Blog

Crossref strives for balance. Different people have always wanted different things from us and, since our founding, we have brought together diverse organizations to have discussions—sometimes contentious—to agree on how to help make scholarly communications better. Being inclusive can mean slow progress, but we’ve been able to advance by being flexible, fair, and forward-thinking. We have been helped by the fact that Crossref’s founding organizations defined a clear purpose in our original certificate of incorporation, which reads:

The official countdown to PIDapalooza 2020 begins here! It’s 163 days to go till our flame-lighting opening ceremony at the fabulous Belem Cultural Center in Lisbon, Portugal. Your friendly neighborhood PIDapalooza Planning Committee—Helena Cousijn (DataCite), Maria Gould (CDL), Stephanie Harley (ORCID), Alice Meadows (ORCID), and I—are already hard at work making sure it’s the best one so far!

With a smaller group than usual, we’re dedicating this year’s annual meeting to hear what you value about Crossref. Which initiatives would you put first and/or last? Where would you have us draw the line between mission and ambition? What is “core” for you? How could/should we adapt for the future in order to meet your needs? Striving for balance Different people want different things from us. As Aristotle said: “There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.

What has hundreds of heads, 91,000 affiliations, and roars like a lion? If you guessed the Research Organization Registry community, you’d be absolutely right! Last month was a big and busy one for the ROR project team: we released a working API and search interface for the registry, we held our first ROR community meeting, and we showcased the initial prototypes at PIDapalooza in Dublin. We’re energized by the positive reception and response we’ve received and we wanted to take a moment to share information with the community.

In its July 2018 meeting, the Crossref Board voted unanimously to approve and introduce a new set of membership terms. At the same meeting, the board also voted to change the description of membership eligibility in our Bylaws, officially broadening our remit beyond publishers, in line with current practice and positioning us for future growth.

Our LIVE Annual Meeting is back in North America for the first time since 2015, and with just 10 days to go, there’s a lot going on in preparation. As you’d expect with a How good is your metadata? theme—the two-days will be entirely devoted to the subject of metadata—because it touches everything we do, and everything that publishers, hosting platforms, funders, researchers, and librarians do. Oh, and it’s actually super awesome too—and occasionally fun.

Hi, I’m Isaac. I’m new here. What better way to get to know me than through a blog post? Well, maybe a cocktail party, but this will have to do. In addition to giving you some details about myself in this post, I’ll be introducing our status page, too.

You want to hear more from us. We hear you. We’ve spent the past year building Crossref Event Data, and hope to launch very soon. Building a new piece of infrastructure from scratch has been an exciting project, and we’ve taken the opportunity to incorporate as much feedback from the community as possible. We’d like to take a moment to share some of the suggestions we had, and how we’ve acted on them.

At the end of last year, Paul Peters—CEO of our member Hindawi—became the new Chair of the Crossref Board. The announcement was made in Singapore at our first LIVE Annual ever held in Asia. I caught up with Paul back in London, UK, where he answered a few questions about what he hopes to bring to the Board, and to the Crossref community as a whole.

Wellcome, in partnership with Crossref and several research funders including the NIH and the MRC, are looking to pilot an initiative in which new grants would be assigned an open, global and interoperable grant identifier. Robert Kiley (Open Research) and Nina Frentrop (Grants Operations) from the Wellcome explain the potential benefits this would deliver and how it might work.