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Crossref is undertaking a large program, dubbed 'RCFS' (Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability) that will initially tackle five specific issues with our fees. We haven’t increased any of our fees in nearly two decades, and while we’re still okay financially and do not have a revenue growth goal, we do have inclusion and simplification goals. This report from Research Consulting helped to narrow down the five priority projects for 2024-2025 around these three core goals:

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.

This past year has been a captivating journey of immersion within the Crossref community, a mix of online interactions and meaningful in-person experiences. From the engaging Sustainability Research and Innovation Conference in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, to the impactful webinars conducted globally, this has been more than just a professional endeavour; it has been a personal exploration of collaboration, insights, and a shared commitment to pushing the boundaries of scholarly communication.

One of the challenges that we face in Labs and Research at Crossref is that, as we prototype various tools, we need the community to be able to test them. Often, this involves asking for deposit to a different endpoint or changing the way that a platform works to incorporate a prototype.

The problem is that our community is hugely varied in its technical capacity and level of ability when it comes to modifying their platform. Some mega-publishers, for instance, outsource their platforms and so are dependent on third party developers/organizations when they want to make a change. Many smaller publishers, by contrast, use systems such as OJS, which come with Crossref plugins that make life very easy… but that require hard code changes to accommodate prototypes. Such changes are way beyond the technical capacity of most journal editors.

When each line of code is written it is surrounded by a sea of context: who in the community this is for, what problem we’re trying to solve, what technical assumptions we’re making, what we already tried but didn’t work, how much coffee we’ve had today. All of these have an effect on the software we write.

By the time the next person looks at that code, some of that context will have evaporated. There may be helpful code comments, tests, and specifications to explain how it should behave. But they don’t explain the path not taken, and why we didn’t take it. Or those occasions where the facts changed, so we changed our mind.

When each line of code is written it is surrounded by a sea of context: who in the community this is for, what problem we’re trying to solve, what technical assumptions we’re making, what we already tried but didn’t work, how much coffee we’ve had today. All of these have an effect on the software we write.

By the time the next person looks at that code, some of that context will have evaporated. There may be helpful code comments, tests, and specifications to explain how it should behave. But they don’t explain the path not taken, and why we didn’t take it. Or those occasions where the facts changed, so we changed our mind.

To this end, I wrote a basic application, credcheck, that will allow you to test a Crossref credential against an API.

To this end, I wrote a basic application, credcheck, that will allow you to test a Crossref credential against an API.

Subject classifications have been available via the REST API for many years but have not been complete or reliable from the start and will soon be deprecated. dfdfd

The subject metadata element was born out of a Labs experiment intended to enrich the metadata returned via Crossref Metadata Search with All Subject Journal Classification codes from Scopus. This feature was developed when the REST API was still fairly new, and we now recognize that the initial implementation worked its way into the service prematurely.

Crossref and DOAJ share the aim to encourage the dissemination and use of scholarly research using online technologies and to work with and through regional and international networks, partners, and user communities for the achievement of their aims to build local institutional capacity and sustainability. Both organisations agreed to work together in 2021 in a variety of ways, but primarily to ‘encourage the dissemination and use of scholarly research using online technologies, and regional and international networks, partners and communities, helping to build local institutional capacity and sustainability around the world.’ Some of the fruits of this labour are: