Blog

Isaac Farley, technical support manager, and Jon Stark, software developer, provide a glimpse into the history and current state of our popular monthly resolution reports. They invite you, our members, to help us understand how you use these reports. This will help us determine the best next steps for further improvement of these reports, and particularly what we do and don’t filter out of them.

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.

I’m happy to announce that Lucy Ofiesh has joined Crossref as our new Director of Finance and Operations. Lucy has experience supporting the sustainability and governance of not-for-profit organizations having held roles such as Executive Vice President of the Brooklyn Children’s Museum and for the last few years as Chief Operating Officer at Center for Open Science, a Crossref member.

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.

Crossref strives for balance. Different people have always wanted different things from us and, since our founding, we have brought together diverse organizations 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 organizations defined a clear purpose in our original certificate of incorporation, which reads:

Bibliographic references in scientific papers are the end result of a process typically composed of: finding the right document to cite, obtaining its metadata, and formatting the metadata using a specific citation style. This end result, however, does not preserve the information about the citation style used to generate it. Can the citation style be somehow guessed from the reference string only?

TL;DR

• I built an automatic citation style classifier. It classifies a given bibliographic reference string into one of 17 citation styles or “unknown”.
• The classifier is based on supervised machine learning. It uses TF-IDF feature representation and a simple Logistic Regression model.
• For training and testing, I used datasets generated automatically from Crossref metadata.
• The accuracy of the classifier estimated on the test set is 94.7%.
• The classifier is open source and can be used as a Python library or REST API.

Introduction

Threadgill-Sowder, J. (1983). Question Placement in Mathematical Word Problems. School Science and Mathematics, 83(2), 107-111

This reference is the end result of a process that typically includes: finding the right document, obtaining its metadata, and formatting the metadata using a specific citation style. Sadly, the intermediate reference forms or the details of this process are not preserved in the end result. In general, just by looking at the reference string we cannot be sure which document it originates from, what its metadata is, or which citation style was used.

TL;DR

On Wednesday, October 2nd, 2019 we discovered that we had accidentally pushed the main Crossref system as part of a docker image into a developer’s account on Docker Hub. The binaries and configuration files that made up the docker image included embedded passwords and API tokens that could have been used to compromise our systems and infrastructure. When we discovered this, we immediately secured the repo, changed all the passwords and secrets, and redeployed the system code. We have since been scanning all of our logs and systems to see if there has been any unusual activity that could be related to the exposure of the container.

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.

2019 has been busy for the Community Outreach Team; our small sub-team travels far and wide, talking to members around the world to learn how we can better support the work they do. We run one-day LIVE local events alongside multi-language webinars, with the addition of a new Community Forum, to better support and communicate with our global membership.

This year we held a publisher workshop in London in collaboration with the British Library in February to talk about all things metadata and Open Access, before heading over to speak to members in Kyiv in March at the National Technical University of Ukraine. June saw our first ever non-English LIVE local event in Bogota held in collaboration with Biteca, and in an action-packed week in July, Rachael Lammey and myself jetted across to Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok where we collaborated with Malaysian Ministry of Education, USIM, Chulalongkorn University, iGroup, and ORCID to run two events for our South-East Asian members.

2019 Board Election

The annual board election is a very important event for Crossref and its members. The board of directors, comprising 16 member organizations, 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.