Product on Crossref

A progress update and a renewed commitment to community

Ginny Hendricks — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

It’s important to acknowledge that Crossref has evolved significantly from just five years ago - our member count has more than doubled from 10,000 to 21,000 organisations since 2019 and they include all kinds of organisations such as funders, universities, government bodies, NGOs, and of course scholar- and library-led publishers. The smaller organisations now collectively contribute the majority of Crossref funding. We’ve gone from 100 million records to 160 million in five years, and our metadata is retrieved more than 2 billion times monthly, quadrupling what it was five years ago.

It’s within this context that we’ve spent quite a lot of time thinking about scalability, how we collect and process feedback and contributions from many organisations, how to automate our operations, and refining the plans for the next few years.

Our strategic agenda remains the same

A few times a year we update the strategy page where there is a quadrant of projects showing what’s completed, in progress, up next, and in planning/ideas - for each strategic theme. We also link from there to our live public roadmap which shows more specifics about individual projects, including projected timelines, and is updated more frequently.

If you’ve been watching the strategy page, checking in on the public roadmap or this blog, or joining webinars and annual meetings, you’ll know that we’ve had some longstanding plans to—among other things—reduce technical debt, rebuild our metadata management system, move to the cloud, modernise our schema, support multiple languages, and partner with multiple data sources to build the Research Nexus.

You’ve heard us talk about these initiatives a lot, but you’ve not seen particularly swift action.

Moving the work forward more effectively

Earlier this year, it became clear that our almost three-year project to build a new relationships API had not worked out. The project, dubbed ‘manifold’, was to initially deliver data citations, and eventually replace our central metadata system, but what was prototyped didn’t scale, even with a subset of our metadata. We weren’t confident enough about the project’s timeline or costs to justifiably continue investing further time and resources.

Meanwhile, we’d barely scratched the surface of our aim to pay down technical and operational debt, and we’d also been neglecting to keep the live system up to date with the numerous metadata changes that have been queued up, waiting to be implemented.

We knew the manifold project was ambitious – our system has grown in complexity over the years. We were trying to rebuild the car while driving it (our system needed to continue to operate and be maintained by our team) while trying to design a new approach to manage the many relationships between 160+ million database records. In the years we worked on this project, we learned a lot that will inform future plans for a large system redesign.

In March this year, we decided to pause the manifold project. We apologised to our community partners for not delivering the promised data<->literature matches they hoped to use. They were frustrated but thankfully understanding.

We then resolved to focus on backend infrastructural changes, conduct cross-training so that all of our staff would become familiar with current in-use systems instead of greenfield tech (for now), and start to make a dent in the backlog of bugs and long-promised schema updates in our mainstream services.

We’re happy to report some movement on these things and some milestones that have been achieved in these areas in recent months.

Fostering a happy and dedicated team

Any kind of work can only happen when our staff are in a good place, feeling supported and comfortable to question things, and well-equipped with information, purpose, and clear priorities. In June, when the whole staff met up in person, we had some really good conversations about culture, communication, and about sharing responsibilities. Some people ran birds-of-a-feather sessions to explore the issues that had been keeping them up at night, such as authentication/security, and rebuilding the Crossref System (CS), and the team also co-created a set of prioritisation drivers that are now in use within our roadmap and planning processes.

Taking on feedback from the all-staff meeting and then the July board meeting, we thought strategically about the organisational structure Crossref would need over the next few years to reflect the growth in scope and size, and fulfil its longer term goals. We have long had an ambitious agenda but realised we didn’t yet have the capacity to do it all. So we came to the conclusion that we needed an updated team and management structure to take us through the next phase of our development.

