de unirse a comités de la junta más específicos.

Como ejemplo, en 2019 la junta decidió eliminar las tarifas de servicio de Crossmark. Esto implicó una revisión estratégica del servicio y su alineación con la misión del comité de Membresía y Tarifas; seguido de una revisión de las implicaciones financieras de eliminar la tarifa; y, en última instancia, un voto de la junta completa para retirar la tarifa a partir de 2020.

Los servicios Crossref proporcionan infraestructura central para las comunicaciones académicas. La junta directiva de Crossref ayuda a dar forma al futuro de nuestros servicios y, por extensión, impacta el ecosistema académico más amplio. Estamos buscando miembros de la junta para contribuir con su experiencia y perspectiva.

¡Estoy interesado pero ocupado! ¿Qué se espera de los miembros de la junta?

Los miembros de la junta asisten a tres reuniones cada año que generalmente tienen lugar en marzo, julio y noviembre. Las reuniones se han llevado en una variedad de ubicaciones internacionales y se brinda apoyo para viajes cuando es necesario.

A partir de 2020, después de las restricciones de viaje como resultado de COVID-19, la junta introdujo un plan para convocar al menos una de las reuniones de la junta virtualmente todos los años, y todas las reuniones del comité tienen lugar virtualmente. La mayoría de los miembros de la junta formen parte del menos un comité Crossref. Se tiene cuidado de acomodar la amplia gama de zonas horarias en las que viven los miembros de nuestra junta.

Aunque las expresiones de interés son específicas de un individuo, el asiento elegido para la junta pertenece a la organización miembro. El miembro primario de la junta también nombra a un suplente que puede asistir a las reuniones en caso de que el miembro de la junta principal no pueda.

Se espera que los miembros de la junta se sientan cómodos asumiendo las responsabilidades anteriores y que se preparen y participen en las discusiones de la reunión de la junta.

Las reuniones de la junta se llevarán a cabo en inglés, por lo que los posibles miembros de la junta deben sentirse cómodos leyendo material en inglés y en inglés conversacional.

Sobre las elecciones

La junta se elige mediante la política de “un miembro, un voto” en la que cada miembro de Crossref tiene un voto para elegir representantes en la junta de Crossref. Los términos de la junta son de tres años, y este año hay seis asientos abiertos para la elección

La junta mantiene un equilibrio de asientos, con ocho asientos para editoriales más pequeñas y ocho asientos para editoriales más grandes, en un esfuerzo por garantizar que la diversidad de experiencias y perspectivas de la comunidad editorial esté representada en las decisiones tomadas en Crossref. Este año elegiremos dos de los asientos de editor más grandes y cuatro de los asientos de editor más pequeños.

La elección se realiza en línea y la votación se abrirá en septiembre. Los resultados de las elecciones se compartirán en la reunión de la junta de noviembre y los nuevos miembros comenzarán su mandato en 2021.

Sobre el comité de nominaciones

El comité de nominaciones revisará las expresiones de interés y seleccionará una lista de candidatos para la elección. Esta lista presentada excederá el número total de asientos disponibles. El comité considera declaraciones de interés, tamaño organizacional, geografía, género y experiencia.

Comité de nominaciones 2020:
Melissa Harrison, eLife, Cambridge, UK, committee chair
Scott Delman, ACM, New York, NY
Susan Murray, AJOL, Grahamstown, South Africa
Tanja Niemann, Erudit, Montreal, Canada
Arley Soto, Biteca, Bogotá, Colombia

Cómo presentar una expresión de interés

Por favor haga clic aquí para enviar su expresión de interés o contáctame si tiene alguna pregunta lofiesh [at] crossref.org.

Version Française

Appel à tous les membres potentiels du conseil d’administration

Le comité de nomination de Crossref invite les personnes qui seraient intéressées à se porter candidates pour l’élection au conseil d’administration de Crossref, pour le mandat commençant en 2021. Le comité de nomination rassemblera les réponses des personnes candidates et élaborera une liste des candidats, pour lesquels nos membres pourront voter lors des élections au conseil d’administration, en septembre. Les candidatures doivent être déposées au plus tard le vendredi 19 juin 2020.

Le rôle du conseil d’administration de Crossref est d’opérer une supervision stratégique et financière de l’organisation, et de conseiller le directeur exécutif ainsi que l’équipe de direction du personnel. Les principales responsabilités du conseil d’administration sont les suivantes :

Fixer l’orientation stratégique de l’organisation
Assurer la surveillance financière
Approuver de nouvelles politiques et de nouveaux services

Le conseil d’administration est représentatif de nos adhérents et guide l’équipe de direction du personnel en ce qui concerne les tendances affectant les communications savantes. Le conseil d’administration établit des orientations stratégiques pour l’organisation, tout en assurant le contrôle des changements et de la mise en œuvre des politiques. Les membres du conseil ont la responsabilité fiduciaire d’assurer son bon fonctionnement. Les membres du conseil d’administration s’acquittent de cette responsabilité en assistant aux réunions du conseil d’administration et en participant à des comités, plus spécifiques, du conseil d’administration.

A titre d’exemple, en 2019, le conseil d’administration a décidé de supprimer les frais liés au service Crossmark. Ceci a impliqué un examen stratégique du service et de son alignement avec la mission de Crossref, par le comité des adhésions et frais, puis un examen des implications financières de la suppression des frais, et, finalement, un vote par l’ensemble du conseil d’administration pour supprimer les frais à partir de 2020.

Les services de Crossref fournissent une infrastructure centralisée pour les communications savantes. Le conseil d’administration de Crossref aide à façonner l’avenir de nos services et, par extension, a un impact sur l’écosystème universitaire plus large. Les futurs membres du conseil d’administration sont recherchés particulièrement pour leur expérience et leur point de vue.

Je suis intéressé mais très occupé! Qu’attend-on des administrateurs?

Les membres du conseil d’administration assistent à trois réunions par an qui ont généralement lieu en mars, juillet et novembre. Les réunions se déroulent dans des lieux divers, à l’échelle internationale, et une assistance financière est octroyée, en cas de besoin, pour le voyage.

À partir de 2020, à la suite des restrictions de voyage causées par la COVID-19, le conseil a présenté un plan pour convoquer au moins une des réunions du conseil en téléconférence chaque année, et toutes les réunions des comités auront lieu en téléconférence. La plupart des membres du conseil d’administration siègent à au moins un comité de Crossref. Nous souhaitons préciser que nous prenons soin de prendre en compte le large éventail de fuseaux horaires dans lesquels vivent les membres de notre conseil d’administration.

Bien que les manifestations d’intérêt émanent d’une personne, le siège pourvu au conseil appartient à l’organisation membre dans son ensemble. Le membre titulaire du conseil d’administration nomme également un suppléant, qui pourra assister aux réunions en cas d’empêchement du membre titulaire du siège au conseil d’administration.

Il est attendu que les membres du conseil d’administration puissent dédier aux responsabilités présentées ci-dessus le temps qui leur est raisonnablement dû, ainsi qu’à la préparation et à la participation aux discussions des réunions du conseil.

À propos de l’élection

Le conseil d’administration est élu selon une politique de «un membre, une voix» dans laquelle chaque membre de Crossref dispose d’une seule voix pour élire les représentants au conseil d’administration de Crossref. Le mandat du conseil d’administration est de trois ans et, cette année, six sièges sont à pourvoir lors de des élections de septembre prochain.

Le conseil d’administration maintient un équilibre des sièges, avec huit sièges pour les petits éditeurs et huit sièges pour les grands éditeurs, afin de garantir que la diversité des expériences et des perspectives de la communauté de l’édition soit représentées dans les décisions prises à Crossref. Cette année, sont à pourvoir deux sièges de grands éditeurs et quatre sièges de petits éditeurs.

Le vote aura lieu en ligne et s’ouvrira en septembre. Les résultats de ce scrutin seront communiqués lors de la réunion du conseil d’administration de novembre et les nouveaux membres commenceront leur mandat en 2021.

À propos du comité de nomination

Le comité des candidatures examinera les candidatures et sélectionnera une liste de candidats aux élections. Le nombre de candidats proposés dépassera le nombre total de sièges à pourvoir. Le comité prend en compte les déclarations d’intérêt, la taille de l’organisation, la géographie, le sexe et l’expérience des personnes pour sa sélection.

Comment exprimer une manifestation d’intérêt

Veuillez cliquer ici pour envoyer votre candidature ou contactez-moi pour toute question à lofiesh [at] crossref.org.

You’ve had your say, now what? Next steps for schema changes

Patricia Feeney — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It seems like ages ago, particularly given recent events, but we had our first public request for feedback on proposed schema updates in December and January. The feedback we received indicated two big things: we’re on the right track, and you want us to go further. This update has some significant but important changes to contributors, but is otherwise a fairly moderate update. The feedback was mostly supportive, with a fair number of helpful suggestions about details.

Feedback and changes

Many of you are excited about CRediT, and a number of members have indicated that they are ready and waiting to send us CRediT roles. To support this, as in my initial proposal, we’re adding a new role element and role_type attribute that supports existing Crossref-defined roles and CRediT roles, as well as a required vocab attribute to specify which vocabulary is being supplied.

<role role_type="author" vocab="crossref">author</role> <role role_type="writing-original_draft" vocab="credit"/>

CRediT as it exists now is an informal standard coordinated by CASRAI, but a formal standard is in the works via NISO. CRediT is currently a list of well considered and defined roles that are not particularly machine-readable. I’ve created a list for implementation that eliminates spaces and ampersands. CRediT also lacks reliable PIDs or persistent URLs for the role definitions, so that has been omitted from our implementation. We’ll adopt any changes resulting from the NISO standard, but have decided to go forward with it as-is, as many of our members are eager to implement.

Beyond CRediT, we’ll also be expanding and refining our contributor support in a number of ways:

We’ll be expanding our affiliation metadata beyond a simple string to include organisation identifiers like ROR, and allow markup of organisation names and locations.
We’re expanding the contributor identifiers as well - in addition to ORCID iDs, members can send us Wikidata, ISNI, and other identifiers.
We’re adding support for multiple names to support contributors whose names can be expressed in multiple alphabets, or who have aliases or nicknames.
We’re changing surname to family_name and will be relaxing the requirement that all person names have a “surname” - a given name may be supplied on its own to support contributors who do not have family names.
The current element for corporate/group authors, organisation, will be replaced by collab as the term “organisation” was widely confusing (we have a lot of affiliation info registered as group authors!), and the collab section will also allow organisation identifiers.

Many of these updates align with how JATS supports contributors - I hope these changes will allow our members to supply robust contributor metadata without the burden of complicated conversions.

I’m also including the proposed changes to support data citation and typing of citations. Additionally, we’ll be adding support for members who want to:

supply Grant IDs in their metadata records
register identifiers for conferences.

A draft 5.0 xsd file is available in a branch of our GitLab schema repository with the details of the planned updates, and more robust documentation and examples are forthcoming.

Implementation plans

My house was built in 1890 and there are always surprises whenever we need to fix or renovate anything. Our system is just as old in technology years - it’s been chugging along since the aughts. This means while we don’t think it’s powered by knob-and-tube wiring, we can’t be sure until we open up the walls. We want to implement our plans (in fact we want to do more!) but if we run into any big blockers or crucial issues, we may roll out the changes over several iterations. These updates are fairly conservative and I remain optimistic we’ll be able to implement them as-is. Our update will help us build a foundation for future updates, allowing us to continuously evolve our schema as we move forward.

Some of you are understandably worried about our implementation schedule and backwards incompatibility. We’re aware that changes are expensive and inconvenient, and making them on our schedule doesn’t always work for your schedule. That’s why we’ve sustained 12+ versions of our schema over the past 12 years. We won’t be mandating a change any time soon, and definitely won’t do so without sufficient warning and community involvement. In the future we’ll need to make a sustained effort to retire older schema, but now isn’t the time for that.

We intend to commence work in Q2 but won’t have a firm timeline for a few more weeks. I will be providing regular updates as we progress, and will be asking for volunteers to test the updates when we’re ready. I’ll also be sharing more documentation and information about how the changes will be represented in our metadata outputs.

Have more to say?

Our feedback period has finished and we do plan to implement the changes as described, but if you have opinions, please share them.

Encouraging even greater reporting of corrections and retractions

Kirsty Meddings — Mon, 30 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

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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Research doesn’t stand still; even after publication, articles can be updated with supplementary data or corrections. When research outputs are is changed in this way the publisher should report and link it, so that those accessing and citing the content know if it’s been updated, corrected or even retracted. This also emphasizes the member’s commitment to the ongoing stewardship of research outputs.

Many people find and store articles to read later, either as PDFs on their laptop or on one of any number of reference management systems - when they come back to read and cite these articles, possibly many months later, they want to know if the version they have is current or not.

Removing Crossmark fees

To encourage even wider adoption of Crossmark, and to promote best practice around better reporting of corrections and retractions, we will no longer be charging additional fees for our Crossmark service. This change applies to all Crossmark metadata registered from 1 January 2020. All members are now encouraged to add Crossmark metadata and add the Crossmark button and pop-up box to their publications - and you can do so as part of your regular content registration.

Richer metadata gives important context

We know that there are many more corrections and retractions that are not yet being registered, and to address this, we are now asking all of our members to start registering metadata for significant updates to your publications, even if you don’t implement the Crossmark button and pop-up box on your content. Remember, anyone can access the Crossmark metadata through our public REST API, and start using it straight away - even if you’re not ready to implement the Crossmark button.

Check out how to get started; if you only want to deposit metadata, follow steps one through four. If you also want to add the Crossmark button and pop-up box to your web pages/PDFs so that readers can easily see when content has changed, then also follow the rest of the steps.

Crossmark

We launched Crossmark in 2012 to raise awareness of these critical changes, by asking Crossref members to:

record such updates in your metadata, either as part of your regular Crossref metadata deposit, or deposited as stand-alone data for back-year records
help readers find out about the changes by placing a Crossmark button and pop-up box (which is consistent across all members making it recognizable to readers) on your landing pages and in PDFs

Members can also use Crossmark to register additional metadata about content, giving further context and background for the reader. These metadata appear in the “More Information” section of the Crossmark box. 7 million DOIs have some additional metadata, the most common being copyright statements, publication history, and peer review methods.

Anyone can access the Crossmark metadata through our public REST API, providing a myriad of opportunities for integration with other systems, and analysis of changes to the scholarly record.

Who has implemented Crossmark?

440 Crossref members have implemented Crossmark to date. 11.4 million DOIs have some Crossmark metadata.

	Total DOIs	DOIs with Crossmark metadata	%
Journal articles	80,862,460	10,155,340	12.56%
Book chapters	14,040,646	792,953	5.65%
Conference Papers	6,175,733	457,237	7.40%
Datasets	1,862,852	19,206	1.03%
Books	753,298	239	0.03%
Monographs	469,333	23	0.00%

Of those, about 130,000 contain an update:

You can see which members or journals have implemented Crossmark by viewing the relevant Crossref Participation Report.

Leaving Crossref

Ed Pentz — Fri, 14 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Where does the time go…

In my blog post on January 14th about Crossref’s 20th anniversary I said, “The one constant in Crossref’s 20 years has been change”. It’s true that there has been constant change, but there has been another constant at Crossref –– me (and DOIs, to be fair). I started as Crossref’s first employee and Executive Director on February 1st, 2000, so I just marked my 20th anniversary with the organisation.

This milestone prompted me to reflect on where I am and where I’m heading. After 20 years leading the organisation, I’ve decided to leave Crossref. It’s time for a new challenge. I’m still very committed to the mission and very proud of my time at Crossref, the culture we’ve created and what the organisation has achieved. It’s been an honor serving as Executive Director and a pleasure working with so many great people over the years. And to be clear –– I’m not ill, being pushed or having a midlife crisis (yet).

It’s a difficult and emotional decision but I think the transition can be positive for me, the staff, the board, and the organisation. I’ll be working with the Crossref board, Chair, Treasurer and staff on the transition –– the plan is for me to be around through September or October to enable the recruitment and handover to a new Executive Director. There will be more information about the transition and recruitment process after the Crossref board meeting March 11-12 in London.

Crossref has a bright future and many opportunities to do new things. Crossref provides essential, open scholarly infrastructure and services that benefit its members and the wider scholarly research ecosystem –– and we’ve got a lot of interesting things in development and ambitious plans. To anyone who might be interested in being Crossref’s next Executive Director, I can honestly say it is fantastic, challenging, fun, and very fulfilling –– that’s why I’ve done it for 20 years.

What’s next for me? I don’t know but it’s something I’ll be thinking about over the coming months. I do know that working for a mission driven organisation and staying involved with scholarly communications and research –– a fascinating and worthy field –– will be top of my list.

Anyway - it’s back to work and full steam ahead for Crossref!

Crossref is 20

Ed Pentz — Tue, 14 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It seems like only yesterday…

On January 19th, 2000 a new not-for-profit organisation was registered in New York State. It was called Publishers International Linking Association, Inc but was more commonly referred to as “CrossRef”. This means that Crossref will be 20 years old on January 19th, 2020 so I wanted to mark the occasion with a short post. We are planning more ways to mark our 20th anniversary later this year so keep a lookout.

