Blog

UPDATE, 24 August 2021: All pools have been migrated to the new Elasticsearch-backed API, which already appears to be more stable and performant than the outgoing Solr API. Please report any issues via our Crossref issue repository in Gitlab. UPDATE, 9 August 2021: The cutovers for the polite and Plus pools are delayed again. We’re still working to ensure acceptable performance and stability before serving responses from the new application and infrastructure.

22 June 2021, London, UK and Boston, MA, USA — The future of global open access publishing received a boost today with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and Crossref. The MOU formalizes an already strong partnership between the two organisations and furthers their shared pursuit of an open scholarly communications ecosystem that is inclusive of emerging publishing communities. Both organisations aim to encourage the dissemination and use of scholarly research using open infrastructure, online technologies, regional and international networks, and community partners - all supporting local institutional capacity and sustainability around the world.

UPDATE August 2, 2021: This work was awarded to Laura Paglione of the Spherical Cow Group. To date, we have collected around 740 million events from 12 different source since we launched our Event Data service service in 2017. Each event is an online mention of the research associated with a DOI, either via the DOI directly or using the associated URL. However, we know that there is much more out there.

We are delighted to announce the formation of a new Advisory Group to support us in improving preprint metadata. Preprints have grown in popularity over the last few years, with increasing focus brought by the need to rapidly disseminate knowledge in the midst of a global pandemic. We have supported metadata deposits for preprints under the record type ‘posted content’ since 2016, and members currently register a total of around 17,000 new preprints metadata records each month.

It is time to put the ‘R’ back into R&D. The Crossref R&D team was originally created to focus on the kinds of research projects that have allowed Crossref to make transformational technology changes, launch innovative new services, and engage with entirely new constituencies. Some Illustrious projects that had their origins in the R&D group include: DOI Content Negotiation Similarity Check (originally CrossCheck) ORCID (originally Author DOIs) Crossmark The Open Funder Registry The Crossref REST API Linked Clinical Trials Event Data Grant registration ROR And for each project that has graduated, there have been several that have not.

This announcement has been in the works for some time, but everything seems to take longer when there is a pandemic going on, including finding time and headspace to plan out our strategy for the next few years. Over the last year or so we have had our heads down addressing how to scale our 20-yr-old system and operation – and adapting to new ways of working. But we’ve also spent time talking to people, forging alliances, looking ahead, and making plans.

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 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:

Service Providers work on behalf of our members by creating, registering, querying and/or displaying metadata. We rely on this group to support our schema as it evolves, to roll out new and updated services to members and to work closely with us on a variety of matters of mutual interest. Many of our Service Providers have been with us since the early days of Crossref. Others have joined as scholarly communications has grown and services have evolved.

UPDATE, 20 December 2021 We are delaying the Metadata Manager sunset until 6 months after release of our new content registration tool. You can expect to see the new tool in production in the first half of 2022. For more information, see this post in the Community Forum. 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.

Crossref aims to link research together, making related items more findable, increasing transparency, and showing how ideas spread and develop. There are a number of moving parts in this effort: some related to capturing and storing linking information, others to making it available. By including relationship metadata in Event Data, we are taking a big step to improve the visibility of a large number of links between metadata. We know this is long-promised and we’re pleased that making this valuable metadata available supports a number of important initiatives.