The structural changes were concluded at the end of November. They included:

Moving Technology under Operations, since Technology—though a vital enabler—still works in service to our mission and in support of our community, just like other operational things like board governance and finance.
Reframing product development as Programs and Services, and reducing our workstreams from five product portfolios to three programs. We formed cross-team steering groups around clearly articulated program areas (more on those below).
Broadening the leadership to include an Executive team and an extended Director team, and forming a Senior Management Team (SMT). These changes ensure that the collective responsibility for Crossref now rests on a wider group of experts who can back each other up and share the risk and the knowledge, rather than on just a few individuals.
We started recruiting for directors for two new leadership positions. We’ll welcome a new Director of Programs and Services and a new Director of Technology in the new year.
Evolving the strategic initiatives team into a data science team, integrating research & development functions throughout all teams and with the SMT taking collective responsibility for strategic initiatives.

Unfortunately, with the shift in approach for product development and by sharing responsibility for strategic initiatives and research among the wider team, we made the difficult decision that four positions would no longer work within the new structure.

A new approach: joined-up initiatives and cross-functional programs

Research has always been an important role for Crossref, but as this function had been annexed from our regular work, it became hard to coordinate strategic initiatives across the wider organisation. In recent years we inadvertently created more technical debt for ourselves, i.e., built multiple prototype tools without plans for adoption or moving them into production. Strategic initiatives, by their nature, need thorough research and high-level alignment, so we made such initiatives—things like Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability (RCFS) and improving the Integrity of the Scholarly record (ISR)—the responsibility of the whole senior management team.

Some useful research had been conducted, but we were never in a position to act on any of it. Particularly promising work has been in the field of metadata matching, and with the growth in the community reliance on our metadata, and attention on data quality rightly increasing, we decided to create a new data science team to be dedicated to this work, led by Dominika Tkaczyk.

We had also struggled with a traditional product management approach since all our tools and activities are interconnected, and we found we were trying to do too many things at once but not all of them very effectively. We also acknowledged that product management comes from the commercial e.g. retail world and therefore is designed to help companies sell/upsell, which is not our goal. So we looked to other approaches more suitable to mission-based nonprofits.

Introducing three programs

We have introduced cross-functional program management in order to work towards the following:

better cross-team alignment
shared responsibility
improve communication and learning
make more progress on the things members need.

Supporting the strategic theme of co-creation, a new program, facilitated by Program Lead Lena Stoll, now manages and oversees all activities around co-creation and community trends. A cross-team steering group just began meeting regularly and will be responsible for interfaces such as reports/dashboards, record registration interfaces, connections and collaborations such as Open Funder Registry, ROR, ORCID auto-update, as well as OJS and other partner integrations. This program also includes the Crossref website and any front-end things to support other programs. And it includes ISR (the integrity of the scholarly record) and our tools in this area such as Crossmark and retraction/correction tooling, and Similarity Check for text comparisons.

Supporting the strategic theme of complete and global metadata and relationships, a new program, facilitated by Program Lead Martyn Rittman, now manages and oversees all activities relating to contributing to the Research Nexus. Working particularly closely with the metadata team, led by Patricia Feeney, this program addresses how metadata is modelled, used, enriched, and extended. Work includes our APIs, incorporating external data sources like Retraction Watch and Event Data, building out metadata matching services with the new data science team, supporting the community of metadata users with API sprints and more modern options for retrieving metadata based on usage and need.

Supporting the strategic theme of open and sustainable operations and keeping to the POSI framework, a new program, facilitated by Program Lead Sara Bowman, now manages and oversees all activities relating to making our operations more open, transparent, and sustainable. This program focuses on supporting and strengthening the core functions our members rely on and enabling future growth. It includes metadata deposit and processing, most apps for e.g. managing titles, authentication, and architectural and infrastructural projects like moving from the data centre to the AWS cloud service. This program also includes modernising our operations in general, which is not just technology but also finance and human resources, so projects like membership process automation, fee modelling and financial analyses, and business system integrations.

The Programs will start to be reflected across our website and in our communications from next year.

What are Crossref’s new prioritisation drivers?