Crossref becoming a legal entity was the result of developments over the previous few years and the DOI-X pilot in 1999. Moving quickly, the fledgling organisation issued its first news release on February 2nd, 2000 - Crossref Update Journal Reference Linking Service Names Executive Director, Board of Directors, New Members, and a “Go Live” Timetable - announcing the appointment of an Executive Director (me!), that there were 22 members, and a plan for launching the system. From these beginnings, Crossref has grown into one of the most successful examples of sustainable scholarly infrastructure. This is due to the hard work and support of many people and organisations, and an organisational structure and governance and sustainability model that has proven very robust.

Looking back, Crossref has achieved an amazing amount but it certainly wasn’t a forgone conclusion that we would be successful. On our tenth anniversary we wrote an overview of Crossref’s founding and early years The Formation of Crossref: A Short History, which highlights that vision, collaboration, trust and utility all contributed to Crossref’s success. I particularly want to recognize Eric Swanson, from Wiley, and Pieter Bolman, from Academic Press/Harcourt Brace for their critical role in the founding of Crossref and in its early success by providing the vision, bringing everyone together, serving as the first Chair and Treasurer of the organisation, and providing me with support and guidance in Crossref’s early start-up phase.

Our history document notes that Crossref grew more quickly than expected, “By the end of 2003, CrossRef had 300 members with 12 million DOIs assigned, compared to the initial projection of 60 participating publishers and 3 million DOIs assigned.” Looking at the 2010 annual report at the ten year mark, Crossref had 43 million content items, 943 members and 15 staff. Since then, Crossref has continued to grow faster than expected and, in fact, at the start of of 20th year, growth is increasing. Our latest annual report “Crossref Annual Report & Fact File 2018-19” highlights that there we have 111 million content items - an average annual increase of 15%; over 11,500 members with over 180 joining per month - an average annual increase of 112%; and 37 staff - an average annual increase of 7%. Crossref is also financially stable, having generated surpluses every year since 2003 and with no fee increases in 15 years - an effective 30%+ decrease for members.

Some of the most important statistics for me are those around DOI resolutions - humans and machines following persistent DOI links - and metadata dissemination via our open APIs and paid services. In 2010 there were around 470 million DOI resolutions for the entire year - we now see over 400 million resolutions per month. With metadata dissemination in 2010 there were on average about 40 million queries per month and there are now over 600 million per month meaning that huge amounts of metadata are flowing out into the ecosystem and improving persistent linking, discovery, and the research process. Also, very importantly, we are much more global and diverse than we were, with members and users from over 120 countries, representing all disciplines and all types of organisations (societies, commercial publishers, funders, start-ups, universities and other research institutions). And in a big change, the members in the top three fee categories accounted for 36% of revenue in 2019 - down from 56% in 2011, while the bottom three categories accounted for 46% of revenue in 2019 - up from 25% in 2011.

As we noted in our blog post from November 2019, A turning point is a time for reflection, “different people have always wanted different things from us and, since our founding, we have brought together diverse organisations to have discussions—sometimes contentious—to agree on how to help make scholarly communications better. Being inclusive can mean slow progress, but we’ve been able to advance by being flexible, fair, and forward-thinking.” While we’ve been very successful, there is a lot we can do better and it is tricky keeping all our stakeholders happy - but that’s what we’ve always done and we’ll continue to do it by being open, inclusive, collaborative, and willing to change and adapt. The one constant in Crossref’s 20 years has been change. The staff and board will be reviewing Crossref’s strategy in 2020 with the value research report and LIVE19 Amsterdam workshops as input. I’m confident we can continue to play a vital role in the scholarly research ecosystem.

A huge thank you to everyone over the years who has contributed to Crossref’s success - it’s a very long list and includes staff, board members, members, users, supporters, partners, consultants, and many others. Personally, I’m proud and honored to have played a role in Crossref’s success and development over the last 20 years and the best part is that there is more to come.

Keep an eye out for the publication of the outputs from our LIVE19 meeting and further 20th anniversary activities.

A Journey of a Crossref Ambassador in Latin America

Arley Soto — Wed, 11 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

English version –– Información en español

In this post, Arley Soto shares some experiences about his work as a Crossref ambassador in Latin America.

When I joined as a volunteer Crossref ambassador in 2018, I never imagined that in less than two years, I would have the opportunity to travel to three Latin American cities, visit Toronto, organize the first Crossref LIVE in Spanish and hold webinars in Spanish about Crossref’s services. After almost two years of continuous learning, I think it is worth sharing my experience with the Crossref community for a better understanding of the ambassadors’ role in Latin America and to inspire ambassadors from other parts of the world to write and post their experiences.

Before becoming a Crossref ambassador, I had already been working with Crossref since 2011, when we started to coordinate DOI registration for the Biomédica Journal of the National Health Institute, one of the first journals to implement the DOI in Colombia. During these first years of relations with Crossref, I acquired basic knowledge on membership and the technical aspects of the services the agency offers, including Reference Linking, Content Registration and Crossmark. This close relationship with Crossref enabled us to hold the PKP-Crossref workshop in 2018 with Juan Pablo Alperín and Susan Collins at the Third International Congress of Redalyc Editors at Universidad César Vallejo, city of Trujillo.

In the same year, thanks to the invitation by the State University System (SUE, for the Spanish original) (Bogotá chapter), I had the opportunity to give a presentation on Crossref during the 2018 International Open Access Week held at Universidad Militar Nueva Granada. Around 50 people participated, including members and non-members of Crossref. There, I emphasized the nature of Crossref as a non-profit organisation, based on affiliations and the importance of new members participating in the annual elections organized by Crossref and running to be representatives in the Crossref Board of Directors.

In November 2018, I had the pleasure of participating in the Crossref Meeting in Toronto, thanks to an invitation from the organizers. There, I talked to the representatives of other organisations who are members of Crossref around the world and I also met some of the members of the Crossref team in person. This event was essential for me as an ambassador, because I learned about Crossref’s vision and different projects firsthand, which increased my capacity to explain Crossref’s scope and role in the area of scientific communications. I remember that the booth Crossref provided to answer technical questions was particularly useful. There, Isaac, Shayn and other members of the technical team were always available to resolve specific queries that I had not been able to resolve before myself.

In my second year as an ambassador, I represented Crossref at the Universidad Central del Ecuador (Quito, Ecuador), in a talk with an average of 40 people from different parts of Ecuador. There, I emphasized the technical aspects of the DOI and good practices for its use in academic publications. This talk was held on April 21, 2019, in collaboration with Crossref and BITECA S.A.S., a sponsoring member of Crossref.

In May 2019, with Susan Collins and Vanessa Fairhurst, we organized Crossref LIVE Bogotá, which was not only successful because of the number of attendees from different parts of Colombia and other countries in the region, but also due to the meeting of Latin American ambassadors, where we worked the full morning discussing the priorities and issues of the region with ambassadors from Brazil, Mexico, Chile and Peru. Apart from other issues, at this meeting, it became clear the need to have better resources and support in Spanish for Spanish-speaking members.

Additionally, we helped to review the Spanish translation of the “You are Crossref” booklet, which we printed and distributed at Crossref LIVE Bogotá.

During 2019, I participated in the Introduction to Crossref and Content Registration and Introduction to Reference Linking and Cited-by webinar webinars and held the first webinar in Spanish about the new Metadata Manager tool, always with the ongoing support and assistance of the Crossref team.

And to end the year with a bang, together with Rachael Lammey, we organized the presentation: Open infrastructure and open data for the global metrics community: what can you build? I presented this at the 2Latmetrics: Altmetrics and Open Science in Latin America colloquium on November 4 in the city of Cusco (Peru).

This account of activities is a demonstration of the commitment of Crossref’s ambassadors to transmit the message of the importance of ethically and responsibly sharing, citing and making science visible on the web.

Spanish version

Cuando me vinculé como embajador voluntario de Crossref en 2018, no imaginaba que en menos de dos años tendría la oportunidad de viajar a 3 ciudades en Latinoamérica, conocer Toronto, organizar el primer Crossref LIVE en español y realizar webinars en español sobre los servicios de Crossref. Después de casi dos años de continuo aprendizaje, creo que vale la pena compartir mi experiencia a la comunidad de Crossref para entender mejor el rol de los embajadores en Latinoamérica y para inspirar embajadores de otras regiones del mundo a que escriban y publiquen sus experiencias.

Antes de convertirme en embajador de Crossref ya había trabajado con Crossref desde el año 2011, año en el que empezamos a gestionar DOI para la revista Biomédica del Instituto Nacional de Salud, una de las primeras revistas en implementar DOI en Colombia. Durante esos primeros años de relaciones con Crossref, adquirí un conocimiento básico sobre las membresías y los aspectos técnicos de los servicios que la agencia ofrece, incluyendo el Reference Linking, Content Registration y Crossmark, entre otros. Esta relación estrecha con Crossref favoreció para que en 2018 realizáramos el taller de PKP - Crossref entre Juan Pablo Alperín y Susan Collins en el 3er Congreso Internacional de Editores Redalyc, en la Universidad César Vallejo, ciudad de Trujillo

En ese mismo año, gracias a la invitación realizada por el Sistema Universitario Estatal, SUE (capítulo Bogotá) tuve la oportunidad de hacer una presentación de Crossref en la Semana Internacional de Acceso Abierto 2018, realizado en Universidad Militar Nueva Granada 2018, allí participaron alrededor de 50 personas entre miembros y no miembros de Crossref, aquí hice énfasis en la naturaleza de Crossref como organización sin ánimo de lucro, basada en afiliaciones y la importancia de que los nuevos miembros participen en las votaciones anuales que organiza Crossref y que se postulen para ser representantes en la junta directiva de Crossref.

En noviembre de 2018 tuve el placer de participar en el Crossref Meeting en la ciudad de Toronto, gracias a una invitación de los organizadores. Allí conversé con representantes de otras organizaciones afiliadas a Crossref alrededor del mundo y también conocí en persona a algunos de los integrantes del equipo de Crossref. Este evento fue de vital importancia para mí como embajador ya que conocí de primera mano la visión y los diferentes proyectos que realiza Crossref, lo que aumentó mi capacidad para explicar en mi contexto el alcance y el papel de Crossref en el entorno de la comunicación científica. Recuerdo que fue particularmente útil el kiosco que dispuso Crossref para atender inquietudes técnicas en donde Isaac, Shane y otros miembros del equipo técnico siempre estuvieron dispuestos a solucionar dudas específicas que no había podido resolver antes por mi mismo.

En el segundo año como embajador representé a Crossref en la Universidad Central del Ecuador (Quito, Ecuador), charla a la que asistieron en promedio 40 personas de diversos lugares del Ecuador, allí hice énfasis en los aspectos técnicos del DOI y buenas prácticas de su utilización en publicaciones académicas.. Esta charla tuvo lugar el 21 de abril de 2019 y la realizamos en colaboración con Crossref y BITECA SAS miembro patrocinador en Crossref.

En mayo de 2019 organizamos junto con Susan Collins y Vanessa Fairshuit el Crossref LIVE Bogotá, que no solamente fue exitoso por la cantidad de asistentes de diferentes partes de Colombia y de otros países de la región, sino por la reunión de embajadores de Latinoamérica, donde trabajamos una mañana completa para discutir acerca de las prioridades y temáticas propias de la región con embajadores de Brasil, México, Chile y Perú. Entre otros asuntos, en esta reunión se hizo evidente la necesidad de tener mayores recursos y soporte en Español para los miembros hispanohablantes.

Así mismo contribuimos con la revisión de la traducción al español de la cartilla “Usted es Crossref” que imprimimos y repartimos durante el Crossref LIVE Bogotá.

Durante 2019 participé en los webinars Introduction to Crossref and Content Registration y Introduction to Reference Linking and Cited-by webinar y llevé a cabo el primer Webinar en español sobre la nueva herramienta Metadata Manager, siempre con el acompañamiento y el soporte permanente del equipo de Crossref.

Y para terminar el año de la mejor manera, preparamos junto con Rachael Lammey la ponencia Open infrastructure and open data for the global metrics community: what can you build? Que presenté en el congreso 2Latmetrics: métricas alternativas y ciencia abierta en américa latina el 04 de noviembre en la ciudad de Cusco (Perú).

Este recuento de actividades es una muestra del compromiso de los embajadores de Crossref en transmitir el mensaje de la importancia de compartir, citar y hacer visible la ciencia en la web, de una manera ética y responsable.

Proposed schema changes - have your say

Patricia Feeney — Wed, 04 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The first version of our metadata input schema (a DTD, to be specific) was created in 1999 to capture basic bibliographic information and facilitate matching DOIs to citations. Over the past 20 years the bibliographic metadata we collect has deepened, and we’ve expanded our schema to include funding information, license, updates, relations, and other metadata. Our schema isn’t as venerable as a MARC record or as comprehensive as JATS, but it’s served us well. It’s not currently positioned to fully support everything we want to do long term - we’d like to support assertions, map cleanly to JATS and schema.org magically at the same time, and maybe even move beyond XML - but for now it’s something we can work with to empower member metadata to help find, cite, and connect scholarly content.

We’ve maintained backwards compatibility for most things since 2007 but this update will require some moderate changes to how contributors are modeled. The balance between supporting established tagging and addressing the evolution of what we collect and how it is expressed can be tricky. We want to collect good metadata without significantly disrupting the workflow of our membership, who are the source of the metadata. Even so, this is a fairly pragmatic update that will position us well for the future. I look forward to supporting new types of content and metadata in the future, but for now take a look at what I’m proposing.

Leave feedback, ask questions, and make suggestions in the feedback document or via email to feedback@crossref.org.

Next update

I’m proposing some updates and additions to the metadata we collect, and would like your feedback. To fully and elegantly support affiliation identifiers and multiple author roles, we need to break backwards compatibility. Specifically, we want to:

Add support for CRediT

The CASRAI CRediT taxonomy is increasingly used to represent roles common to contributors to research outputs. Our members are applying CRediT to contributors, so we want to capture them as well. Supporting CRediT allows Crossref and our membership to identify and credit contributors beyond authors and editors.

As most of you know, a contributor often does more than one thing - they write, they edit, they curate. We currently only allow one contributor role as an attribute, but, to realistically support CRediT and accurately capture evidence about the work, we need to allow multiple contributor roles. This will break backwards compatibility. We can potentially support the old way and the new way, but I’m trying to avoid awkward compromises wherever possible.

Supporting CRediT doesn’t mean you need to adopt CRediT. We’ll continue to support existing author roles, but they’ll be marked up differently. Details are in our request for feedback document.

Expand support for author and organisation identifiers

We collect ORCID iDs in our metadata but do not currently support other types of contributor identifiers. We also don’t support affiliation or organisation identifiers beyond those assigned within our funder and clinical trial registries. We’ve had increasing demands from both metadata suppliers and users to expand support for affiliation identifiers because…identifiers are useful. We also want to expand author identifier support as ORCID IDs may only be registered by researchers who are able to curate their own ORCID record. Adding support for ISNI and Wikidata IDs is a common request, but we anticipate there’s a need for other identifiers as well.

Our plan is to accept identifiers registered with identifiers.org as well as other identifiers upon request. We prefer to remain consistent with the identifiers.org registry as much as possible.

We’re particularly keen to support open community-led identifiers like ORCID and ROR and will continue to do so, but also want to support the metadata our members want to distribute. organisation identifiers will be particularly useful as they’ll help us populate records with ROR IDs in the future, leading to better quality affiliation metadata.

Expand support for a range of contributor names

We currently require a surname for all contributors, and don’t provide comprehensive support for contributors whose names are represented by multiple alphabets, or who have nicknames or aliases, or who don’t have a surname. To begin with, we’ll replace surname with the more widely used ‘family name’ and remove the fixed surname requirement, allowing only a given name to be provided where appropriate. We’ll also allow a variety of names to be provided for each contributor.

Expand affiliation support

We currently collect affiliation as a single string - we’re going to break that up to support affiliation names, and add in support for organisational identifiers like ROR.

Expand support for data citation

For those of you who send us references, we’re adding a few fields to better support data citation. We’re also going to allow you to (optionally) supply a specific publication type for references.

Other updates

We’re making some other small updates as well. If you have a small request, we may be able to accommodate it in our next update. Larger changes or additions will probably have to wait for future updates, but we’d love to start collecting suggestions now.

We need your feedback!

I’ll be giving a webinar on December 19 at 02:00 and 15:00 UTC to go over these changes in detail - please visit our webinars page to register.

Again, please leave feedback, ask questions, and make suggestions in the feedback document, or if you prefer send feedback via email to feedback@crossref.org. We’ll be taking feedback through January 15, 2020.

A turning point is a time for reflection

Ed Pentz — Sat, 09 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Crossref strives for balance. Different people have always wanted different things from us and, since our founding, we have brought together diverse organisations to have discussions—sometimes contentious—to agree on how to help make scholarly communications better. Being inclusive can mean slow progress, but we’ve been able to advance by being flexible, fair, and forward-thinking.

