In the first half of this year we’ve been talking to our community about post-publication changes and Crossmark. When a piece of research is published it isn’t the end of the journey—it is read, reused, and sometimes modified. That’s why we run Crossmark, as a way to provide notifications of important changes to research made after publication. Readers can see if the resesarch they are looking at has updates by clicking the Crossmark logo.
We’re happy to note that this month, we are marking five years since Crossref launched its Grant Linking System. The Grant Linking System (GLS) started life as a joint community effort to create ‘grant identifiers’ and support the needs of funders in the scholarly communications infrastructure.
The system includes a funder-designed metadata schema and a unique link for each award which enables connections with millions of research outputs, better reporting on the research and outcomes of funding, and a contribution to open science infrastructure.
In our previous blog post about metadata matching, we discussed what it is and why we need it (tl;dr: to discover more relationships within the scholarly record). Here, we will describe some basic matching-related terminology and the components of a matching process. We will also pose some typical product questions to consider when developing or integrating matching solutions.
Basic terminology Metadata matching is a high-level concept, with many different problems falling into this category.
Update 2024-07-01: This post is based on an interview with Euan Adie, founder and director of Overton._
What is Overton? Overton is a big database of government policy documents, also including sources like intergovernmental organizations, think tanks, and big NGOs and in general anyone who’s trying to influence a government policy maker. What we’re interested in is basically, taking all the good parts of the scholarly record and applying some of that to the policy world.
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:
DOAJ added support for Crossref XML to make it easier for publishers to upload metadata
Closer collaboration between customer/member support at both organisations, making it easier for publishers and journal editors to navigate both service’s technologies
the launch of PLACE: ‘a ‘one-stop shop’ for information to support publishers in adopting best practices the industry developed’ (together with other partners)
a pilot gap analysis of the journals in DOAJ with the possibility of helping them start to use and resolve DOIs.
The new agreement, signed earlier this month, will slightly shift focus to build upon existing collaborations, particularly around metadata. One of the primary sections of the MOU is enhancing support for the least-resourced journals by:
Assigning DOIs and depositing the metadata with Crossref
Finding ways to improve their DOAJ application experience to help them become indexed
Collect and ingest their Crossref metadata into DOAJ
Help them to get preserved via JASPER or similar initiatives
Help identify other local partners, such as Crossref Sponsoring Organisations, to support their use of Crossref services
It’s great that we can further underpin what is already a good working relationship. Both Crossref and DOAJ are central to discovery so it’s a natural partnership. Helping journals meet better standards and become indexed to make them more discoverable on a global scale is at the heart of our strategy. This agreement opens up a new avenue that allows the community to really focus on supporting those journals and the research they publish.’
– Joanna Ball, Managing Director of DOAJ
‘The collaborations with DOAJ so far only reconfirmed our shared goal to help make the global scholarly communications system more equitable wherever we can. Our joint projects aim to seek out and devise support for resource-constrained journals in multiple ways. DOAJ’s work is essential in helping journals to develop good practice, while Crossref offers an open infrastructure to ensure all journals can be included and discoverable in the global scholarly record.’
– Ginny Hendricks, Director of Member and Community Outreach at Crossref
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About DOAJ
DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer reviewed journals. DOAJ deploys around one hundred carefully selected volunteers from the community of library and other academic disciplines to assist in curating open access journals. This independent database contains over 20,400 peer-reviewed open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts and humanities. DOAJ is financially supported worldwide by libraries, publishers and other like-minded organizations. DOAJ services (including the evaluation of journals) are free for all, and all data provided by DOAJ are harvestable via OAI/PMH and the API. See https://doaj.org/ for more information.
About Crossref
Crossref is a global community-governed open scholarly infrastructure that makes all kinds of research objects easy to find, assess, and reuse through a number of services critical to research communications, including an open metadata API that sees over 1.5 billion queries every month. Crossref’s ~20,000 members come from 155 countries and are made up of universities, publishers, funders, government bodies, libraries, and research groups. Their ~155 million DOI records contribute to the collective vision of a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organizations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society.