These are the drivers that our ~40 staff co-created in June that are guiding decisions about the priorities on our roadmap. New ideas will be evaluated in the following areas:

Encourage participation from new or under-represented communities
Respond to and lead trends in scholarly communications
Benefit the greatest number of members and users
Reflect on how the community works with each other and allow members to self-serve
Expand to support and connect relevant resource types and metadata fields
Make it easier to create and update metadata
Enhance metadata for completeness and accuracy
Make it easier to retrieve and use metadata
Automate repetitive/manual tasks
Address technical and operational debt
Maintain critical systems and operations and ensure their security
Control or reduce costs - to Crossref, our community, or the environment

We’re happy to report that the changes made this year have resulted in a productive last few months of the year. As reported in our annual meeting, here is the progress update.

What’s paused

A relationships API endpoint and, therefore, a specific data citation feed
Manifold, the three-year effort to modernise our tech stack
Most of the strategic initiatives prototypes that can’t yet be scaled, such as Labs API and Labs reports

What’s recently completed

We succeeded in moving the entire Crossref corpus to an open-source database, PostgreSQL
Fixed numerous REST API data quality issues and lots of troublesome bugs
Schema development - support for ROR as a Funder identifier is live and currently in testing
We automated some very manual membership and billing processes, saving hundreds of staff hours a year
Released a new form for journal article record registration, building on the grant registration form
Upgraded Participation Reports to include Affiliations and ROR IDs
Launched a new API Learning Hub

Since the rest of the community stops for no Crossref product roadmap issue, we also progressed a number of community and governance initiatives:

The Grant Linking System (GLS) reached 5 years with over 40 funders joining Crossref and registering over 130,000 grants and awards, including use of facilities and projects
Our research for Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability (RCFS) with the Membership & Fees Committee is going well, and we’ll have new fee proposals for review in 2025
The integrity of the Scholarly Record (ISR) conversations have deepened, and we’ve formed strong relationships with editorial experts and research integrity sleuths, who are getting up to speed on our metadata, and we’re working with some sleuthing consultants to change our processes to handle deceptive member behaviour such as paper mills, cloned journals, and citation manipulation. The new data science team plays a role here, along with membership and governance.

What’s currently in focus

In our efforts to do less but do it more effectively, we have two current priorities:

Get out of the physical data centre and into the cloud.
Develop Schema 5.4.

These two projects are underway, involving lots of communication and learning. Since we haven’t released any schema updates in many years, all our staff are learning for the first time how a metadata schema model is interpreted in a systemic way, learning about the structure of research objects, and honing the process as they go. We’ve high hopes we’ll be in a position to release continuous metadata schema versions and catch up on the backlog over the coming years.

What’s next

Continuous metadata development, with contributor roles up next
Retraction Watch data integrated into the REST API so users have a single source of retraction/correction data
Upgraded preprint matching and notifications
Modelling more equitable fees through the RCFS projects
Piloting a non-voting membership category

Once we’re fully in the cloud and in the groove of metadata updates, and with the support of newly-hired technology and program directors joining in the new year, we’ll turn our attention to rebuilding the central metadata system that we call the Crossref System, or “CS” and report more on this next year.

So that was our summary of 2024 and an indication of what’s coming in 2025 and beyond; sorry it’s so long, and thanks for reading this far! Next year we’ll get back to more regular updates as the strategic agenda and the programs progress.

ISR part three: Where does Crossref have the most impact on helping the community to assess the trustworthiness of the scholarly record?

Rachael Lammey — Mon, 17 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Ans: metadata and services are all underpinned by POSI.

Leading into a blog post with a question always makes my brain jump ahead to answer that question with the simplest answer possible. I was a nightmare English Literature student. ‘Was Macbeth purely a villain?’ ‘No’. *leaves exam*

Just like not giving one-word answers to exam questions, playing our role in the integrity of the scholarly record and helping our members enhance theirs takes thought, explanation, transparency, and work.

Some of the elements Amanda outlines in the previous posts in this series (Part 1, Part 2) really resonated from a product perspective:

We must be cautious that our best practices for demonstrating legitimacy and identifying deceptive behaviour do not raise already-high barriers for emerging publications or organisations that present themselves in ways that some may not recognize as professional standards. Disruption is different from deception. Crossref has an opportunity to think about how to identify deceptive actions and pair that with our efforts to bring more people on board and support their full participation in our ecosystem.