We have been helped by the fact that Crossref’s founding organisations defined a clear purpose in our original certificate of incorporation, which reads:

“To promote the development and cooperative use of new and innovative technologies to speed and facilitate scientific and other scholarly research.”

As Crossref prepares to turn 20 in January 2020, it’s an opportunity to reflect on achievements and highlights from 2018-19 and also ponder the preceding decades. Change is a constant at Crossref but the organisation has never strayed from its initial defined purpose. Our services and value now extend well beyond persistent identifiers and reference linking, and our connected open infrastructure benefits our 11,000+ membership as well as all those involved in scholarly research. This expansion is exactly what was envisioned to meet the goal of “speeding and facilitating” research.

This year’s annual report is different from previous years’; it has been expanded into a ‘fact file’ so that we can invite comments on the path ahead, based on transparent access to data about our membership, activities, and finances. As we were pulling together the charts and tables for this annual report we noticed stark differences in where Crossref is today compared to years past.

The rate of membership growth has accelerated and we now have over 180 new members joining every month, leading to one of the most striking changes we found. The lowest three membership tiers now account for 46% of revenue (up from 25% in 2011) while the highest three tiers account for 36% (down from 56% in 2011).

Today, the typical Crossref member has just a few hundred registered content items.

One way we have been able to accommodate this growth efficiently is by collaborating with sponsors in different countries. Very small members can join via a local sponsor that is able to provide technical, financial, language, and administrative support. We now have more members joining via sponsors, who otherwise would largely not be able to join at all. While you’d need to be a millionaire by US standards to join directly from Indonesia in our lowest fee tier (calculated using Purchasing Power Parity), the sponsor program—supported often by government investment in science and education—has enabled Indonesian organisations to join Crossref in large numbers, supporting their aim to become one of the fastest-growing nations in open research, and to help that research be discovered.

Crossref has repeatedly stayed ahead of developments in the community

In 2007, when the Similarity Check working group discussions and pilot started, there was disagreement on the board about whether Crossref should provide such a service and whether it was a strategic priority for members. By the end of the pilot, when the decision came to launch a production service, it was seen as essential and a top priority. This conclusion has been borne out in recent research into the value of Crossref; Similarity Check is one of the services of most importance to members.

Adding preprints as a record type was controversial at the time. The board discussed the topic of “duplicative works” for about two years with strong opinions on all sides. The working group delivered a good set of policies and technical specifications and in the July 2015 board meeting there was a majority—but not 100%—agreement on the motion to approve. We implemented preprints as a record type just in time to accommodate the snowballing of preprint servers emerging from existing and new members.

Another example of a former—and current—area of contention is the approach to metadata. When Crossref first launched, there were lengthy discussions about what metadata we should collect. The initial focus was on the minimal set of metadata to enable reference matching in support of reference linking. In the beginning, neither article titles, lists of authors, references, nor abstracts were included in the minimal metadata set. We supported them as optional but most members opted out. However, the huge set of metadata that Crossref collects and disseminates now is seen as essential, providing a lot of value for members in terms of discoverability.

Today, Crossref enables metadata retrieval on a large scale—an average of more than 600 million queries per month—through a variety of interfaces, most notably the REST API (Public, Polite, and Plus versions). The metadata is used by thousands of organisations and services—both commercial and not-for-profit—increasing the discoverability of member content. In fact, members of all stripes have long initiated projects to expand the metadata Crossref is able to collect and disseminate: from facilitating text mining (through license and full-text URLs); to enabling better connections with and evidence of contributions (through Funder IDs, ORCID iDs, and soon CRediT roles and ROR IDs).

These are all examples of where Crossref has successfully “promoted the cooperative use of new and innovative technologies” and where we are meeting our mission to make scholarly communications a little bit better. As ever, we need to thank our brilliant staff for their unfailing resilience, balance, and diligence, in these times of dynamic change.

Considering the value and future of Crossref

Research is global, and supporting a diverse global community is a challenge. This year, we conducted our first wide-ranging investigation into what people value from Crossref. This involved telephone interviews with over 40 community members as well as an online survey of 600+ respondents.

The results of the value research are referenced throughout the annual report/fact file and are available online publicly. We will be discussing the insights in various forums and posing some questions, such as:

How should Crossref balance the different dynamics in the community?
Are the right members involved in key decisions?
Are the sustainability model we have and the fees we charge fair?
Which initiatives should be top or bottom priorities?

Director of MIT Press, Amy Brand, recently reflected that Crossref is currently at a crossroads, envisioning that:

“The Crossref of 2040 could be an even more robust, inclusive, and innovative consortium to create and sustain core infrastructures for sharing, preserving, and evaluating research information.”

But only if Crossref is not:

“held back, and its remit circumscribed, by legacy priorities and forces within the industry that may perceive open data and infrastructure as a threat to their own evolving business interests.”

We welcome this public commentary and encourage others in the community to respond and report what value Crossref offers as community-owned infrastructure, and how they’d like to see the organisation evolve.

More than ever, we need to have this discussion with a broad and representative group. So please, read the value research report and the annual report/fact file, and get ready to voice your opinions!

Request for feedback: Conference ID implementation

Patricia Feeney — Fri, 13 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve all been subject to floods of conference invitations, it can be difficult to sort the relevant from the not-relevant or (even worse) sketchy conferences competing for our attention. In 2017, DataCite and Crossref started a working group to investigate creating identifiers for conferences and projects. Identifiers describe and disambiguate, and applying identifiers to conference events will help build clear durable connections between scholarly events and scholarly literature.

Chaired by Aliaksandr Birukou, the Executive Editor for Computer Science at Springer Nature, the group has met regularly over the past two years, collaborating to create use cases and define metadata to identify and describe conference series and events. We first asked for input on metadata specifications in April 2018. Technical implementation kicked off in February with a workshop at CERN to discuss the mechanics of making PIDs for conferences a reality.

We’ve reached another milestone and want your feedback

Crossref has supported a number of conference publication-related PIDs for years - members can currently register PIDs for conference series publications, conference proceedings, and of course individual conference papers - and that won’t change, but we will also be supporting DOI registration for conferences. A crucial step towards this is of course integrating the new identifier into our metadata input schema.

The details

We currently collect some limited metadata describing the conference itself such as theme, location, and dates as part of the conference series or proceeding metadata, but do not apply a DOI to that information. The new Conference ID records will include expanded metadata as defined by the working group. You’ll be able to register a distinct metadata record for a single conference. You’ll also be able to register a record for a conference series, and connect Conference IDs to conference proceeding metadata records and DOIs.

Changes to the conference-specific metadata are backwards compatible. Members will be able to register event metadata per usual, or can instead use the new event metadata to register an identifier for their conference event and/or series. This means a member can:

Register conference, conference series, proceedings series, proceedings, and papers in one submission
Register proceedings or proceedings series and papers without a Conference ID included
Register Conference IDs only
Update an existing conference record with a Conference PID

I’ve written up our proposal in this google doc and we want your feedback before we proceed with implementation. Please comment directly in the Google doc, open a Gitlab issue, or feedback@crossref.org. We’ll keep the document open for comments until September 30.

2019 election slate

Lisa Hart Martin — Fri, 23 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

2019 Board Election

The annual board election is a very important event for Crossref and its members. The board of directors, comprising 16 member organisations, governs Crossref, sets its strategic direction and makes sure that we fulfill our mission. Our members elect the board - its “one member one vote” - and we like to see as many members as possible voting. We are very pleased to announce the 2019 election slate - we have a great set of candidates and an update to the ByLaws addressing the composition of the slate to ensure that the board continues to be representative of our membership.

2019 Election Slate

Crossref received 52 expressions of interest this year through the link that was sent out via our blog, and over 100 emails from members interested in serving on our Board. It is very exciting to see that our members want to be involved.

In March of this year, the Board made a motion per the recommendation of an adhoc Governance Committee. It was resolves to “provide the following guidance to the Nominating Committee: To achieve balance between revenue tiers by proposing a 2019 slate consisting of one Revenue Tier 1 seat and four Revenue tier 2 seats, and a 2020 slate consisting of four Revenue Tier 1 seats and two Revenue Tier 2 seats; thereby resulting in, as nearly as practicable, an equal balance between board members representing Revenue Tier 1 and Revenue Tier 2 (as those terms are defined in Crossref’s ByLaws below).”

Section 2. Nominating Committee. The Board shall appoint a Nominating Committee of five (5) members, each of whom shall be either a Director or the designated representative of a member that is not represented on the Board, whose duty it shall be to nominate candidates for Directors to be elected at the next annual election. The Nominating Committee shall designate a slate of candidates for each election that is at least equal in number to the number of Directors to be elected at such election. Each such slate will be comprised such that, as nearly as practicable, one-half of the resulting Board shall be comprised of Directors designated by Members then representing Revenue Tier 1; and one-half of the resulting Board shall be comprised of Directors designated by Members then representing Revenue Tier 2. “Revenue Tier 1” means all consecutive membership dues categories, starting with the lowest dues category, that, when taken together, aggregate, as nearly as possible, to fifty percent (50%) of Crossref’s annual revenue. “Revenue Tier 2” means all membership dues categories above Revenue Tier 1. The Nominating Committee shall notify the Secretary in writing, at least twenty (20) days before the date of the annual meeting, of the names of such candidates, and the Secretary, except as herein otherwise provided, shall transmit a copy thereof to the last recorded address of each member of record simultaneously with the notice of the meeting.

The Committee and the Board has worked very hard to balance the Board, so you will see two categories on the ballot, large and small.

The 2019 slate includes: seven candidates for five available seats

Candidate organisations, in alphabetical order, for the Small category (1 seat available):

eLife, Melissa Harrison
The Royal Society, Stuart Taylor

Candidate organisations, in alphabetical order, for the Large category (4 seats available):

Clarivate Analytics, Nandita Quaderi
Elsevier, Chris Shillum
IOP, Graham McCann
Springer Nature, Reshma Shaikh
Wiley, Todd Toler

Take a look at the candidates’ organisational and personal statements

You can be part of this important process, by voting in the election

If your organisation is a voting member in good standing of Crossref as of September 13, 2019, you are eligible to vote when voting opens on September 27, 2019.

How can you vote?

On September 27, 2019, your organisation’s designated voting contact will receive an email with the Formal Notice of Meeting and Proxy Form with concise instructions on how to vote. You will also receive a user name and password with a link to our voting platform.

The election results will be announced at LIVE19 Amsterdam on November 13, 2019.

Building better metadata with schema releases

Patricia Feeney — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This month we have officially released a new version of our input metadata schema. As well as walking through the latest additions, I’ll also describe here how we’re starting to develop a new streamlined and open approach to schema development, using GitLab and some of the ideas under discussion going forward.

What’s included in version 4.4.2

The latest schema as of August 2019 is version 4.4.2 and this release now includes:

Support for “pending publication”
Support for JATS 1.2 abstracts
Abstract support to dissertations, reports, and allow multiple abstracts wherever available
Support for multiple dissertation authors
A new acceptance_date element added to journal article, book, book chapter, and conference paper record types

“Pending publication” is the term we’ve coined for the phase where a manuscript has been accepted for publication but where the publisher needs to communicate a DOI much earlier than most article metadata is available. Some members asked for the ability to register and assign DOIs prior to online publication, even without a title, so this allows members to register a DOI with minimal metadata, temporarily, before online publication. There is of course no obligation to use this feature.

It’s worth calling out the addition of acceptance_date too. This is a key attribute that is heavily requested by downstream metadata users like universities. Acceptance dates allow people to report on outputs much more accurately, so we do encourage all members to start including acceptance dates in their metadata. It’s highly appreciated!

Schema files public on GitLab

I’ve added our latest schema to a new GitLab repository, There you’ll find the schema files, some documentation, and the opportunity to suggest enhancements. The schema has been released as bundle 0.1.1 and also includes our new Grant metadata schema for members that fund research.

The schema has been available in some form for months but at this point we consider it ‘officially’ released to kick off our new but necessary practice of formal schema releases. Any forthcoming updates will be added to the next version.

Schema management process

We’ve been adding sets of metadata and new record types over the years, but also need to have a defined process for small but vital pieces of metadata that you need to provide and retrieve from our metadata records. If you’re wondering what our procedure for updating our schema is, you are not alone! We have not had a formal process, instead relying on ad-hoc requests from our membership and working groups. Our release management and schema numbering has also not been consistent.

Going forward, I will ensure that all forthcoming versions of our metadata schema are be posted as a draft on GitLab for review and comment, and the final version will be officially released via GitLab as well.

It’s important to note that when we talk about “the schema”, we generally mean the input schema specifically i.e. what members of Crossref can register about the content they produce. As always, the output for retrieving that metadata is subject to separate development plans for our Metadata APIs. I’m working with our technical team so we can develop and introduce an ’end-to-end’ approach that doesn’t in future treat the input and the output as such separate considerations.

What’s next

Many of the updates in this latest release have been in the works for some time. Changes to our metadata both large and small are considered carefully, but I’d like to do this in a transparent and cooperative way with our community.

I recently set up the “Metadata Practitioners Interest Group” and we’ve just had our second call. A big topic was how to best manage the ideas and requests from the community. The ability for public comments on GitLab is a first step.

This most recent update contains a mix of long term projects and updates to keep our metadata current and useful. Other changes that are under discussion will require more development on our end. But stay tuned for more information about forthcoming changes, as well information about how you can contribute.

LIVE19, the strategy one: have your say

Ginny Hendricks — Sun, 11 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

With a smaller group than usual, we’re dedicating this year’s annual meeting to hear what you value about Crossref. Which initiatives would you put first and/or last? Where would you have us draw the line between mission and ambition? What is “core” for you? How could/should we adapt for the future in order to meet your needs?

Striving for balance

Different people want different things from us. As Aristotle said: “There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.” As we prepare for our 20th year of operation, please join this unique meeting to help shape the future of Crossref.

There won’t be any plenary talks about trends in scholarly communications, but instead workshop-style activities to help hone our strategy, do some scenario planning, and prioritize goals together, as a community.

Have your say

Whether you can make it in person or not, you can still pitch in by giving us your opinion in advance. We’re gathering broad input on what you think we’re doing well, whether we’re on the right track strategically, and how we can improve. There’s never been such a comprehensive study of what value we offer so we hope to learn a lot and will adjust plans based on the results.

Please take the “Value of Crossref” survey. It’ll take 10-12 minutes.

At the meeting

Please join us at the Tobacco Theater in central Amsterdam on the afternoon of 13th November from 12:30 pm and for the full day of 14th November. The first afternoon will involve some scene-setting talks with key information you’ll need for the following day’s workshops, including the results of the survey above. There will also be some announcements, including who members have voted onto our board (this year’s slate is yet to be communicated), and of course plenty of time for discussion and questions among peers.

In addition to the results of the survey, during the meeting each participant will be furnished with a ‘fact pack’ to reference in their discussions and recommendations. It will include answers to questions like who pays to keep Crossref sustainable?. I’m looking forward to busting some myths on that one! Everyone will be pre-assigned to a particular table/topic (like a wedding!) and will stay in those groups for roundtable discussions. There will be a community facilitator and a staff member on each table. You will be able to mingle more widely in the breaks and the evening drinks reception on the 13th.

Based on this provided data, we’ll be asking participants to think about key questions such as:

Who, ultimately, does Crossref serve?
What should Crossref’s product development priorities be?
What (if anything) would be missed if Crossref went away? (i.e. what’s our central value)
What does ‘community’ really mean and how should Crossref work to better balance opposing priorities?

Research is global, and supporting a diverse global community is a challenge. Come and have your say. Register today.

I can’t wait to see you there and hear your thoughts.

License metadata FTW

Rachael Lammey — Fri, 28 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

More and better license information is at the top of a lot of Christmas lists from a lot of research institutions and others who regularly use Crossref metadata. I know, I normally just ask for socks too. To help explain what we mean by this, we’ve collaborated with Jisc to set out some guidance for publishers on registering this license metadata with us.

At the most basic level, complete and accurate license metadata helps anyone interested in using a research work out how they can do so. Making the information machine-readable helps this to be done easily and at scale by all kinds of tools and services.

In this best practice guide, we’re specifically focusing on a use case for license metadata that comes from research institutions. They need to know which version of an article (or other content item) may be exposed in an open repository, and from what date, and tell anyone who comes across the piece of content in the repository what they can do with it once they find it there.

Without this being stated simply and clearly in the Crossref metadata, the institution won’t know which works they can make available and which they cannot, even if you as the publisher know that the item is open access, or is open access after a certain date. This can impact the research community’s capacity to find and use the research you publish.

The guidance offers advice on:

the kind of license information it’s useful to link out to from the Crossref metadata
what the Crossref metadata might look like for:

gold open access content
green open access content with a Creative Commons License
green open access content with a publisher-defined post-embargo license

how to add this metadata to existing or new Crossref deposits

Take a look at the full guidelines here.

Maybe there’s more to the story than this, or more information that you need as a publisher or as a research institution - if so, let us know and we can adapt this document based on your feedback. Requests for socks may be declined.

