Blog

Publishers, are you ready to ROR?

If you manage a publishing system or workflow, you know how crucial—and how challenging!—it is to have clean, consistent, and comprehensive affiliation metadata. Author affiliations, and the ability to link them to publications and other scholarly outputs, are vital for numerous stakeholders across the research landscape. Institutions need to monitor and measure their research output by the articles their researchers have published. Funders need to be able to discover and track the research and researchers they have supported.

Evolving our support for text-and-data mining

Bryan Vickery

Bryan Vickery – 2020 August 21

In Text and Data Mining

Many researchers want to carry out analysis and extraction of information from large sets of data, such as journal articles and other scholarly content. Methods such as screen-scraping are error-prone, place too much strain on content sites and may be unrepeatable or break if site layouts change. Providing researchers with automated access to the full-text content via DOIs and Crossref metadata reduces these problems, allowing for easy deduplication and reproducibility. Supporting text and data mining echoes our mission to make research outputs easy to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse.

Similarity Check news: introducing the next generation iThenticate.

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.

Meet the new Crossref Executive Director

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 At the recent Crossref board meeting, I rescinded my resignation and the board happily accepted this.

New faces at Crossref

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!

Community Outreach in 2020

2020 hasn’t been quite what any of us had imagined. The pandemic has meant big adjustments in terms of working; challenges for parents balancing childcare and professional lives; anxieties and tensions we never had before; the strain of potentially being away from co-workers, friends, and family for a prolonged period of time. Many have suffered job losses and around the world, many have sadly lost their lives to the virus.

Calling all prospective board members

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. 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 staff leadership team, with the key responsibilities being:

Come for a swim in our new pool of Education materials

After 20 years in operation, and as our system matures from experimental to foundational infrastructure, it’s time to review our documentation. Having a solid core of education materials about the why and the how of Crossref is essential in making participation possible, easy, and equitable. As our system has evolved, our membership has grown and diversified, and so have our tools - both for depositing metadata with Crossref, and for retrieving and making use of it.

Crossing the Rubicon - The case for making chapters visible

To help better support the discovery, sale and analysis of books, Jennifer Kemp from Crossref and Mike Taylor from Digital Science, present seven reasons why publishers should collect chapter-level metadata. Book publishers should have been in the best possible position to take advantage of the movement of scholarly publishing to the internet. After all, they have behind them an extraordinary legacy of creating and distributing data about books: the metadata that supports discovery, sales and analysis.

Memoirs of a DOI detective…it’s error-mentary dear members

Hello, I’m Paul Davis and I’ve been part of the Crossref support team since May 2017. In that time I’ve become more adept as a DOI detective, helping our members work out whodunnit when it comes to submission errors.

If you have ever received one of our error messages after you have submitted metadata to us, you may know that some are helpful and others are, well, difficult to decode. I’m here to help you to become your own DOI detective.