We don’t have the means or desire to be the arbiter of research quality (whatever that means). However, we operate neutrally, at the center of scholarly communications, and we can help develop a shared consensus or framework. Our metadata elements and tools can be positioned to signal or detect trustworthiness. An important distinction is that we can play a role in assessing legitimacy (activities of the actors) but not in quality (calibre of the content itself).

Crossref has lots of plans (and lots to do) to improve our role in ISR

Rather than a long list of things we want to do in terms of tools, services, and functionality, it feels more manageable to break this work into three key areas.

1. Collecting better information in better ways

We think many elements of the metadata our members record with us help expose important information about the research, e.g., authors, publication dates, and abstracts. We also help our members assess submissions for originality via our Similarity Check service, and the ongoing migration to iThenticate V2 aims to better support this aspect of the publication process.

Beyond this, as Amanda points out, ‘once members start registering their content, their metadata speaks about their practices’. Seeing who published a work along with the metadata they provide; validated ORCID IDs to identify the authors, reference lists and links to related research and data, and important updates to the work via Crossmark, all contribute to showing not just the ‘what’ but the ‘how’ so that the community can use that information to support their decision-making.

I always want to stress that this work is not just an ‘ask’ for our members. We are moving in the same direction as we improve the things we do to support organisations in registering their records with us, answering their questions, working with partner organisations like PKP, consulting with our community on pain points, and thinking about how we can better enhance and facilitate their work. We’ve been fortunate that our community has taken the time to engage in discussions with Turnitin on iThenticate improvements, do user testing sessions as we build simple user interfaces to record grants, lead calls and conversations on improving grant metadata and supporting the uptake of ROR and data citation, and provide thoughtful feedback on our recent preprint on CRE metadata. This all helps us to explain, structure, and prioritize our product work.

There are also some closely related R&D-led projects that are already informing our thinking:

A more responsive version of participation reports so that it’s easier for members to identify gaps in their metadata and compare against others.
Making it easier to get metadata back in a format where members can easily redeposit it.
Better matching to help us and our members augment the metadata they send us to add value to the work we all do.

We said in the previous blog posts that we’ll pose questions about what kinds of metadata give what kind of levels of trustworthiness, and have previously highlighted the following activities:

Reporting corrections and retractions through Crossmark metadata. We know that our members are collecting this information, but often it isn’t making it through metadata workflows to us. We’re part of the NISO CREC (Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern) working group with many of our members and metadata users, as this feels like something critical to address.
Assessing originality using Similarity Check. On average, we’re seeing 320 new Similarity Check subscribers each year, with over 10 million checks being done each year by our members.
Establishing provenance and stakeholders through ORCID and ROR. At the time of writing, we have over 30,000 ROR IDs in Crossref, and this is growing steadily across different record types. ROR is keen to support adoption and so are we.
Acknowledging funding and other support through the use of the Open Funder Registry and registering grants metadata. This has improved in quality and completeness since we launched the Funder Registry in 2014 and with more comprehensive support for grants in more recent years. But we still have work to do, as this paper by Kramer and de Jonge points out: The availability and completeness of open funder metadata.
Citing data for transparency and reproducibility, including linking to related research data. Scholix, MDC and STM Research Data groups.
Demonstrating open peer review by registering peer review reports. Members have already recorded over 300,000 peer reviews with Crossref, opening up this information on their processes.

In your organisation, what weight do you give these? We know that some of our members register some of these things in more volume than others - is that due to their perceived value, technical limitations, or ‘we’re working on it, give us time?’ Do you think of them in the context of the integrity of the record or are we off the mark? Are there other things we haven’t mentioned in this blog that we could capture, report on and highlight?