Similarity Check is changing

Jennifer Lin — Thu, 30 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Tl;dr

Crossref is taking over the service management of Similarity Check from Turnitin. That means we’re your first port of call for questions and your agreement will be direct with us. This is a very good thing because we have agreed and will continue to agree the best possible set-up for our collective membership. Similarity Check participants need to take action to confirm the new terms with us as soon as possible and before 31st August 2019. Instructions will be circulated early June via email.

Background

Many of our members use Similarity Check which gives their editors reduced-rate access to Turnitin’s iThenticate system for plagiarism checking. Some use Similarity Check directly and some as part of a submission system.

The service launched in 2008 when we announced our initial partnership with Turnitin. Since then it’s gone from strength to strength and now has over 60 million full-text documents (from over 87 thousand titles) available for text comparison and almost 1500 members using the service.

The way that the Similarity Check arrangement works is changing, and it’s important that users know what’s happening. We have worked with Turnitin to set up a process that will transition participants easily and swiftly into the upgraded service with no access interruptions to iThenticate access.

So, what is changing and why?

We know that Similarity Check is a critical service for our members, and we want to improve people’s experience of using it. So, in consultation with members, we’ve strengthened the service by updating our relationship with Turnitin to consolidate all the components of the service under our care and stewardship. From next week, Similarity Check participants will move from having an agreement with Turnitin to one with Crossref. And at Crossref, we have a new agreement with Turnitin as the technology provider for the service.

The new arrangement puts us in a strong position to improve support and drive future improvements of the system. Representing our collective membership, we’ve agreed better terms than what people have today and what members would get acting individually.

There are five key changes specifically:

Members’ Similarity Check service agreement will be with us and not Turnitin.
Per-document checking fees will be invoiced by us, and not Turnitin. They’ll be included in members’ regular invoices, reducing international transfer fees for many.
The first 100 documents checked each year will be free of charge.
Turnitin will operate as a vendor for Crossref. We’ve already agreed a range of additions to their technology roadmap. Turnitin will remain responsible for fixing any bugs or technical issues with the system, but we’re in a stronger position to ensure these are fixed quickly.
Users will get training and on-boarding support from Crossref. This will cover both how to use the interface and how to interpret the results.

What’s staying the same?

The system itself and how it’s accessed - people’s logins will stay exactly the same and nothing will change about how participants have their systems set up.
The fees - the annual Similarity Check fee and the per-document checking fees will remain at the same level (although under the new arrangement users will get the first 100 documents each year for free - see “what’s changing” above!)
Your service obligations - members still need to make at least 90% of all their journal article content available for Turnitin to index. This is achieved through the dedicated full-text URLs that members register in their metadata.
Licensing and privacy - there are no changes to the licensing of members’ content or the privacy requirements for Turnitin’s use of member content.

For existing users

We’ve worked closely with Turnitin to ensure an easy transition to the new Crossref terms. You can transition to the new terms at any stage from next week through to 31st August, and Turnitin will end your contract with them in the month you take that action.

Next week, we’ll email your main Crossref membership contact with a link to a form asking them to click-through accept the new terms. This will confirm and commence the transition process.

You’ll then need to:

Pay your final Turnitin invoice, which will be sent at the end of the month you complete the form. This will cover your per-document checking fees up to the 25th of that month.
Continue to use iThenticate as usual.

Your service agreement will officially move from the Turnitin agreement to the Crossref agreement on the 25th of the month that you complete the transition form. The next Similarity Check invoices you receive will be from Crossref in January 2020 and will include your Similarity Check annual fee and your per-document checking fees for the remainder of 2019.

If you haven’t transitioned to the new agreement by 31st August, you risk losing access to the iThenticate system as Turnitin will not be able to automatically renew your direct contract.

If you have any questions about these changes, do contact our membership specialist. We’ll be in touch next week with a link to a new form where you’ll be able to check your details and accept the new agreement directly with us.

For prospective users

When you apply to participate in Similarity Check you will be accepting terms directly with Crossref and not Turnitin. Eligible members can apply any time from next week.

Any questions?

There are many benefits to this new set-up, but we understand these things can be a bit of a hassle. We’ve welcomed a new colleague (say hello to Kathleen!) to help people transition and get the best from their use of Similarity Check. Please contact her via Support with any questions.

[Update June 5th: we’ve added a new FAQ page for members who signed up for Similarity Check prior to June 2019]

Putting content in context

Kirsty Meddings — Mon, 13 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Crossmark is also about providing context. It is a button placed on content, which when clicked on brings up a pop-up box that tells the reader about significant updates such as corrections and retractions, together with other information about the publishing and editorial processes that have been applied to the content ahead of publication.

The Crossmark box can display information about authors, funders and licenses. In addition, our members can add “More information” and often do in the form of publication history, links to supporting materials, and peer review information. All of this supporting information helps the reader assess how well the content has been - and continues to be - curated by the publisher.

Who’s in?

250 Crossref members have signed up to use Crossmark (it’s an add-on service with its own fees). Though optional, some star pupils have even added Crossmark to their back-year content and as a result have Crossmark coverage on 99% of their content (kudos to PLOS, Rockefeller University Press and the societies represented by KAMJE, to name a few).

At the other extreme, some have applied Crossmark to less than 10% - these tend to be members with back-year records going back many decades, who are just implementing Crossmark for their more recent research outputs. Crossmark coverage is one of the things tracked in Participation Reports - pop over and take a look if you want to see what your organisation is doing.

So what additional metadata has been registered by members using Crossmark? (data snapshot from our REST API April 2019):

8,711,500 content items have some Crossmark metadata
104,650 updates to content have been registered. Of these
55,000 are corrections and 28,000 errata
16,000 are new versions or new editions
2,700 are retractions and 1,280 are withdrawals
4,830,510 content items have some custom metadata, which appears in the More Information section of the Crossmark box. The most common metadata provided here is publication history, followed by copyright statements, the peer review method used, and whether the item has been checked for originality using Similarity Check.

Some news on clicks and views

We’ve been collecting usage statistics more or less since the Crossmark service launched in 2012, but have lacked a suitable way to share them. This will change later this year! In preparation, I’ve been digging around in the data and uncovered some interesting things.

I was able to do a degree of comparison between Crossmark usage against overall article views using PLOS articles as they make their usage data openly available. I spot-checked fifteen articles and found that most of them had a monthly number of clicks on the Crossmark button in the low-twenties, regardless of the number of total page views the article had received.

The highly viewed paper above shows relatively very few clicks on the Crossmark button, whereas on the paper with fewer views, below, clicks on the button follow the overall pattern of usage.

It’s not unreasonable to suppose that a paper with very high usage has a higher proportion of lay readers visiting it, whereas a more niche paper is being visited by those with a research interest. This is encouraging, as it suggests researchers are interested in checking the status of the content and the additional “trust signals” that the Crossmark box can provide.

Web pages vs PDFs

We track the number of clicks on the Crossmark button in PDFs separately to those that come from web pages. (There are some that we can’t determine, usually because the link behind the button has been incorrectly formatted, but for most members these are minimal.)

I looked at the 30 members with most Crossmark coverage, and averaged the number of clicks over a six month period in 2018. For two thirds of these members, clicks on the Crossmark button on their web pages exceed those in their PDFs, but there are also definite outliers.

Some are easily explained: member #6 hasn’t put the Crossmark button in any of their PDFs, while member #21 has only put it in their PDFs. Member 10 has the button on its article landing pages hidden in a “more information” section that the reader has to click to expand.

That said, member #20 has the button displayed prominently next to the article title but gets 85% of Crossmark clicks from PDFs. There’s no obvious subject bias - four of the members above are physics publishers - two have many more PDF clicks, two have more HTML.

None of the findings above contain nearly enough data to draw any definitive conclusions, but I hope they pique your interest to find out more when we make Crossmark usage statistics available to all members later this year. In the meantime if you have any suggestions/questions, or would be interested in helping us when we come to testing the statistics interface, please let me know.

Express your interest in serving on the Crossref board

Lisa Hart Martin — Wed, 24 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The Crossref Nominating Committee is inviting expressions of interest to serve on the Board as it begins its consideration of a slate for the November 2019 election.

The board’s purpose is to provide strategic and financial oversight and counsel to the Executive Director and the staff leadership team, with the key responsibilities being:

Setting the strategic direction for the organisation;
Providing financial oversight; and
Approving new policies and services.

The Board tends to review the strategic direction every few years, taking a landscape view of the scholarly communications community and trends that may affect Crossref’s mission. In July 2017, the board and staff came up with four strategic themes and these have been developed into an organisation-wide roadmap.

The board votes on any new policy or service that staff and committees propose if it is a departure from normal practice for Crossref.Some of the recent things the board has approved include:

Approval of all the new terms of membership; broadening of the membership eligibility criteria to include non-publishers.
Involvement in the ROR.org initiative including community outreach, technical prototyping, and helping to explore governance options.
Approval of a proposal for funders to join at a reduced annual fee; the registration of DOIs for research grants.
Allocating $50,000 USD of the operating budget to research the community’s level of interest in a distributed usage service.
Specifying the Board makeup to include equal numbers of small and large members; reframing the election processes.

What is expected of a Crossref Board member?

Board members should be able to attend all board meetings, which occur three times a year in different parts of the world. If you are unable to attend in person you may send your named alternate as your proxy or be able to attend via telephone.

Board members must:

be familiar with the three key responsibilities listed above;
actively participate and contribute towards discussions; and
read the board documents and materials provided, prior to attending meetings.

How to submit an expression of interest to serve on the Board

We are seeking people who know about scholarly communications and would like to be part of our future. If you have experience on a governing board (as opposed to an operational board) and have a vision for the international Crossref community, we are interested in hearing from you.

If you are a Crossref member, are eligible to vote, and would like to be considered, you can complete and submit the expression of interest form with both your organisation’s statement and your personal statement before 21 May 2019.

It is important to note it is your organisation who is the Crossref member—and therefore the seat will belong to your organisation.

About the election and our Board

We have a principle of “one member, one vote”; our board comprises a cross-section of members and it doesn’t matter how big or small you are, every member gets a single vote. Board terms are three years, and one third of the Board is eligible for election every year. There are five seats up for election in 2019, 4 large and 1 small.

The board meets in a variety of international locations in March, July, and November each year. View a list of the current Crossref Board members and a history of the decisions they’ve made (motions).

The slate will be decided by the Nominating Committee and interested parties will be informed if they have made the slate by July 15, 2019.

The election opens online in September 2019 and voting is done by proxy online, results will be announced at the annual business meeting during ‘Crossref LIVE19’ on 13th November 2019 in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Election materials and instructions for voting will be available online to all Crossref members in September 2019.

The role of the Nominating Committee

The Nominating Committee meets to discuss change, process, criteria, and potential candidates, ensuring a fair representation of membership. The Nominating Committee is charged with selecting a slate of candidates for election from those who have expressed an interest.

The selection of the slate (which might exceed the number of open seats) is based on the quality of the expressions of interest and the nominating committee’s review of the candidates in light of the board’s directive of maintaining an appropriately balanced and representative board. The nominating committee will prioritize maintaining representation of members having both commercial and non-commercial business models, in addition to continuing to seek balance across factors such as gender, ethnic and racial background, geography, and sector.

The Board voted in March 2019 that balance according to size (based on revenue tier) will be achieved by a 2019 slate consisting of one revenue tier 1 seat (small) and 4 revenue 2 seats (large), and a 2020 slate consisting of 4 revenue tier 1 seats and 2 revenue tier 2 seats (see Crossref’s amended Bylaws on the Crossref website).

The Committee is made up of three board members not up for election, and two non-board members. The current Nominating Committee members are:

Jasper Simons, APA (Chair);
Scott Delman ACM;
Catherine Mitchell, CDL;
Vincent Cassidy, The Institution of Engineering & Technology (IET); and
Claire Moulton, The Company of Biologists.

Please submit your expression of interest or reply to me with any questions at lhart@crossref.org. This is your opportunity to help guide our wonderful organisation!

Phew - its been quite a year

Ed Pentz — Thu, 13 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

As the end of the year approaches it’s useful to look back and reflect on what we’ve achieved over the last 12 months—a lot! To be honest, there were some things we didn’t get done—or didn’t make as much progress with as we hoped—but that happens when you have an ambitious agenda. However, we also got some things done that we didn’t expect to or that weren’t even on our radar at the end of 2017—this is inevitable as the research and scholarly communications landscape is rapidly changing.

In my blog post from the beginning of the year, the key projects I highlighted were Metadata Plus, Event Data, organisation IDs, Grant IDs and Metadata 2020, and that richer metadata and more record types were key goals. We did make very good progress on all of these projects as reported below.

For 2018 we were operating in the framework of the four strategic themes, or areas of focus, developed by the board and staff. These are: 1) Simplifying and enriching our services; 2) Improving our metadata; 3) Expanding constituencies, and 4) Selectively collaborating and partnering. These themes will also be guiding us in 2019.

Simplifying and enriching our services

Upgrading our tools

Over the past year, we’ve been busy streamlining our processes, developing new tools and adding new services. A key new tool is Metadata Manager which supports the Content Registration service by offering a simpler, more user-friendly, non-technical way to register and update metadata. It provides lots of context-sensitive help, registers content immediately, in real time, and provides guidance on how to make corrections—thereby ensuring each deposit is successful. Metadata Manager currently supports journal deposits (we would have liked to add more in 2018) but we will be adding other record types in 2019.

Upgrading our services

Crossref metadata has always been open through a number of interfaces without restriction, but this year we introduced an option for extra support and functionality, through Metadata Plus. Metadata Plus provides guaranteed uptime, snapshots of the complete set of metadata and enhanced support for organisations (members or not) that want to use Crossref metadata in their own services and systems.

Improving the member experience: New membership terms

This year we began to redesign the member experience and have made a lot of improvements to the sign-up and onboarding process, the most significant of which is the new click-through membership terms, introduced in July for new members and coming into effect for existing members in March 2019, which is proving to be a huge time saver for both our members and our team.

Improving our metadata

Our objective this year was to better communicate what metadata best practice is, to equip our members with all the data and tools they need to meet this best practice, and to achieve closer cooperation from service providers.

Best practice tools: Participation Reports

Released in Beta in August this year, Participation Reports provides a dashboard that gives a clear picture of the metadata that each member provides. This is a useful visualization of metadata that has long been available via our public REST API. Members can see where the gaps in the metadata are and get information on how to fill those gaps.

Communicating metadata best practice: Data Citations

The importance of linking data with literature can’t be understated. Research integrity and reproducibility depend on it. We’re committed to exposing the links between the literature and the data or software that supports it, and earlier this year we partnered with DataCite to make this a reality. All the data citations coming in from Crossref and DataCite are being pulled into Event Data.

Equipping members with all the data: Event Data

Event Data reached technical readiness. Event Data captures and records “events” such as comments, links, shares, bookmarks, and references. It provides open, transparent, and traceable information about the provenance and context of every event.

Expand constituencies

Crossref currently has 15,000 members in 140 countries. With that comes the need to increasingly and proactively work with emerging markets as they start to share research outputs globally.

Ambassador program

The Crossref Ambassador program launched in January and now has a team of 16 trusted contacts who work within our communities (as librarians, researchers, publishers, and innovators) around the world. They share great enthusiasm and belief in our work. We provide them with training and support, and they help us improve education about global research infrastructure in general and the opportunities that are enabled through richer metadata.

Funders and grant identifiers

I’m very happy to report that the Crossref board approved grants as a new record/resource type to be rolled out in 2019 - we made faster progress on this than expected. The proposal for grant identifiers was developed by staff in collaboration with the Crossref Funder Advisory Group and the Membership and Fees Committee. This means that funders will be joining Crossref and registering a standard set of metadata and a persistence identifier - a DOI - for their grants.

Collaborate and partner

So that our alliances with others have the greatest impact, we have aligned our strategic plans for scholarly infrastructure with others. Some of these alliances are led or driven by Crossref and with others we are involved but not leading.

ROR

We are working with the California Digital Library, DataCite and Digital Science as the Steering group for ROR - the Research Organization Registry - which is a new, community-led project that is developing an open, sustainable, usable, and unique identifier for research organisations based on the work done by the organisation Identifier Working Group in 2017 and 2018.

Metadata 2020

Metadata 2020 is a collaboration that advocates richer, connected, and reusable, open metadata for all research outputs, which will advance scholarly pursuits for the benefit of society. Over 140 volunteers—including publishers, librarians, researchers, platforms/tools, and other stakeholders—from 86 organisations, are working in six project groups. The projects are very strategically focused, looking at key issues like researcher communications, incentives, and shared best practices.

I can’t close off the year without mentioning the incredible milestone we reached this September when the 100th million content item was registered with Crossref. This was made possible by our members’ and the wider community’s commitment and contribution, so once again, thank you.

Roll on 2019!

2018 election slate

Lisa Hart Martin — Fri, 17 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

With Crossref developing and extending its services for members and other constituents at a rapid pace, it’s an exciting time to be on our board. We recieved 26 expressions of interest this year, so it seems our members are also excited about what they could help us achieve.

From these 26, the Nominating Committee has put forward the following slate.

