Looking back over 2024, we wanted to reflect on where we are in meeting our goals, and report on the progress and plans that affect you - our community of 21,000 organisational members as well as the vast number of research initiatives and scientific bodies that rely on Crossref metadata.
In this post, we will give an update on our roadmap, including what is completed, underway, and up next, and a bit about what’s paused and why.
The Crossref2024 annual meeting gathered our community for a packed agenda of updates, demos, and lively discussions on advancing our shared goals. The day was filled with insights and energy, from practical demos of Crossrefâs latest API features to community reflections on the Research Nexus initiative and the Board elections.
Our Board elections are always the focal point of the Annual Meeting. We want to start reflecting on the day by congratulating our newly elected board members: Katharina Rieck from Austrian Science Fund (FWF), Lisa Schiff from California Digital Library, Aaron Wood from American Psychological Association, and Amanda Ward from Taylor and Francis, who will officially join (and re-join) in January 2025.
Background The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) provides a set of guidelines for operating open infrastructure in service to the scholarly community. It sets out 16 points to ensure that the infrastructure on which the scholarly and research communities rely is openly governed, sustainable, and replicable. Each POSI adopter regularly reviews progress, conducts periodic audits, and self-reports how theyâre working towards each of the principles.
In 2020, Crossrefâs board voted to adopt the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure, and we completed our first self-audit.
In June 2022, we wrote a blog post âRethinking staff travel, meetings, and eventsâ outlining our new approach to staff travel, meetings, and events with the goal of not going back to ânormalâ after the pandemic. We took into account three key areas:
The environment and climate change Inclusion Work/life balance We are aware that many of our members are also interested in minimizing their impacts on the environment, and we are overdue for an update on meeting our own commitments, so here goes our summary for the year 2023!
Following up on his earlier post (which was also blogged to CrossTech here), Leigh Dodds is now [Following up on his earlier post (which was also blogged to CrossTech here), Leigh Dodds is now]3 the possibility of using machine-readable auto-discovery type links for DOIs of the form
These LINK tags are placed in the document HEAD section and could be used by crawlers and agents to recognize the work represented by the current document. This sounds like a great idea and weâd like to hear feedback on it.
Concurrently at Nature we have also been considering how best to mark up in a machine-readable way DOIs appearing within a document page BODY. Current thinking is to do something along the following lines:
which allows the DOI to be presented in the preferred Crossref citation format (doi:10.1038/nprot.2007.43), to be hyperlinked to the handle proxy server (<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nprot.2007.43">http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nprot.2007.43</a>), and to refer to a validly registered URI form for the DOI (info:doi/10.1038/nprot.2007.43). Again, we would be real interested to hear any opinions on this proposal for inline DOI markup as well as on Leighâs proposal for document-level DOI markup.
(Oh, and btw many congrats to Leigh on his recent promotion to CTO, Ingenta.)
