Chuck Koscher
Chuck has moved on from Crossref. Chuck Koscher joined Crossref in 2002. His primary responsibility had been the development and operation of Crossrefâs core services and technical infrastructure. As a senior staff member, he also contributed to the definition of Crossrefâs mission and the expansion of its services, such as the launch of the Open Funder Registry (formerly known as FundRef). His role included the management of technical support and back-end business operations. Chuck and his team interfaced directly with members in dealing with issues affected by new or evolving industry practices, such as those involving non-journal content like books, standards, and databases. Chuck had been active within the industry, having served 9 years on the NISO board of directors, and participated in initiatives such as the NISO/NFAIS Best Practice in Journal Publishing and NISOâs Supplemental Material Working Group. Prior to Crossref, Chuck had over 20 years of software engineering experience, primarily in the aerospace industry.
Weâre putting the final touches on the changes that will allow preprint publishers to register their metadata with Crossref and assign DOIs. These changes support Crossrefâs CitedBy linking between the preprint and other scholarly publications (journal articles, books, conference proceedings). Full preprint support will be released over the next few weeks.
If you ever see me in the checkout line at some store do not ever get in the line Iâm in. It is always the absolute slowest.
Crossrefâs metadata system has a sort of checkout line, when members send in their data they got processed essentially in a first come first served basis. Itâs called the deposit queue. We had controls to prevent anyone from monopolizing the queue and ways to jump forward in the queue but our primary goal was to give everyone a fair shot at getting processed as soon as possible.
A new version of our OpenURL resolver was deployed July 2 which should handle higher traffic (e.g. we have re-enable the LibX plug-in ) Unfortunately there were a few hick ups with the new version which I believe are now corrected (a character encoding bug and a XML structure translation problem).
Sorry for any inconvenience.
Over the past two weeks weâve focused on our OpenURL query interface with the goal being to improve its reliability. Iâd like to mention some things weâve done.
We now require an OpenURL account to use this interface (see the registration page) . This account is still free, there are no fixed usage limits, and the terms of use have been greatly simplified.
Resources have been re-arranged dedicating more horse-power to the OpenURL function.
On March 3rd the Open Archives Initiative held a roll out meeting of the first alpha release of the ORE specification (http://www.openarchives.org/ore/) . According to Herbert Van de Sompel a beta release is planned for late March / early April and a 1.0 release targeted for September. The presentations focused on the aggregation concepts behind ORE and described an ATOM based implementation. ORE is the second project from the OAI but unlike its sibling PMH it is not exclusively a repository technology.
From the beginning our OpenURL resolver has had a non standard feature of returning metadata in response to a request instead of redirecting to the referrent. This feature returned one of our older XML formats which is a bit limited as to the fields it contains.
Sometime after our resolver was deployed we introduced a more verbose XML format for DOI metadata called âUNIXREFâ. This was always available to regular queries against the Crossref system but was never introduced to the OpenURL resolver (for no particular reason).