The 2018 slate: seven candidates for five available seats

African Journals OnLine (AJOL), Susan Murray, South Africa
American Psychological Association (APA), Jasper Simons, USA
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Scott Delman, USA
California Digital Library (CDL), Catherine Mitchell, USA
Hindawi, Paul Peters, UK
Sage, Richard Fidczuk, USA
Wiley, Duncan Campbell, USA

Read the candidates’ organisational and personal statements

Candidates were chosen based on the following criteria:

Follow the guidance from the Board to provide a slate or seven or fewer.
Maintain the current balance of the board with respect to size of organisations.
Improve balance in other areas, with respect to gender and geography.
Also consider types of organisations and sector, as well as engagement with Crossref and its services.

You can be part of this important process, by voting in the election

If your organisation is a member of Crossref on September 14, 2018 you are eligible to vote when voting opens on September 28, 2018 (affiliates, however, are not eligible to vote).

How can you vote?

On September 28, 2018, your organisation’s designated voting contact will receive an email with a link to the formal Notice of Meeting and Proxy Form with concise instructions on how to vote. An additional email will be sent with a username and password along with a link to our online voting platform. It is important to make sure your voting contact is up-to-date.

Want to add your voice?

We are accepting independent nominations until November 7, 2018. organisations interested in standing as an independent candidate should contact me by this date with a list of ten other Crossref members that endorse their candidacy.

The election itself will be held at LIVE18 Toronto, our annual meeting, on 13 November 2018 in Canada. We hope you’ll be there to hear the results.

3,2,1… it’s ‘lift-off’ for Participation Reports

Anna Tolwinska — Wed, 01 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Metadata is at the heart of all our services. With a growing range of members participating in our community—often compiling or depositing metadata on behalf of each other—the need to educate and express obligations and best practice has increased. In addition, we’ve seen more and more researchers and tools making use of our APIs to harvest, analyze and re-purpose the metadata our members register, so we’ve been very aware of the need to be more explicit about what this metadata enables, why, how, and for whom.

This week we take an important step towards this goal with a much-anticipated announcement: Participation reports are in beta release—so come along and take a look!

What does this mean?

Participation Reports gives—for the first time—a clear visualization of the metadata that Crossref has. Search for any member to find out what percentage of their content includes 10 key elements of information, above and beyond the basic bibliographic metadata that all members are obliged to provide. This includes metadata such as ORCID iDs for contributors, funding acknowledgements, reference lists, and abstracts—richer metadata that makes content more discoverable, and much more useful to the scholarly community as a whole, including among members themselves.

You can filter by content such as journal articles, book chapters, datasets, and preprints, and compare current content (past two calendar years and year-to-date) to back file content (older than that). And within the journal articles view, you can drill down to view the metadata completeness for each individual journal. We hear that editorial boards are keen to see that aspect!

We’re delighted that participation reports are now available in beta. That means that while we are confident that the data shown is accurate, there could be the odd glitch as we monitor use.

Thank you to everyone who has helped us to test the reports and provided so much valuable feedback. We plan to expand and improve participation reports to include additional metadata elements, metadata quality checks, and adherence to Crossref best practice such as DOI display. We’re still listening so do get in touch if you have questions or suggestions, or would like a more detailed walk through. There is also a feedback button right in-situ in the tool.

How good is your metadata?

Kirsty Meddings — Thu, 26 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Exciting news! We are getting very close to the beta release of a new tool to publicly show metadata coverage. As members register their content with us they also add additional information which gives context for other members and for services that help e.g. discovery or analytics.

Richer metadata makes content useful. Participation reports will give—for the first time—a clear picture for anyone to see the metadata Crossref has. This is data that’s long been available via our Public REST API, now visualized.

Who are participation reports for? Everyone!

It’s an opportunity to evaluate and educate. See for yourself where the gaps are, and what our members could improve upon. Understand best practice through seeing what others are doing, and learn how to level-up.

Monitor what metadata is being registered, even if this work is done by a third party or another department. And see what other organisations in scholarly communications see when they use Crossref metadata in their research, tools, and services.

The beta release—expected after acceptance testing some time late May—will let anyone look up any of our 15,000+ members and see whether they are registering ten key elements that add context and richness to the basic required bibliographic metadata.

What do we mean by ‘richer metadata’?

The ten checks for Beta, will be:

References
~~Open references~~ [EDIT 6th June 2022 - all references are now open by default].
ORCID iDs
Funder IDs
Funding award numbers
Crossmark metadata
License information
Full text links
Similarity Check URLs
Abstracts

Each of these additional metadata elements helps increase discovery and wider and more varied use—and usefulness—of research outputs.

Why are we doing this and what do we mean by ‘participation’?

Over the years when we’ve talked with our members about their metadata, we learned that many just can’t be certain exactly how they’re performing. It could be that they’ve outsourced Content Registration to another service provider or larger publisher, or it could be they just weren’t previously aware they could collect and share authors’ ORCID iDs, Funder IDs, and so on. So our primary aim is to give our members the information they need in order to make a case for improving their metadata records. Each check will come with information about why it is important and guidance on how to improve. Additionally, with the growing use of Crossref as a central source of metadata for the research community, it’s in everyone’s interest to be as transparent as possible about what metadata we have - and encourage greater understanding of what’s possible.

Member ‘participation’ is an important concept. Crossref distinguishes itself from other DOI registration agencies by providing this richer infrastructure which allows for things like funding information, license information, links between data and preprints, and so on—all contributing to the research nexus for everyone’s benefit.

Membership of Crossref is not just about getting a persistent identifier for your content, it’s about placing your content in context by providing as much metadata as possible and looking after it long-term.

Here’s a sneak preview of what the report will look like:

So whether you’re a member who wants to run a “health check” on your own metadata, or a consumer of metadata interested in what’s available and from whom, watch this space for Participation Reports!

Would you like a heads-up on your report, pre-beta?

Beta will be released some time in May or June this year, following acceptance testing with members and others. Then we’re looking for about 20 members to have a half-hour phone call with a walk-through ‘health check’. Please contact Anna if you’d like to schedule one.

Do you want to be on our Board?

Lisa Hart Martin — Wed, 18 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Do you want to effect change for the scholarly community?

The Crossref Nominating Committee is inviting expressions of interest to serve on the Board as it begins its consideration of a slate for the November 2018 election.

The key responsibilities of the Board are:

Setting the strategic direction for the organisation;
Providing financial oversight; and
Approving new policies and services.

Some of the decisions the board has made in recent years include:

Introduction of the Metadata APIs Plus service (to provide a paid-for premium service for machine access to metadata);
Updating the policy on open references (to increase links so that more readers can access content);
Establishing the OI Project (to create a persistent organisation Identifier);
Inclusion of preprints in the Crossref metadata; and
Approval to develop Event Data (which will track online activity from multiple sources).

What is expected of a Crossref Board member?

Board members should be able to attend all board meetings, which occur three times a year in different parts of the world. If you are unable to attend in person you must be able to attend via telephone.

Board members must:

be familiar with the three key responsibilities listed above,
actively participate and contribute towards discussions, and
read the board documents and materials provided, prior to attending meetings.

How to submit an expression of interest to serve on the Board

If you are a Crossref member, are eligible to vote, and would like to be considered, you should complete and submit the expression of interest form with both your organisation’s statement and your personal statement before 18 May 2018.

It is important to note it is your organisation who is the Crossref member—and therefore the seat will belong to your organisation.

About the election and our Board

The election opens online in September 2018 and voting is done by proxy online, or in person, at the annual business meeting during ‘Crossref LIVE18’ on 13th November 2018 in Toronto, Canada. Election materials and instructions for voting will be available to all Crossref members online in September 2018.

The role of the Nominating Committee

The selection of the slate (which is likely to exceed the number of open seats) is based on the quality of the expressions of interest and maintaining the balance and diversity of the board—especially in areas of organisational size, gender, geography and sector.

The Committee is made up of three board members not up for election, and two non-board members. The current Nominating Committee members are:

Mark Patterson, eLife (Chair);
Chris Shillum, Elsevier;
Amy Brand, MIT Press;
Vincent Cassidy, The Institution of Engineering & Technology (IET); and
Claire Moulton, The Company of Biologists.

Our board needs to be stay truly representative of Crossref’s global and diverse membership of organisations who publish. Please submit your statements of interest or reply to me with any questions to me at lhart@crossref.org.

Hear this, real insight into the inner workings of Crossref

Joe Wass — Sun, 01 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

You want to hear more from us. We hear you.

We’ve spent the past year building Crossref Event Data, and hope to launch very soon. Building a new piece of infrastructure from scratch has been an exciting project, and we’ve taken the opportunity to incorporate as much feedback from the community as possible. We’d like to take a moment to share some of the suggestions we had, and how we’ve acted on them.

We asked a focus group “What one thing would you change?”. In hindsight, we could have done a better job with the question. We did get some enlightening answers but—for legal and practical reasons—we are unable to end either world hunger or global conflict, or do any of the other things we were invited to do. So we went back to our focus group and asked “What one thing would you change about Crossref?”.

The answers were illuminating. Some of you wanted mundane things like more data dumps. A disappointing number of people wanted us to put the capital ‘R’ back in our name. But two things we heard consistently, loud and clear, were:

“I want to hear more from Crossref”
“I want to know more about what’s going on inside Crossref”

One respondent said:

I like the newsletters, and the Twitter visuals are nice enough, but I want to hear, you know, more from them.

Another:

Crossref is your typical quiet DOI Registration Agency. They make a big thing about being the background infrastructure you don’t notice. But infrastructure doesn’t have to be quiet. I live next to the M25, and I can tell you, that’s the sound of success. I mean, it’s loud.

One final quote which clinched it for us:

The outreach team is doing a great job with their multilingual videos. But you can never cover every world language. In today’s connected world, you should be thinking about the universal language.

She clarified:

No, I don’t mean XML.

We took this advice to heart. When we were building Crossref Event Data, we baked these features right in. Now you can hear what’s going on inside Crossref, any time, day or night.

Introducing the Crossref Thing Action Service!

Turn up your speakers (about half-way, it would be foolhardy to turn them too high) and visit:

live.eventdata.crossref.org/thing-action-service.html

It’s optimized for Google Chrome, but we’ve tested it in Firefox and Safari.

The Thing Action Service shows you, in excruciating sonorous detail, every single action that happens inside the Crossref Event Data system. Every time we receive live data from Twitter or Wikipedia. Every time we check a DOI. Every time we check an RSS feed. Every time we find a link to our Registered Content on the web.

In a pioneering move within the scholarly publishing space, you can hear the data as it’s being processed, live. Furthermore, we think we are the first DOI Registration Agency to offer our services in stereo.

John Chodacki, Professional Working Group Chair, said:

We welcome this innovation. From my experience Chairing, well, everything, I’m certain that hearing-impaired users will like it especially.

So sit back, put the Thing Action Service on the speakers, and relax. You may find it difficult at first, but as you let the sound waves wash over you, think of all that data in flight. That beep could be someone criticizing the article you wrote on Twitter. But don’t worry, the next one might be someone defending it.

Think of it as musique concrète. That’s the Art of Persistence.

A year in the life of Crossref

Ed Pentz — Tue, 23 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

We are delighted to report that last year Crossref welcomed a record-breaking 1,939 new members and, because our member base is growing so rapidly in both headcount and geography—with the highest number of new members joining from Asia—we thought it was a good time to reiterate what Crossref is all about, as well as show off a little about the things we are proud to have achieved in 2017.

What is Crossref?

We are an organisation that runs a registry of metadata and DOIs of course, but we are much more than that—staff, board, working groups, and committees as well as a broad range of collaborators, users, and supporters in the wider scholarly communications community. Increasingly, our community includes new contributors like scholars, funders, and universities. Together, we are all working toward the same goal—to enhance scholarly communications. Everything we do is designed to put scholarly content in context so that the content our members publish can be found, cited, used, and re-used.

Here’s how we did that over the past year:

We rallied the community

Rallying the community is all about working together to forge new relationships and pave the way for future generations of researchers—in 2017 we were closely involved with the launch of Metadata 2020; a collaboration that advocates richer, connected, and reusable metadata for all research outputs.

We tagged and shared metadata

To make sure that our APIs continue to have real, genuine utility, we introduced a new service called Metadata Plus in 2017 so that platforms and tools can leverage the power of our rich, immense database to increase the value and discoverability of content.

We played with new technology

To keep pace with changes in the industry and stay true to our mission, we often play with new technology with the goal of offering a bigger and better infrastructure. In 2017 we formed a working group and an advisory group for two new identifiers that will see this infrastructure increase; organisation IDs which became ROR, and Grant IDs which became the Crossref Grant Linking System.

We made new tools and services

Combining our own knowledge and experience with input from the wider community, in 2017 we were able to launch in Beta a new and exciting tool called Event Data. Event Data provides a record of where research has been bookmarked, linked, recommended, shared, referenced, commented on etc, beyond publisher platforms—which is a great example of putting scholarly research in a wider context.

So, while richer metadata (including more record and resource types) remains our focus 2018 and beyond, we also hope that as we become a bigger and more global community we can move beyond the basics and work together to make sure that DOIs, are not the be-all and end-all when they are, in fact, just the beginning.

Peer reviews are open for registering at Crossref

Jennifer Lin — Tue, 24 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

About 13-20 billion researcher-hours were spent in 2015 doing peer reviews. What valuable work! Let’s get more mileage out of these labors and make these expert discussions citable, persistent, and linked up to the scholarly record. As we previously shared during Peer Review week, Crossref is lauintroducing support for a new record type to support the registration of peer reviews. We’re one step closer to changing that. Today, we are excited to announce that we’re open for deposits.

If you missed the first episode, here’s a recap:

Publishers have been registering reviews with us for a while (ex: Example 1, Example 2, and Example 3). But these have been shoehorned into other content: article, dataset, or component. So we are extending Crossref’s infrastructure to properly treat this special scholarly artifact. This includes a range of outputs made publicly available from the peer review history (referee reports, decision letters, author responses, community comments) across any and all review rounds. We welcome scholarly discussions of journal articles before or after publication (e.g. “post-publication reviews”).

We collect metadata that characterizes the peer review asset (for example: recommendation, type, license, contributor info, competing interests). We also collect metadata, which offers a view into the review process (e.g. pre/post-publication, revision round, review date).

This special set will support the discovery and investigation of peer reviews as it is linked up to the article discussed. It will also enable the following:

Enable tracking of the evolution of scholarly claims through the lineage of expert discussion
Support enrichment of scholarly discussion
Enable reviewer accountability
Credit reviewers and editors for their scholarly contribution
Support publisher transparency
Connect reviews to the full history of the published results
Provide data for analysis and research on peer review

Please come check out our documentation for more information.

As publishers are implementing this, we are finishing up the delivery of this metadata for machine and human access, across all the Crossref interfaces (REST API, OAI-PMH, Crossref Metadata Search) to enable discoverability across the research ecosystem. We are also working to make it possible for members to get Cited-by data for the peer reviews they register.

If you are interested in registering your peer review content with us, please get in touch.

Changes to the 2018 membership agreement for better metadata distribution

Ginny Hendricks — Mon, 09 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

We are making a change to section 9b of the standard Crossref membership agreement which will come into effect on January 1, 2018. This will not change how members register content, nor will it affect membership fees in any way. The new 2018 agreement is on our website, and the exact wording changes are highlighted below. The new membership agreement will automatically replace the previous version from January 1, 2018 and members will not need to sign a new agreement.

What’s changing?

At its July meeting the Crossref board unanimously approved recommendations from the Membership and Fees Committee to update Crossref’s metadata delivery offerings. One of the recommendations was to remove the option for case-by-case opt outs of metadata delivery through the OAI-PMH channel used for Enhanced Crossref Metadata Services.

This opt-out was only used by a small number of our members (around 40 of nearly 9,000), who have been contacted directly. This means that for the vast majority of members there is no change in how Crossref makes their metadata available but we wanted to make everyone aware of the change to the membership agreement.

So, as is currently the case, all metadata registered with Crossref is available via all the Metadata APIs under an appropriate agreement with the user or terms and conditions for the service. The one exception to this is how references are distributed - we will contact members next week about the options for references.

Why are we making this change?

Our metadata services have become very popular with users of all kinds throughout scholarly communications–including search and discovery platforms, libraries, other publishers, reference managers, sharing services, and analytics providers. More and better metadata means more and better discoverability of publisher content.
The change also brings this service into line with our mission to improve scholarly communications through quality metadata and related infrastructure services, removing the need for bilateral agreements between publishers and third parties.
Many members complained when we contacted them about opt-outs whenever a new OAI-PMH user came on board. It is better for our members and for our staff if there is a common standard across the board.

Changes to 2018 membership agreement

9) Sharing of Metadata by PILA

a) Local Hosting. [no change]

b) Other Metadata Services. Subject to compliance by the entity receiving the Metadata and Digital Identifiers with the terms and conditions ~~set forth in a separate agreement between~~ established by PILA for the particular service through which access is provided, and ~~the entity receiving the Metadata and Digital Identifiers~~, PILA may ~~license~~ authorize third parties to receive and use ~~bulk deliveries of~~ Metadata and Digital Identifiers from ~~the~~ PILA ~~System from members who have chosen to participate in Metadata Services,~~ which PILA shall provide directly to such third parties. At least thirty (30) days prior to making such Metadata delivery PILA will notify each PILA Member whose Metadata and Digital Identifiers are intended to be included in such delivery of the anticipated delivery date, the identity of the third party and the purpose for which the delivery is being made. Metadata and Digital Identifiers belonging to any PILA Member who notifies PILA in writing prior to the specified delivery date of its desire to be excluded from such delivery will be excluded or removed from such delivery.