2. Disseminating this information and supporting its downstream use

We want to make it as easy as possible for everyone to access and use the metadata our members register with us. Especially as some of the biggest metadata users are our members and, more selfishly, us! But there’s no point collecting metadata to support ISR if it’s unwieldy and difficult to access and use.

We’re working on a project, described in the mid-year community update by a number of my colleagues to break down internal metadata silos and model it in a more flexible way. This will lend itself to better information collection and exchange, and support of the Research Nexus by building a relationships API to let anyone see all of the relationships Crossref can see between a given work and well, anything else related to it (citations, links to preprints, links to data to name but a few).

Part of that work will involve supplementing the metadata our members register with high-quality, curated data from selected sources, making it clear where those assertions have come from.

We want our API to perform consistently and well, to contain all the metadata our members register, handle it appropriately, and be able to keep the information in it up-to-date.

Our API will underpin the reports we provide our members (among other things) so that we can provide simple interfaces for organisations to check how they’re doing along with more functional requests. Do their DOIs resolve? Are they submitting metadata updates when they publish a correction? How much will they be billed in a given quarter? We have a lot of internal reporting and need to build more, and if we want to use these, chances are many others do too, so we should open those up.

3. Trying to live up to POSI to underpin this work

When I see a new project, initiative, tool or service in the research ecosystem the first thing I want to do is find out about the organisation itself so that I can base some decisions on that. Lateral reading in action.

At Crossref, we want to show who we are beyond just our tools, services, and products and be transparent about our values. That’s why we have adopted the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure or POSI for short. Now we need to meet these principles and we’re working towards that. POSI proposes three areas that an Open Infrastructure organisation like Crossref can address to garner the trust of the broader scholarly community: accountability (governance), funding (sustainability), and protection of community interests (insurance). POSI also proposes a set of concrete commitments that an organisation can make to build community trust in each area.

So POSI isn’t just opening code and metadata, it’s telling our community how we handle membership, governance, product development, technical and financial stability and security, holding our hands up when we’ve got something wrong, and actively looking to improve upon the things we do.

Are you still reading? If so, you’ve done better than many of my examiners, I’m sure. So stay with us as we work together to ensure we bring quality, transparency, and integrity to the work we all do.

The next part in this series will report back on the feedback and discussions and potentially propose some new or adjusted priorities. Join us at the Frankfurt bookfair this week (hall 4.2, booth M5) or comment on this post below.

Announcing our new Director of Product: Rachael Lammey

Ed Pentz — Thu, 12 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Unfortunately, Bryan Vickery has moved onto pastures new. I would like to thank him for his many contributions at Crossref and we all wish him well.

I’m now pleased to announce that Rachael Lammey will be Crossref’s new Director of Product starting on Monday, May 16th.

Rachael’s skills and experience are perfectly suited for this role. She has been at Crossref since 2012 and has deep knowledge and experience of all things Crossref: our mission; our members; our culture; and our services.

In all her roles at Crossref Rachael has demonstrated how community-focused product development can be done.

Starting as a Product Manager for Similarity Check and Crossmark, she then led community discussions on text and data mining and taxonomies, introduced our support of preprints, and led the very successful ORCID Auto-update integration. She initiated our important partnership with the Public Knowledge Project including scoping and overseeing the joint plugin development work over the years. She helped to grow the Sponsors program, establish the LIVE informational events, oversaw the founding of our ambassador program, engaged more research funders and institutions, and became a go-to person for data citation expertise in our community.

In her brief time in our Research & Development team, she helped to kick off that group’s reinvigoration and has engaged with numerous new community and technical initiatives. Such relationships—together with her knowledge of our systems and API—have enabled her to be a key driver in the development and adoption of ROR and grants - two of the highest strategic priorities of recent years.

Rachael says:

“Alignment in planning and focusing on delivering outcomes will be my initial priorities. I’m conscious that we have a lot in play and I want to support the product team in their existing and ambitious goals while working with the leadership team and our very diverse community to focus and prioritise our development roadmap. I’m really grateful for this opportunity and I am looking forward to working with our members, users, and other open infrastructure organisations in this new capacity”.

Our staff and the board are very enthusiastic about Rachael’s appointment and we know our community will be too. Please join us in congratulating Rachael!

Next steps for Content Registration

Sara Bowman — Mon, 17 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

UPDATE, December 2025: The legacy Metadata Manager interace will be switched off on 1 January 2026. We have been in touch with affected members throughout the year with guidance and resources on making the switch to our newest helper tool or alternative content registration methods.

---

Hi, I’m Sara, one of the Product Managers here at Crossref. I joined the team in April 2020, primarily tasked with looking after Content Registration mechanisms. Prior to Crossref, I worked on open source software to support scientific research. I’ve learned a lot in the last year about how our community works with us, and I’m looking forward to working more closely with you in the coming year to improve Content Registration tools.

Just over a year ago, we updated you on the status of Metadata Manager. TL;DR: We learned that our approach with the tool wasn’t flexible enough to easily and quickly add other record types or update the input schema, and paused new development. We’re back with another update on Metadata Manager and our strategy for Content Registration user interfaces (UIs) going forward.

Our helper tools for Content Registration

The bulk of content registered with us is done so programmatically; that is, our members’ (or their service providers’) machines talking to our machines using our APIs. But, there are plenty of our members that don’t have the technical expertise to work with us this way. For those members, we provide various helper tools to assist with manual content registration.

We offer a variety of interfaces for registering many different types of content, including Web Deposit form for most record types, Metadata Manager for journal content, and Simple Text Query to register references. Each of these has its own use cases and limitations, leading to a confusing and inconsistent experience for members who are manually depositing metadata. From our perspective, maintaining this many interfaces in different codebases is inefficient, in part because an update to the schema likely leads to separate updates in each of them. A unified user interface to register content would both improve and simplify the user experience for you, our community, and make updates quicker and more efficient. The original goal of Metadata Manager was to be this unified interface. But we’ve learned that the approach we took was flawed: there have been problems reported by users, and the tool itself isn’t flexible enough to easily and quickly add new record types or support new fields when our input schema changes.

A new approach to helper tools

So we’ve decided to build something new and retire the old. We’ll be focusing on creating a brand new Content Registration user interface that will eventually replace Metadata Manager, the Web Deposit form, and Simple Text Query. And what we’ve learned from our experiences with Metadata Manager and Web Deposit has greatly influenced our strategy going forward. The new tool will:

Have a Community focus

Design for small - Our membership demographic is evolving. A large (and growing) number of our members are very small, often with a single publication and no technical resources. Creating XML can be a barrier to participating in Crossref, and our helper tools are designed to lower that barrier.
Accessibility and localization support - All of our UIs should support major international accessibility guidelines and translation into local languages, to meet the needs of our global membership.
Open source code - Build in the open, so that others can contribute. This could mean an entire UI that we haven’t prioritized, or adding a new translation file, or tweaking some CSS.

Follow user-centered design processes

Unified user interface - Improve user experience and simplify tools and services by providing members with one place to go to register content via a UI.
Rapid iteration - Focus on a technical solution that allows for rapid development of UIs to support new record types and updates to our schema.
Building the right features for the right users - The needs of our large members and smaller members are different. Experience has shown us that the core audience for a helper tool is smaller members; we’ll tailor the features to solve the challenges of our smaller members.

Allow us to build content for the future

Tactical approach to record types - Quickly build UIs in a strategic order. We can’t build support for every record type at once, so we want to identify and build in the areas of highest impact/lowest effort first.
Deliberate approach to supported fields - Not all members will supply metadata for all fields in our schema. Building a UI to support all fields for a specific record type before moving on to another slows progress on that next record type. We’ll identify the most-used and most-useful fields to support first, and add more in a future iteration if needed.

