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https://doi.org/10.13003/c23rw1d9 Crossref acquires Retraction Watch data and opens it for the scientific community Agreement to combine and publicly distribute data about tens of thousands of retracted research papers, and grow the service together 12th September 2023 —– The Center for Scientific Integrity, the organisation behind the Retraction Watch blog and database, and Crossref, the global infrastructure underpinning research communications, both not-for-profits, announced today that the Retraction Watch database has been acquired by Crossref and made a public resource.

In August 2022, the United States Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memo (PDF) on ensuring free, immediate, and equitable access to federally funded research (a.k.a. the “Nelson memo”). Crossref is particularly interested in and relevant for the areas of this guidance that cover metadata and persistent identifiers—and the infrastructure and services that make them useful. Funding bodies worldwide are increasingly involved in research infrastructure for dissemination and discovery.

The integrity of the scholarly record is an essential aspect of research integrity. Every initiative and service that we have launched since our founding has been focused on documenting and clarifying the scholarly record in an open, machine-actionable and scalable form. All of this has been done to make it easier for the community to assess the trustworthiness of scholarly outputs. Now that the scholarly record itself has evolved beyond the published outputs at the end of the research process – to include both the elements of that process and its aftermath – preserving its integrity poses new challenges that we strive to meet… we are reaching out to the community to help inform these efforts.

As a distributed, global, and community-led organisation, sharing information and listening to our members both online and in person has always been integral to what we do. For many years Crossref has held both in-person and online meetings and events, which involved a fair amount of travel by our staff, board, and community. This changed drastically in March 2020, when we had to stop traveling and stop having in-person meetings and events.

Unfortunately, Bryan Vickery has moved onto pastures new. I would like to thank him for his many contributions at Crossref and we all wish him well. I’m now pleased to announce that Rachael Lammey will be Crossref’s new Director of Product starting on Monday, May 16th. Rachael’s skills and experience are perfectly suited for this role. She has been at Crossref since 2012 and has deep knowledge and experience of all things Crossref: our mission; our members; our culture; and our services.

In collaboration with California Digital Library and DataCite, Crossref guides the operations of the Research Organization Registry (ROR). ROR is community-driven and has an independent sustainability plan involving grants, donations, and in-kind support from our staff. ROR is a vital component of the Research Nexus, our vision of a fully connected open research ecosystem. It helps people identify, connect, and analyze the affiliations of those contributing to, producing, and publishing all kinds of research objects.

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.

Where does the time go…

In my blog post on January 14th about Crossref’s 20th anniversary I said, “The one constant in Crossref’s 20 years has been change”. It’s true that there has been constant change, but there has been another constant at Crossref –– me (and DOIs, to be fair). I started as Crossref’s first employee and Executive Director on February 1st, 2000, so I just marked my 20th anniversary with the organization.

It seems like only yesterday…

On January 19th, 2000 a new not-for-profit organization was registered in New York State. It was called Publishers International Linking Association, Inc but was more commonly referred to as “CrossRef”. This means that Crossref will be 20 years old on January 19th, 2020 so I wanted to mark the occasion with a short post. We are planning more ways to mark our 20th anniversary later this year so keep a lookout.

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.