Please contact our membership specialist if you have any feedback or questions.

2017 election slate

Lisa Hart Martin — Thu, 17 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Slate of 2017 board candidates announced, and it’s going to be exciting

Crossref is always evolving and the board knows it must evolve with us so we can continue to provide the right kind of services and support for you, as members of the research community.

This year two things happened for the first time: we used our updated bylaws see article VII, section 2 agreed by the board last year, to allow more candidates than available seats; and secondly, to issue an open call for expressions of interest. Many members of the current board felt it was vital to move to this more transparent process.

With Crossref developing new services for new types of members at a rapid pace, it’s an exciting time to be on the board of directors. With 25 expressions of interest it seems we’re not the only ones who think so!

From these 25 applications, the Nominating Committee has proposed the following nine candidates to fill the six seats open for election to our board of directors:

American Institute of Physics (AIP), Jason Wilde, USA
F1000 Research, Liz Allen, UK
Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers (IEEE), Gerry Grenier, USA
The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), Vincent Cassidy, UK
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press (MIT Press), Amy Brand, USA
OpenEdition, Marin Dacos, France
SciELO, Abel Packer, Brazil
SPIE, Eric Pepper, USA
Vilnius Gediminas Technical University Press (VGTU Press), Eleonora Dagiene, Lithuania

Read the candidates’ organisational and personal statements

Candidates were chosen based on the following criteria:

That board representation should be reflective of membership
A balance of types and sizes of organisations
That all committee choices and recommendations were unanimous

You can be part of this important process, by voting in the election

If your organisation is a member of Crossref on September 15 2017, you are eligible to vote when voting opens on September 28 (affiliates, however, are not eligible to vote).

How can you vote?

On September 28, your organisation’s designated voting contact will receive an email with a link to the formal Notice of Meeting and Proxy Form with concise instructions on how to vote. An additional email will be sent with a username and password along with a link to our online voting platform. It is important to make sure your voting contact is up-to-date.

Want to add your voice?

We are accepting independent nominations until 7 November 2017. organisations interested in standing as an independent candidate should contact me by this date with the endorsements of ten other Crossref members.

The election itself will be held at LIVE17 Singapore, our annual meeting, on 14 November 2017. We hope you’ll be there to hear the results.

Now put your hands up! (for a Similarity Check update)

Madeleine Watson — Tue, 06 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Today, I’m thinking back to 2008. A time when khaki and gladiator sandals dominated my wardrobe. The year when Obama was elected, and Madonna and Guy Ritchie parted ways. When we were given both the iPhone 3G and the Kindle, and when the effects of the global financial crisis lead us to come to terms with the notion of a ‘staycation’. In 2008 we met both Wall-E and Benjamin Button, were enthralled by the Beijing Olympics, and became addicted to Breaking Bad. And lest we forget, 2008 was also the year in which Beyoncé brought us Single Ladies; in all its sassy hand-waving, monochrome glory. For Crossref though, 2008 holds another important milestone as it was the year we launched our Similarity Check initiative. Today, the artist formerly known as CrossCheck provides our members with cost-effective access to Turnitin’s powerful text comparison tool, iThenticate.

Fast forward nearly a decade, and it’s wonderful to see just how Similarity Check membership has grown in the nine years since launch; from 16 original members in 2008 to over 1,300 today.

Figure 1.1 The number of publishers participating in the Similarity Check service each year between 2008 – 2017 (to April)

Usage of iThenticate is also consistent with this growth in membership, and throughout 2016 our members checked over four million manuscripts for similarity using the tool. As Similarity Check members contribute their full-text content into Turnitin’s database, this increase in membership also has a dramatic impact on the volume of content indexed by Turnitin. Today, members can compare their manuscripts against Turnitin’s database of over 60 million full-text works provided by Similarity Check members. With over 88 million works currently registered with Crossref, this means that 68% of all content deposited with us is now available for comparison in iThenticate.

Over the years we have worked very closely with Turnitin to help champion new iThenticate feature developments that best support our member’s use of the tool as a core function of their editorial workflow. Many of our members too have also worked together with Turnitin to provide feedback on user experience and design.

Below, Turnitin’s Product Manager for iThenticate, Sun Oh, shares an insight into their research process and how Similarity Check member’s feedback has been critical in developing new and improved functionality in iThenticate.

Read on to learn more from Sun…

Sun Oh is a Senior Product Manager at Turnitin. She is currently the Product Manager for iThenticate and backend systems including the Content Intake System and similarity reports.

Last year we surveyed our Crossref customers to find out what Similarity Check improvements they would like to see and noticed a recurring request for the ability to compare two or more personally sourced documents.

We were intrigued and decided to run with it. We contacted the respondents who had asked for this, and started conversations to find out more. This helped us gather invaluable data, which in turn helped us to build the feature based on real use cases and with a clear view of what was wanted.

The design prototypes were reviewed for usability and effectiveness each step of the way by the respondents and once we had the feature up and running, those who requested it in our initial survey were among the first to trial it.

We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve now launched the new Doc-to-Doc comparison feature, available through iThenticate’s native interface. Simply select the Doc-to-Doc comparison upload method from the document submission panel.

If you are a Crossref member using Similarity Check, you have exclusive early access to this new feature, which allows you to use iThenticate’s powerful similarity check functionality and apply it to your own, private documents.

How does Doc-to-Doc Comparison work?

Doc-to-Doc comparison allows users to upload one primary document and compare it against up to five other documents.

Figure 1.2 The document upload screen for Doc-to-Doc comparison

When the upload is complete, a similarity score is generated for the primary document based on the amount of similar content found in the comparison documents. A full comparison report is also available.

The comparison report will open in the document viewer, and will display the primary document along with a list of the comparison documents and with their similarity percentage. If one of the comparison documents doesn’t include text that matches the primary document, iThenticate will still display it anyway, with a 0% score, allowing users to rule it out of their inspection. The similarity report will be stored securely in the user’s folder until they delete it.

Figure 1.3 Similarity report for Doc-to-Doc comparison

As these documents will not be stored in a shared database, they won’t affect the similarity score of any future submissions. Primary and comparison documents remain completely private and will not be indexed into the shared iThenticate content database.

To get a better idea of how Doc-to-Doc comparison works, check out the iThenticate feature guide on the Turnitin website.

Start using Doc-to-Doc Comparison now!

If you’re a Crossref member using Similarity Check, you can log in to your iThenticate account now and select the Doc-to-Doc comparison link on the homepage.

What else is new in iThenticate in this new release?

New Look

In addition to Doc-to-Doc comparison, we decided to refresh the look and feel of iThenticate; the same tools our users know and trust, now with a modern interface. Users will also notice that iThenticate now has more readable font and friendlier styling throughout.

Report Mode Memory

To make life easier, iThenticate now remembers whether users were in the All Sources or Match Overview mode when they last used the Document Viewer. iThenticate will then open documents in this mode automatically hereafter.

Improved Submission Process

We’re also enhancing our submission process by making the upload requirements more inclusive. We’ve increased the possible file size limit from 40MB to 100MB when uploading to either the database or to Doc-to-Doc comparison, and PowerPoint (.ppt) and Excel (.xlsm) file formats are now accepted.

Developments completed in 2016

If Similarity Check members haven’t had a chance to check out the improvements we introduced in iThenticate throughout 2016, here’s a quick recap. You can always find our updates on the What’s New page of the iThenticate website.

Download User List

The ability for administrators to download a list of all the users in their account has been added. This list will allow administrators to easily send emails to users.

Similarity Score Calculation Update

We updated how the similarity score is calculated when bibliographic material is excluded from a similarity report. Now, when bibliography exclusion is enabled, the word count of the bibliography is not included when calculating the overall percentage. This update to the similarity report calculation helps to provide users with a more accurate similarity score.

Improved Security

We are fully committed to keeping user’s data safe and secure at all times. To that end, we’ve added additional security logging, put in measures to enforce stronger passwords, and enabled Captcha after failed login attempts.

Faster Report Generation

We’ve increased the number of resources dedicated to the generation of similarity reports for our iThenticate service. As a result, users should see faster turnaround times for similarity reports.

Support for Eight Additional Languages

The iThenticate user interface is now available in eight additional languages: German, Dutch, Latin American Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Italian, French, and both Simplified & Traditional Chinese. When adding new users to an account, administrators can specify the language of the new user, which will then send a welcome email in the selected language. Individual users can also set their preferred language by selecting a language from the Language dropdown in the Settings menu.

Content Intake System

We’ve developed a new Content Intake System which enables our publication content database to scale so that our users can compare against a constantly growing database of the most recently published content. This allows us to index Similarity Check members’ data in a much more reliable and efficient way than legacy intake methods. And recently, we’ve made the collecting and processing of content from Crossref members using Similarity Check even faster by parallelising our processors. This means that we have more processors running simultaneously to process data.

By removing the need for crawling, we will also minimize our impact on traffic to a Similarity Check member’s public-facing website. The Content Intake System is able to directly collect full text URLs from members DOI metadata. This results in a huge reduction in the time it takes from when a publisher first deposits a new DOI with Crossref, to when the content is indexed by us into our full-text publication database. To date, we’ve been able to index the content associated with 60 million Crossref DOIs, and have indexed more than 165 million published works in total which submissions are compared against in iThenticate.

Walker (web crawler)

We’ve developed a new web crawler. Referred to as “Walker”, the crawler makes it possible to provide quicker and more reliable similarity matches to content available on the web. Not to be confused with the Content Intake System mentioned above, Walker’s purpose is to crawl the public web and is not used for indexing full-text content from Similarity Check members.

Using Walker, we’re adding an average of nearly 10 million new web pages to our content database per day, ensuring we have the freshest internet content available to find matches against.

We’d love to get your feedback!

As we design and develop new features, we want to make sure we’re fully understanding Similarity Check member’s needs and would love the opportunity to engage with users for further research. If you’d like to sign up to participate in user research for upcoming feature developments, please take a few minutes to fill out our Feedback Program Form. We look forward to connecting with you!

Contact Turnitin (EDIT 30/04/24: Support for iThenticate, contact details updated )

Please go to our Get help with Similarity Check page

~~For iThenticate technical and billing support, please email tiisupport@turnitin.com~~

~~For questions about content indexing, please contact Gareth at gmalcolm@turnitin.com~~

~~For iThenticate product development questions, please contact Sun at soh@turnitin.com~~

* Sun Oh, Product Manager for iThenticate*

**Thanks to Sun and the whole team at Turnitin for sharing this update.**

For more information about Similarity Check, visit our service page.

Want to join Crossref Similarity Check? Please contact our membership specialist.

Want to be on our Board?

Lisa Hart Martin — Fri, 28 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Do you want to affect change for the scholarly community?

Our Nominating Committee is inviting expressions of interest to serve on the Board as it begins its consideration of a slate for the November 2017 election.

Key responsibilities of the Board are setting the strategic direction for the organisation, providing financial oversight, and approving new policies and services. Some of the decisions the board has made in recent years include:

Establishing The OI Project to create a persistent organisation Identifier;
Inclusion of preprints in the Crossref metadata; and
The approval to develop Event Data which will track online activity from multiple sources.

Any member can express interest in serving on the Board

We are seeking people who know about scholarly communications and would like to be part of our future. If you have a vision for the international Crossref community, we are interested in hearing from you. Crossref members that are eligible to vote, and would like to be considered, can express their interest together with statements of interest from you and from your organisation. The form should be completed and sent to us before 01 June 2017.

The role of the Nominating Committee

The Nominating Committee meets to discuss change, process, criteria, and potential candidates, ensuring a fair representation of membership. The Committee is made up of three board members not up for election, and two non-board members.

Current Nominating Committee members:

John Shaw, Sage (Chair)
Mark Patterson, eLife
Paul Peters, Hindawi
Chris Fell, Cambridge University Press
Rebecca Lawrence, F1000 Research

About the election and our Board

We have a principle of one member, one vote; our board comprises a cross-section of members and it doesn’t matter how big or small you are, every member gets a single vote. Board terms are three years, and one third of the Board is eligible for election every year. There are six seats up for election in 2017. The board meets in a variety of international locations in March, July, and November each year. View a list of the current Crossref Board members and a history of the decisions they’ve made (motions). The election opens online in late September 2017 and voting is done by proxy online or in person at the annual business meeting during Crossref LIVE in November 2017. Election materials and instructions for voting will be available to all Crossref members online in late September 2017. The board needs to be truly representative of Crossref’s global and diverse membership of organisations who publish.

Please express interest using the form, or email me with any questions.

Revised Crossref DOI display guidelines are now active

Ed Pentz — Wed, 15 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

We have updated our DOI display guidelines as of March 2017, this month! I described the what and the why in my previous blog post New Crossref DOI display guidelines are on the way and in an email I wrote to all our members in September 2016. I’m pleased to say that the updated Crossref DOI display guidelines are available via this fantastic new website and are now active. Here is the URL of the full set of guidelines in case you want to bookmark it (https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.13003/5jchdy) and a shareable image to spread the word on social media.

This blog is a quick reminder that all Crossref members should now be displaying DOIs in the recommended new format from this month, on any new content you publish online. Please note these guidelines are for Crossref DOIs only, we have nearly 90 million registered but there are others, and not all DOIs are made equal.

The main changes are to display the DOI as a full, linked URL using HTTPS:

https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.xxxx/xxxxx

For background on the HTTPS issue please read Geoffrey Bilder’s blog post, Linking DOIs using HTTPS.

What will happen if you don’t update your Crossref DOI display?

We tell members that they should be working towards making the change even if they can’t do it until later - we recognize that it is not always an easy change to make.

However, if members don’t make the change, nothing immediate will happen (Crossref won’t fine you!) although as more members make the change your display will look odd and out of place compared with other members’ content.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

Call for participation: Membership & Fees Committee

Ed Pentz — Tue, 29 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Crossref was founded to enable collaboration between publishers. As our membership has grown and diversified over recent years, it’s becoming even more vital that we take input from a representative cross-section of the membership. This is especially important when considering how fees and policies will affect our diverse members in different ways.

About the M&F Committee

The Membership & Fees Committee (M&F Committee) was established in 2001 and plays an important role in Crossref’s governance. Made up of 10-12 organisations of both board members and regular members, the group makes recommendations to the board about fees and policies for all of our services. They regularly review existing fees to discuss if any changes are needed. They also review new services while they are being developed, to assess if fees should be charged and if so, what those fees should be. For example, the committee recently made recommendations to the board about the fees for a new service called Event Data that we’ll launch soon, and the Content Registration fees for preprints. In addition, the board can also ask the committee to address specific issues about policies and services. Increasingly, the committee works with the outreach team to include research and survey insights.

About committee participation

The M&F Committee meets via one-hour conference calls about six times a year, although this can vary depending on what issues the committee is considering. Often proposals are developed by staff and then reviewed and discussed by the committee - so there is reading to do in preparation for the calls.

This is very important work and in order to ensure that the committee is broadly representative of Crossref’s diverse membership we are seeking expressions of interest from members who would like to serve on the M&F Committee for 2017. Appointments are for one year and members can serve multiple terms.

About you

In view of our commitment to be representative of the membership we are refreshing the committee and want to have engaged and interested people from a diverse set of members join.

If you are interested in joining the committee and helping Crossref fulfil its mission please email feedback@crossref.org with your name, title, organisation and a short statement about why you want to serve on the committee by December 19th, 2016.

Scott Delman, Director of Group Publishing, ACM is the current Chair of the committee and will review the expressions of interest with me, Ed Pentz, Executive Director, to form the committee.

Thanks for your interest.

Smart alone; brilliant together. Community reigns at Crossref LIVE16

Ginny Hendricks — Sat, 29 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

A bit different from our traditional meetings, Crossref LIVE16 next week is the first of a totally new annual event for the scholarly communications community. Our theme is Smart alone; brilliant together. We have a broad program of both informal and plenary talks across two days. There will be stations to visit, conversation starters, and entertainment, that highlight what our community can achieve if it works together.

Check out the final program.

We’re now opening the doors to all parties—our 5,000+ members of all shapes and sizes—as well as the technology providers, funders, libraries, and researchers that we work with. Our aim is to gather the ‘metadata-curious’ and have more opportunities to talk face-to-face to share ideas and information, see live demos, and get to know one another.

Mashup Day - Tuesday 1st November 12-5pm. An ‘open house’ vibe, we’ll have several stations to visit each Crossref team, a LIVE Lounge, good food, and guest areas run by our friends at DataCite, ORCID, and Turnitin. We’ll have some special programming too, on-the-hour lightning talks, including a wild talk at 2pm from a primatologist who speaks baboon!

