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.
It was with great sadness and shock that I learned that Dr Norman Paskin had passed away unexpectedly on the 27th March. This is a big loss to the DOI, Crossref and digital information communities. Norman was the driving force behind the DOI System and was a key supporter and ally of Crossref from the start. Norman founded the International DOI Foundation in 1998 and ran it successfully until the end of 2015 when he moved to a strategic role as an Independent Board Member.
Norman was an early proponent of the value of persistent digital identifiers paired with standardised metadata and laid the groundwork for the system and infrastructure that has made Crossref and eight other Registration Agencies so successful. Norman was also a key adviser and participant in many standards organizations and initiatives where he regularly provided key intellectual input to help improve digital communications.
Personally, it was a great pleasure to work with Norman over the last twenty years and I greatly appreciated his intelligence, humour, advice, and particularly his help and generous support when I relocated to Oxford.