Deprecating Metadata Manager

In order to free up the resources to develop the new Content Registration UIs, we need to stop doing other things - that means not adding to, supporting, or bug-fixing other Content Registration tools. We’re setting an aggressive goal of sunsetting Metadata Manager by the end of 2021, with a commitment to a smooth transition to our new tool. This means that new members should not start using Metadata Manager. New members who need a helper tool have a few choices:

those who use the OJS platform from PKP to host their journals (OJS V3 and above) should use the third party Crossref OJS plugin to register their content.
other new members should use the Web Deposit form
current members who are using Metadata Manager may continue to do so, but are advised that we won’t be doing bug fixes or further development on the tool, and that support will be scaled back. If possible, you should transition over to using the Web Deposit form.

This wasn’t a decision made lightly, but one made after considering multiple options and all the data available to us about member usage and internal resources.

To highlight some of the data that led to this decision: the Support team tracks the types of support tickets they handle. In 2020, the 3rd most common ticket type was Metadata Manager-related. But less than 4% of metadata records registered with us are registered using Metadata Manager. Supporting Metadata Manager requires resources disproportionate to the amount of use the tool gets. For comparison, twice as many records are registered using the Web Deposit Form, but it generates far fewer Support tickets. To fix the bugs and issues reported about Metadata Manager requires an equally disproportionate amount of developer resources. So far, we have been unable to free up resources we would need to fix them all. Continuing to maintain this tool is effectively preventing us from building something new that will better meet the needs of our smaller members.

We know this will surprise and concern some of you, especially heavy users of Metadata Manager. We’re committed to making this a smooth transition, and over the coming months, we’ll provide more guidance to help current members migrate to our other tools.

Involving the community

Building a tool that allows us to create and adapt content registration forms based on example input files is an exciting new approach - one that will allow us to better serve the needs of our smaller members across multiple record types and support those who want to adapt our tools to their own needs. We’ve already begun work on a proof-of-concept tool aligned with this new strategy and I’m excited to drive it to production. As this project develops, we’ll keep in close contact with members, conducting user interviews, feedback sessions, and using usage data to help guide our decision-making on features and design. As we’ll be building in the open, we’ll have prototypes to share along the way as we iterate to produce a tool that will stand the test of time as well as scale to support even more content and members in future. We welcome your feedback over on our Community Forum, where we’ve set up a dedicated category to discuss this topic.

Introducing our new Director of Product

Ed Pentz — Mon, 19 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’m happy to announce that Bryan Vickery has joined Crossref today as our new Director of Product. Bryan has extensive experience developing products and services at publishers such as Taylor & Francis, where he led the creation of the open-access platform Cogent OA. Most recently he was Managing Director of Research Services at T&F, including Wizdom.ai after it was acquired.

He previously held a range of roles from Publisher to Chief Operations Officer at BioMedCentral, as well as online community and technology leadership roles at Elsevier.

Bryan is a great addition to Crossref and we are lucky to have him. The product team is keen to progress the long list of wishes from our community with his guidance. Bryan will bring focus and clarity to our roadmap and our development processes, making it easier for people to adopt and participate in our services, and ensuring that we are working on the issues that are most important to our members.

He will also be a vital part of the leadership team, working with me and the other directors Geoffrey, Ginny, and Lisa to help us take the organisation forward in a transparent way that serves our mission and empowers our excellent staff.

And now a few words from Bryan…

I’m thrilled to be joining Crossref as Director of Product at a time of considerable change in scholarly communication. I’ve worked in, and around, scholarly publishing for more than 20 years.

This is a challenging role. We have many exciting services and collaborations to progress, and also technical debt to address (like everyone else) to upgrade our existing services - it’s essential we balance these. My priority is to stay on top of the issues of the highest value to the scholarly community, now and in the future, and ensure we deliver services that are both useful and usable.

I will be attending Crossref LIVE19 “The strategy one” along with other staff and look forward to meeting many of our members then. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts on where we’ve been (what it’s like working with us and using our services) and where we’re going (what you’d like to see from us). You can reach me via our feedback email.

Please join us in welcoming Bryan to the Crossref community.