Conference Day - Wednesday 2nd November 9am-5pm. There is more of a formal plenary agenda this day, with keynote speakers from across the scholarly communications landscape. Our primary goal is to share Crossref strategy and plans, alongside thought-provoking perspectives from our guest speakers. We’ll hear from many corners of our community including:

Funder program officer, Carly Strasser (Moore Foundation) on “Publishers and funders as agents of change“,

Data scientist, Ian Calvert (Digital Science) on “You don’t have metadata“,

Open knowledge advocate, Dario Taraborelli (The Wikimedia Foundation) on “Citations for the sum of all human knowledge“, and

Scholarly communications librarian, April Hathcock (New York University) on “Opening up the margins“.

For our part, we will set out Crossref’s “strategy and key priorities” (Ed Pentz), “A vision for membership” (me, Ginny Hendricks), “The meaning of governance” (Lisa Hart Martin), “The case of the missing leg” (Geoffrey Bilder),”New territories in the scholarly research map” (Jennifer Lin), and “Relationships and other notable things” (Chuck Koscher).

We will also set aside thirty minutes for the important Crossref annual business meeting, when we will announce the results of the membership’s vote, and welcome new board members.

I can’t wait to welcome you all.

Have you voted?

If you’re a voting member of Crossref you’ll have cast your vote already I hope! I’m so happy to see that people have voted in record numbers although it’s under 7% of our eligible members which is not high… more on member participation next week.

Important changes to Similarity Check

Madeleine Watson — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

New features, new indexing, new name - oh my!

TL;DR The indexing of Similarity Check users’ content into the shared full-text database is about to get a lot faster. Now we need members assistance in helping Turnitin (the company who own and operate the iThenticate plagiarism checking tool) to transition to a new method of indexing content.

For existing Similarity Check users: please check that your metadata includes full-text URLs so that Turnitin can quickly and easily locate and index your content. Full-text URLs need to be included in 90% of journal article metadata by 31st December 2016.

2016 has seen some exciting new developments

(And there are plenty more in store as we strive towards 2017). But first: in April we renamed the service from CrossCheck to Similarity Check and we now have a new service logo available to reference via our logo CDN using the following code.

<img src="https://assets-crossref-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/logo/crossref-similarity-check-logo-200.svg" width="200" height="98" alt="Crossref Similarity Check logo">

Earlier this year Crossref also signed a new contract with Turnitin. As part of this, we negotiated the inclusion of dedicated development time each year from Turnitin’s engineering and product teams to focus on developments in the iThenticate tool that will specifically support Similarity Check users and their needs. Many of our members will have been contacted recently by Turnitin and asked to complete a survey regarding how they use the tool and what improvements they would like to see made in the future. The results of this survey are currently being analyzed and will be used by Turnitin to inform a development plan.

Finally, throughout 2016 we have also been working with Turnitin to help them develop a new Content Intake System that provides a faster, more reliable and robust method for collecting data from Crossref and indexing users’ content into the Similarity Check full-text database. Previously Turnitin was only able to collect prefix data from Crossref’s system on a monthly basis whereas today, with the new Content Intake System up and running, they are able to pull full-text content links from deposited metadata on a daily basis. This means that if you are a Similarity Check user currently depositing full-text URLs with Crossref, your content is being indexed by Turnitin faster than ever before.

There are plenty of other benefits this new method provides. This is why we have agreed with Turnitin that from 1st January 2017 onwards, indexing via full-text URLs will be the only method supported for Similarity Check.

Not convinced? Let me share my top four reasons for advocating Turnitin’s exclusive use of the full-text URL indexing method for Similarity Check:

1. Reduced traffic to publisher servers. Indexing via full-text URLs means that the crawl is targeted specifically to the location of the full-text PDF or HTML content, thereby reducing the amount of traffic Turnitin puts through publisher’s servers.

2. Lower margin for error and simplified issue recovery. Turnitin will no longer need to make multiple fetches for any content item, meaning there are now fewer steps in the process. This means there will be fewer places for indexing errors to occur and also reduces the reliance on users setting meta tags or span tags correctly in their markup. Furthermore, if problems do arise, using the one method of indexing for all users will mean that Turnitin is able to pinpoint the issue faster and work with members to resolve it quickly.

3. Quicker turnaround on indexing with fewer delays. Turnitin will no longer need to investigate and set up bespoke indexing methods for different Similarity Check users and they will be able to access the location of full-text content from the one place (ie. within the specific resource tag in member’s metadata deposits). More accurate data from only one location will result in a quicker turnaround on indexing, meaning newly published content will be added into the Similarity Check content database sooner for all members to check other new manuscripts against.

4. Daily ingest is better than monthly! Full-text links can be collected daily from Crossref-rather than monthly for other methods-meaning a more regular ingest of content.

The presence of full-text URLs within the metadata is critical to the functioning of Turnitin’s new indexing system. All new Similarly Check participants are now asked to ensure they have these links in place within their deposited metadata before they participate in the service.

Already a user of Similarity Check?

If you’re an existing Similarity Check participant who joined the service before 2016, your content is likely to be currently indexed via different methods, such as following links contained in your page meta tags. If you’re not currently depositing full-text links with Crossref for Similarity Check, you will have received an email from us about this in August. If you’re unsure though, you can check your XML to see if you have included the full-text link in the field or you can send us an email at similaritycheck@crossref.org as we’d be happy to check for you.

Help, don’t leave me behind!

Us? Never! We’re here to help. But we really do need those full-text links… Everything existing Similarity Check publishers need to know about adding full-text links into new or existing metadata can be found on our help site. These URLs should be included as part of all standard metadata deposits going forward and can be easily added into existing files in bulk. So there’s no need to redeposit the full metadata, unless of course you would prefer to do so!

That’s a wrap

Looking back, it really has been a busy year for Similarity Check and it will continue to be so as we persevere in laying the groundwork for a more streamlined, robust and scalable service for 2017 and beyond. Remember, we need Similarity Check users to ensure they have full-text URLs in at least 90% of their journal article metadata by 31st December 2016 in order to continue using Similarity Check from 2017 onwards.

And please keep us updated! With over 1,200 publishers using Similarity Check, we’ll need a little nudge to know when metadata has been updated to include these links. So once updates have been deposited, please email similaritycheck@crossref.org to confirm. And of course, as always, if there are any questions or if some advice would help, we’re just an email away.

One member, one vote: Crossref Board Election opens today, September 30th

Lisa Hart Martin — Fri, 30 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Watch for two important emails on September 30th – one with a voting link and material, and one with your username and password.

Running Crossref well is a key part of our mission. It’s important that we be as neutral and fair as possible, and we are always striving for that balance. One of our stated principles is “One member, one vote”. And each year we encourage each of our members-standing at over 6000 today-to participate in the election of new board members.

It is hard to believe that November 2nd will be Crossref’s 17th annual meeting and our 16th annual Board of Directors election. How time flies, and oh, how we have grown!

Crossref’s Truths, taken from our forthcoming new website.

I am hoping that we can rally the membership to participate in this important process!

Candidates will be elected at Crossref LIVE16 for three-year terms to fill five of the 16 Board seats whose terms expire this year. The slate of candidates was recommended by the Nominating Committee, which consisted of three Board members not up for re-election, and two Crossref members that are not on the Board.

This year, Jasper Simons, APA; Paul Peters, Hindawi; Jason Wilde, AIP; Chris Fell, Cambridge University Press; and Rebecca Lawrence, f1000 served on the Nominating Committee. The Committee met to discuss the process, criteria, and potential candidates, and put forward a slate which was required to be at least equal to the number of Board seats up for election. The slate may or may not consist of Board members up for re-election.

Crossref members are welcome to run as independent candidates, as long as they have ten member endorsements sent to lhart@crossref.org with the intent to run. We sent a notification of the process in advance (this year on August 26th), so any nominations could be included in the voting materials that will be sent via email on September 30th.

You can access online voting from today at:

https://eballot4.votenet.com/PILA/admin. Watch your inbox today for emails with your username and password!

New Crossref DOI display guidelines are on the way

Ed Pentz — Tue, 27 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR

Crossref will be updating its DOI Display Guidelines within the next couple of weeks. This is a big deal. We last made a change in 2011 so it’s not something that happens often or that we take lightly. In short, the changes are to drop “dx” from DOI links and to use “https:” rather than “http:”. An example of the new best practice in displaying a Crossref DOI link is: https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.1629/22161

Hey Ho, “doi:” and “dx” have got to go

The updated Crossref DOI Display guidelines recommend that https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/ be used and not http://dx.doi.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/ in DOI links. Originally the “dx” separated the DOI resolver from the International DOI Foundation (IDF) website but this has changed and the IDF has already updated its recommendations so we are bringing ours in line with theirs.

We are also recommending the use of HTTPS because it makes for more secure browsing. When you use an HTTPS link, the connection between the person who clicks the DOI and the DOI resolver is secure. This means it can’t be tampered with or eavesdropped on. The DOI resolver will redirect to both HTTP and HTTPS URLs.

Timing and backwards compatibility

We are requesting all Crossref member publishers and anyone using Crossref DOIs to start following the updated guidelines as soon as possible. But realistically we are setting a goal of six months for implementation; we realize that updating systems and websites can take time. We at Crossref will also be updating our systems within six months - we already use HTTPS for some of our services and our new website (coming very soon!) will use HTTPS.

An important point about backwards compatibility is that “http://dx.doi.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/” and “http://doi.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/” are valid and will continue to work forever-or as long as Crossref DOIs continue to work-and we plan to be around a long time.

We need to do better

Reflecting on the 2011 update to the display guidelines it’s fair to say that we have been disappointed. It is still much too common to see unlinked DOIs in the form doi:10.1063/1.3599050 or DOI: 10.1629/22161 or even unlinked in this form: http://dx.doi.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.1002/poc.3551

What’s so wrong with this approach? To demonstrate, please click on this DOI doi:10.1063/1.3599050 - oh, you can’t click on it? How about I send you to a real example of a publisher page. What I’d like you to do is click the following link and then copy the DOI you find there and come back - http://dx.doi.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.1002/poc.3551.

Are you back? I expect you had to carefully highlight the “10.1063/1.3599050” and then do “edit”, “copy”. That wasn’t too bad but the next step is to put the DOI into an email and send it to someone. But wait - what are they going to do with “10.1063/1.3599050”? It’s useless. If you want it to be useful you’ll have to add “http://doi.org.pluma.sjfc.edu” or https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/ in the front.

When publishers follow the guidelines it makes things easier - if you go to https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.1063/1.3599050 you’ll note that you can just right click on the full DOI link on the page and get a full menu of options of what to do with it. One of which is to copy the link and then you can easily paste into an email or anywhere else.

However-putting a positive spin on the spotty adherence to the 2011 update to the DOI display guidelines-everyone has another chance with the latest set of updates to make all the changes at once!

More on HTTPS (future-proofing scholarly linking)

We take providing the central linking infrastructure for scholarly publishing seriously. Because we form the link between publisher sites all over the web, it’s important that we do our bit to enable secure browsing from start to finish. In addition, HTTPS is now a ranking signal for Google who gives sites using HTTPS a small ranking boost.

The process of enabling HTTPS on publisher sites will be a long one and, given the number of members we have, it may a while before everyone’s made the transition. But by using HTTPS we are future-proofing scholarly linking on the web.

Some years ago we started the process of making our new services available exclusively over HTTPS. The Crossref Metadata API is HTTPS enabled, and Crossmark and our Assets CDN use HTTPS exclusively. Last year we collaborated with Wikipedia to make all of their DOI links HTTPS. We hope that we’ll start to see more of the scholarly publishing industry doing the same.

So-it’s simple-always make the DOI a full link - https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.1006/jmbi.1995.0238 - even when it’s on the abstract or full text page of the content that the DOI identifies - and use “https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/”.

The membership boom & why metadata isn’t like beer

Susan Collins — Fri, 23 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

You might recognize my name if you’ve ever applied for Crossref membership on behalf of your organisation. It recently occurred to me that, since I’ve been working in our membership department for eight years, I’ve been a part of shepherding new members for half of our history. And my, how we’ve grown.

Membership growth by country

Though it may be easy to see our membership growth by looking at the numbers, I think it’s interesting to consider where we’ve grown. The top ten member countries have dramatically changed since Crossref began sixteen years ago. At the end of our first year of operations, our membership included 54 publishers and affiliated organisations. The majority were from the US and the UK, with a small number from Germany, the Netherlands, and Japan.

In 2012, participation in our sponsors program began to increase. Sponsors are affiliated organisations that act on behalf of smaller publishers and societies who wish to register their content with Crossref. Several organisations from Turkey and South Korea were among the first sponsors to join and were very successful in representing a large number of publishers and societies from their regions. Soon to follow were sponsors from India, Ukraine, Russia and Brazil. In 2014, the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) became a sponsoring affiliate, focusing on smaller publishers with the aim of increasing the quality and global reach of scholarly publishing. With the introduction of our sponsor program, the past few years have seen a steady increase in the geographical diversity of our members.

There are 194 countries in the world. It’s pretty amazing that organisations in 112 of the world’s countries are now represented in our membership. Do I think we’ll see members joining from the other 82 nations? I don’t know but I hope so.

A look at our trending nations chart shows the diversity of our membership as we’ve grown, depicting the countries that produced the most new members over the last two years. There has been tremendous growth from South Korea! What I find just as interesting is that we have new members from so many different nations that they form their own special bloc, shown here as “Other.”

Our growth has taken place at a remarkable rate. When I joined Crossref in 2008, we had over 1800 publishers and affiliates and we were adding about 300 new members per year. In 2015, nearly 1500 members joined and we are seeing even larger numbers so far in 2016. Counting all publishers, affiliates, libraries, sponsors and represented members, our new member total through the end of August is nearly 1200 and will most certainly overtake the 2015 figure.

Member perceptions

With such a range of new members each month it’s even more important that we help people understand the benefits of joining Crossref. That it’s not just registering metadata and DOIs but maintaining and improving records over time, and participating in reference linking. We are adding and improving some educational tools that will help everyone understand how our services can enhance the discoverability of content, and why sharing richer metadata supports their full participation in the scholarly community. We are in the process of developing a new, cleaner website with videos that better explain our services-to be released in the next few weeks,-a new onboarding experience, and new and improved query and deposit tools.

Connected metadata isn’t like beer

Sometimes inviting more people to a party means there is less beer to go around. Fortunately for everyone, metadata isn’t like beer. In fact, the more metadata you draw from the tap, the more useful it becomes. So inviting new members to join Crossref makes our community better and more valuable for everyone. Every member uses that metadata to link their content to every other member’s content. This makes all members’ content easier to find, link, and cite, not just at the moment it is published, but over time.

Members from around the globe join Crossref everyday and help guide our growing community. If you are interested in joining please contact me at member@crossref.org.

Get ready for Crossmark 2.0!

Kirsty Meddings — Wed, 17 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

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.

However, this was only phase one of the Crossmark makeover. We will soon complete the upgrade to display a fully responsive, mobile-friendly box. The Crossmark button has been given a facelift too, and we are excited to offer the first public preview today:

The new button brings the Crossmark icon up to date and is designed to be more “clickable” than the current button. It will be available in several different ratios and also in greyscale.

The first phase of the new design was rolled out in the existing Crossmark pop up window (Crossmark v1.5) without the need for changes within publisher systems. For the Crossmark v2.0 upgrade, publishers will need to update their landing pages with a new snippet of code, to ‘unlock’ the new button and functional enhancements.

Crossmark 2.0 will be available to adopt in a few weeks, and each publisher can decide when to switch over. We encourage members to upgrade sooner rather than later to get the benefits of the new box, but we also understand there are planned development schedules and the need for a testing period so we will continue to support Crossmark v1.5 until March 2017.

Many thanks to all of those who completed our surveys to help us shape the new button. And congratulations to Elizabeth Ramsey, a researcher from Trent University in Canada, who will be receiving a limited edition Crossref Moleskine notebook from the survey prize draw.

Our User Experience Designer, Rakesh Masih, will be blogging soon with details about the research and testing for this project, as well as more about our new approach to user experience at Crossref.

Crossref Brand update: new names, logos, guidelines, + video

Ginny Hendricks — Fri, 29 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

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.

With a cohesive approach to naming and branding, the benefits of changing to (some) new names and logos should help everyone. Our aim is to stem confusion and be in a much better position to provide clear messages and useful resources so that people don’t have to try hard to understand what Crossref enables them to do.

So while it may be a bit of a pain short-term, it will be worth it!

What are the new names?

As a handy reference, here is a slide-shaped image giving an overview of our services with their new names:

Overview of brand name changes, April 2016

It’s a lowercase ‘r’ in Crossref

That’s right, you’ve spent fifteen years learning to capitalize the second R in Crossref, and now we’re asking you to lowercase it! Please say hello to and start to embrace the more natural and contemporary Crossref.

Reference logos from our new CDN via assets.crossref.org

I’m hoping we can count on our community to update logos and names on your end, keeping consistent with new brand guidelines. And I hope we can make it as easy as possible to do:

This Content Delivery Network (CDN) at assets.crossref.org allows you to reference logos using a snippet of code. Please do not copy/download the logos.
This set of brand guidelines for members.

We also have a new website in development which will put support and resources front and center of the user experience. More on that in the next month or two.

By using the snippets of code provided via our new CDN at assets.crossref.org, these kind of manual updates should never be a problem in the future if the logo changes again (no plans anytime soon!).

Of course, we don’t expect people to update new logos and names immediately, there is always a period of transition. Please let us know let us know if we can help you to update your sites and materials in the coming weeks.

Also, check out the launch video, which presents five key Crossref brand messages:

What are there 80 million of?

Ginny Hendricks — Fri, 08 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

As of this week, there are 80,000,000 scholarly items registered with Crossref!

By the way, we update these interesting Crossref stats regularly and you can search the metadata.

The 80 millionth scholarly item is [drumroll…] Management Approaches in Beihagi History from the journal Oman Chapter of Arabian Journal of Business and Management Review, published by Al Manhal in the United Arab Emirates.

There have been loads of changes since Wiley registered “Designer selves: Construction of technologically mediated identity within graphical, multiuser virtual environments” with the DOI http://dx.doi.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(1999)50:10<855::AID-ASI3>3.0.CO;2-6), which happens to have been Crossref’s first official DOI (after many prototype deposits).

In the beginning, most of our new members came from the United States and Europe. Now, lots of our members and affiliates come from other parts of the world.

Ed Pentz was Crossref’s first (and only) employee in February 2000. Now it takes 30 of us to manage the 80 million records and over 5,300 participating organisations and to work on projects like Crossref Event Data, ‘early content registration’ , and all the new stuff you’ll be hearing about later this year.

Maybe in the context of social media services (e.g. Facebook users) 80,000,000 does not seem like such a big number. But 80,000,000 is an important milestone. Just think —

There are also 80 million microbes in a 10 second kiss [Microbiome, 2014, 2:41, Kort et al].

And after 80 million years of extinction events, we’re all still here!

What else is 80 million? Tell us in a tweet using #Crossref80mil. There may be a prize!

Crossref has 80 million registered content items

Watch Speaker Videos from the 2015 Annual Meeting

April Ondis — Tue, 24 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

You might have missed it, but you haven’t missed out. If you want to watch – or savor re-watching – the presentations from last week’s 2015 Crossref Annual Meeting, we’ve embedded each video below in chronological order. Sit back, relax, and take it all in (again) just as though you were in an air-conditioned ballroom at the Taj.

Note: You can find the playlist containing all the videos on our YouTube channel.

Ed Pentz, Crossref Executive Director, focuses on the best practice of writing DOIs as actionable hyperlinks in his presentation, Crossref Best Practice: http://www.slideshare.net/Crossref/ed-pentz-crossref15-55435481 (slides only)

Martin Paul Eve senior lecturer at Birkbeck University, London, delivers a trenchant criticism of the process small publishers must go through when getting and depositing their first Crossref DOI in his presentation, Crossref Deposit: A Scholar-Publisher Experience:

Anne Coghill, Manager of Peer Review Operations for the American Chemical Society, detailed their process for deciding where in the manuscript workflow to insert CrossCheck plagiarism screening in her presentation, American Chemical Society Publications and CrossCheck: http://www.slideshare.net/Crossref/ann-coghill-crossref15 (slides only)

Ben Hogan, Regional Manager in Wiley’s Peer Review Management team, shares Wiley’s pain points as well as its positive experiences in using CrossCheck to detect plagiarism in his presentation, _CrossCheck Usage and Case Studies: _

Jure Triglav, Lead Developer for the PubSweet Publishing Framework at the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation, demonstrates how to mine data from the corpus of open science using Crossref’s metadata via its API and open source tools from the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation in his presentation, Making Science Writing Smarter:

Scott Chamberlain, open science researcher, shows the several advantages of using programmatic tools such as R, Python, and Ruby to mine text and data, including Crossref metadata, in his presentation, _Text and Data Mining: _

Helen Duriez, ePublishing Manager at the Royal Society, describes the Royal Society’s experience with providing Crossmark data as a means of communicating document version information in her presentation, Crossmark – a journey through time (and space?) 2015

John Chodacki, chair of Crossref’s DET committee, describes the future state of the DOI Event Tracker as an open hub for collecting and sharing data around web events that involve DOIs in his presentation, DOI Event Tracker 2015:

Marc Abrahams, editor and co-founder of the Annals of Improbable Research, makes you LAUGH, then THINK with his keynote speech, Improbable Research, the Ig Nobel Prizes, and You:

Juan Pablo Alperin describes the ways that Crossref and the Public Knowledge Project can work together to support common goals, in his presentation, _PKP and Crossref: Two P’s in a Cross

Ed Pentz, Crossref Executive Director, summarizes the organisation’s expansion over the past year with his presentation, Crossref Growth and Change:

Ginny Hendricks, Director of Member & Community Outreach, details the findings of Crossref’s recent stakeholder research and the organisation’s future plans to enhance member experience with her presentation, Member & Community Outreach:

Jennifer Lin, Director of Product Management, visualizes Crossref’s role as a map maker for the scholarly web in her presentation, Crossref: Building an Open Map for the Scholarly Enterprise:

Chuck Koscher, Director of Technology, gives us performance stats for the Crossref system, including aggregate uptimes and how long it takes to deposit metadata, in his presentation, Crossref System Performance:

Geoffrey Bilder, Director of Strategic Initiatives, sheds light on the status of current and future research projects that are part of Crossref’s new product development process in his presentation, Strategic Initiatives Update:

Scott Chamberlain, open science researcher, proposes the use of programmatic tools, such as the R programming language working with the Crossref search API, to undertake scientific research in his presentation, Thinking Programmatically:

Martin Paul Eve, senior lecturer at Birkbeck University, London, bears us back to the origins of the scholarly mission, considers the implications of the notion that researchers work within a symbolic economy, and looks at the practical challenges brought about by open access modes of publication for works in the Humanities in his wide-ranging presentation, Open Access & the Humanities: Digital Approaches:

Slideshare, Too!

Finally, each speaker has generously made their slides available here: http://www.slideshare.net/Crossref/tag/crossref15

_ _

The logo has landed

Ginny Hendricks — Wed, 11 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The rebranding of Crossref was top priority when I joined in May in a new role called “Director of Member & Community Outreach”. Since then I’ve been working to understand the array of services, attributes, and audiences we have developed; to answer the questions “What do we do, for whom, and why?”

As Crossref prepares to celebrate turning fifteen at our annual meeting next week, I am thrilled to present our new brand identity with key messages and logo. And along with “thrilled” you may also detect “nervous excitement”.

Over the last few months we have reviewed earlier research and talked with a number of members, affiliates, and academics. Turns out we’re the plain talkers of the industry, the do-ers, the scrappy people who get stuff done, chivvy others along, and in some cases we are—dare I say it—the voice of reason!

While balancing differing views within the scholarly community, we’re all about making connections – literally and figuratively. We help bring together people and metadata in pursuit of an excellent research communications system for all. And, to mirror one of Ed Pentz’s new catchphrases, we are “keeping it real”; with down-to-earth language.

Crossref Key Messages

New logos and names for all our products will come soon (in some cases it’ll be a ‘de-brand’ rather than a re-brand!). We’ll gradually phase in the new identity over the next month or two, starting with our annual meeting, and with a complete website relaunch following in 2016. We will contact all of our members and partners in the coming weeks with information about using the new logo, using a content delivery network (CDN) so that sites can reference the correct file.

Why rebrand?

We have not rebranded because we plan on doing something different but rather to better express the things we already do. Our ‘problem’ was that often people didn’t know Crossref was behind initiatives like CrossCheck, Crossmark and FundRef. Our products had become unlinked from the organisation. And since we’re all about linking things together, that just made no sense.

We needed an icon to give more flexibility across the web that a word mark cannot do alone. The icon is made up of two interlinked angle brackets familiar to those who work with metadata, and can also act as arrows depicting Metadata In and Metadata Out, two themes under which our services can generally be grouped.
Sentence case helps to avoid splitting the word; we do not want to tempt the Cross and the Ref to divide again. So that lowercase R you see in the middle of our name is indeed an official change. (Hopefully we can change the habit!)
The palette gives a nod to the history of Crossref with red & dark grey, but brings in contemporary colors for a fresh palette that is distinctive in our industry (we researched a lot - everyone has circles, and traditional shades abound). Our aesthetic embodies classic Swiss design principles and is minimalist in keeping with our straight-talking personality.

So, in the words of Board Chair, Ian Bannerman, it’s time for Crossref to step forward.

About Crossref

I’m looking forward to revealing more of the story at our annual meeting next week!

Annual Meeting: Join Crossref in Boston this November!

April Ondis — Fri, 18 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

We’d like to invite the scholarly publishing community to get together in Boston this November with the Crossref Annual Meeting as a rally point. This is the event we hold just once a year to get the whole team under one roof, host a lively discussion with the leading voices in scholarly communications, present technical workshops, and offer you the chance to get hands’ on with our latest metadata services. Our free two-day event takes place from November 17-18, 2015 in Boston, MA.

Agenda:

Tuesday, November 17 - Tech Workshops:

The morning is an opportunity to get into small groups and talk directly with our development and support teams. We will present best practices around using Crossref’s metadata. After lunch, we will feature member case studies with tips on implementation and lessons learned. If you’re on the technical production side of scholarly publishing, you’ll want to be there — and not just for the beer & pretzels afterwards.

Wednesday, November 18 - Member Meeting:

A day to hear from thought leaders from the larger scholarly publishing community as well as from inside Crossref. Our keynote speaker will be Dr. Ben Goldacre (Bad Science), and our distinguished speakers include Dr. Scott Chamberlain (rOpenSci), Dr. Juan Pablo Alperin (Public Knowledge Project), and Dr. Martin Eve, (Open Library of Humanities). We will share details about the road map for Crossref Labs’ current and future initiatives, hear about the latest organisational developments from new members of our team, and see the debut of our new brand logo and communications strategy. Following the formal discussion, we’ll continue the conversation over cocktails as part of our celebration of Crossref’s milestone 15th Anniversary!

✱ Tickets:

Reserve your free tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/crossref15-tech-workshops-member-meeting-tickets-17921679225

Who Should Attend?

Scholarly publishers, technology providers, librarians, researchers, academic institutions, funders, journalists, and others who are keen to discuss tools and services to advance scholarly publishing are encouraged to attend.

✱ Venue:

Hotel Taj Boston
15 Arlington Street
Boston, MA 02116 USA

About Crossref Crossref is a not-for profit membership organisation that wants to improve research communication. We organize publisher metadata, run the infrastructure that makes DOI links work, and we rally multiple community stakeholders in order to develop tools and services to enable advancements in scholarly publishing.

DOI Event Tracker (DET): Pilot progresses and is poised for launch

Jennifer Lin — Tue, 15 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Publishers, researchers, funders, institutions and technology providers are all interested in better understanding how scholarly research is used. Scholarly content has always been discussed by scholars outside the formal literature and by others beyond the academic community. We need a way to monitor and distribute this valuable information.

The Crossref DOI Event Tracker (DET)

To meet this need, Crossref will be introducing a new service that tracks activity surrounding a research work from potentially any web source where an event is associated with a DOI. Following a successful pilot run started Spring 2014, the service has been approved to move toward production and is expected to launch in 2016. Any party wishing to join this phase is welcome to contact Jennifer Lin. The DOI Event Tracker (DET) registers a wide variety of events such as bookmarks, comments, social shares, citations, and links to other research entities, from a growing list of online sources. DET aggregates them, and stores and delivers the data in many ways.

Open, portable, and licensed for maximum reuse

Crossref has long served as the citation linking and metadata infrastructure provider for scholarly communication; the new DOI Event Tracker is a natural next step, providing a practical solution as a resource for the whole community. The tracker offers the following features:

Data on event activity across a common pool of online channels.
Near real-time alerting for select sources with push notifications to the system.
Cross-publisher monitoring to enable benchmarking and provide context to the data.
Common format for normalizing data results across the diverse set of sources via modern REST API.
Secure and regularly refreshed backups of critical data for long term data preservation.
Transparency of data collection so as to ensure auditable, replicable, and trustworthy results.
Query-initiated retrieval or real-time alerts when an event of interest occurs.
CC-0 license for open and flexible propagation of data.

A number of platforms are already confirmed and more parties are welcomed at any stage. So far we have confirmation to track DOI events on the following platforms:

[table id=1 /]

This set of sources reflects our initial focus on parties willing to allow their data to be redistributed in the common pool. Efforts are underway to expand the source list to include Twitter and MyScienceWork, among others. Publishers can also act as sources by publishing and distributing DOI event data via the DET when an event occurs on its platform (for example, when a PDF is downloaded, or when a comment mentions a DOI in a locally hosted discussion forum, etc.). This would make local DOI activity globally available to funders, researchers, institutions, etc.

DET provides benefits of scale and ease of access as a central point for collecting and propagating data to the community. As a single point of access, it overcomes the business and technical hurdles that are a part of managing multiple online sources where scholarly activity occurs, in a rapidly changing landscape of online channels. This resource covers content across publishers and serves as a strong foundation to support the development of tools and services by any party. DET users will always be able to combine the DET data with those individually collected via negotiated or paid access. DET remains a utility separate from any value-added amenities, such as analytics, presentation, and reporting.

DET Service-Level Agreement

For those who seek the highest level of service and a more flexible range of access options, Crossref will provide a Service-Level Agreement (SLA) service for the DOI Event Tracker. The DET SLA includes the following additional features on top of the common data offering:

Access to the complete suite of sources, which includes restricted and/or paid sources in addition to common data, providing the fullest picture of DOI usage activity possible.
Guaranteed uptime and response time to the latest raw data on the aggregate activity surrounding a DOI.
Guaranteed support response time to questions and issues surrounding data and data delivery.
Flexible data access options: on-demand real time data access and scheduled bulk downloads for processing batch analytics.
Optimum retrieval rates and accelerated delivery speeds with the dedicated SLA API.
Access to a webhook API for events of interest as an alternative to polling DET.
Standardized and enhanced linkback service for the difficult-to-track, grey literature.

The DET SLA service has a simple, value-based pricing model based on subscriber size. Register your interest in Crossref’s DOI Event Tracker and the DET SLA service if you would like stay informed of the upcoming launch. Please contact Jennifer Lin for more information.

Image modified from “Radar” icon by Karsten Barnett from the Noun Project.

Please join us for the 2009 Crossref Technical Meeting.

Anna Tolwinska — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Crossref Technical Meeting*

The Charles Hotel, Cambridge, MA

Monday, November 9th, 2009

2:00 pm - 5:00 pm

Please register today!

We also encourage you to register for our 10th Anniversary Celebration Dinner, which will take place Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 6:30 pm following the Crossref Technical Meeting at the Museum of Science in Boston, MA. Transportation from the Charles Hotel to the Museum of Science will be provided. Our 2009 Annual Meeting will take place on Tuesday, November 10th at 9:00 am in the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, MA and we urge you to register soon (if you haven’t already done so)

as space is limited. You may register for both events here.

*Please note that this year’s Technical Meeting will be on Monday afternoon.

PubMed Central Links to Publisher Full Text

Ed Pentz — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

A Crossref Member Briefing is available that explains how PubMed Central (PMC) links to publisher full text, how PMC uses DOIs and how PMC should be using DOIs. The briefing is entitled “Linking to Publisher Full Text from PubMed Central” (PDF 85k).

Crossref considers it very important the PMC uses DOIs as the main means to link to the publisher version of record for an article and we are recommending that publishers try to convince PMC to use DOIs in an automated way. Almost all of the PMC articles contain DOIs but they aren’t linked. This seems like a waste considering that publishers have invested a lot in Crossref and DOIs as unique identifiers and persistent links.

This issue will be of interest to anyone who publishers journal articles that are the result of NIH funding and fall under the NIH Public Access Policy.

Welcome to CrossTech

Ed Pentz — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to CrossTech, a new access-controlled blog to discuss developments in the online scholarly publishing world. Crossref’s mission is to foster dialogue and information sharing among publishers to enable innovation and collaboration. In order to do things collaboratively, publishers need to share information and communicate in an appropriate manner that takes into account anti-trust and competitive issues. The online publishing world changes quickly and many developments are driven by organisations outside of scholarly publishing so CrossTech provides publishers a “protected” space to discuss issues.

Nature Publishing Group’s Xanadu blog is the model for CrossTech. Our hope is that CrossTech will build on the idea of Xanadu.

CrossTech Objectives: To provide a neutral forum where participants can post and discuss technical issues, link to relevant items on the Internet, make others aware of important developments and share and learn from each others’ experiences. CrossTech will promote collaboration and innovation among publishers in an appropriate manner taking account of anti-trust and competitive issues.

The main goals of CrossTech are:

To provide a common forum for discussing new publishing technologies
To develop a publisher technology community
To determine common directions for key publishing technologies
To foster best practices - and decide the best route to codify or standardize those practices
To share experiences
To act as an alerting mechanism for publishers to learn of relevant, new technology developments

Please let us know if you would like to participate. A username and password will be needed to read, post and comment. To obtain a username and password to post and comment, please email Anna Tolwinska annat@crossref.org.

We look forward to having you participate!