Retractions and corrections from Retraction Watch are now available in Crossref’s REST API. Back in September 2023, we announced the acquisition of the Retraction Watch database with an ongoing shared service. Since then, they have sent us regular updates, which are publicly available as a csv file. Our aim has always been to better integrate these retractions with our existing metadata, and today we’ve met that goal.
This is the first time we have supplemented our metadata with a third-party data source.
As a provider of foundational open scholarly infrastructure, Crossref is an adopter of the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI). In December 2024 we posted our updated POSI self-assessment. POSI provides an invaluable framework for transparency, accountability, susatinability and community alignment. There are 21 other POSI adopters.
Together, we are now undertaking a public consultation on proposed revisions for a version 2.0 release of the principles, which would update the current version 1.
https://doi.org/10.13003/axeer1ee
In our previous entry, we explained that thorough evaluation is key to understanding a matching strategy’s performance. While evaluation is what allows us to assess the correctness of matching, choosing the best matching strategy is, unfortunately, not as simple as selecting the one that yields the best matches. Instead, these decisions usually depend on weighing multiple factors based on your particular circumstances. This is true not only for metadata matching, but for many technical choices that require navigating trade-offs.
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.
Please help us welcome new faces at Crossref! Martyn, Sara, Laura, and Mark joined us very recently and we are happy they’re with us. Both Martyn and Sara have joined the Product team and this has given us the chance to reorganize the team into the following groups: content registration, scholarly stewardship, scholarly impact, metadata retrieval, and UX/UI leadership. Laura joined the Finance and Operations team to help make the billing process simple for our members. Mark joins the Technology team and one of his projects will be improving the Event Data service.
It is exciting to already see the impact of your contributions and look forward to what’s to come!
And now a few words from each of them.
Martyn Rittman
I am a former university researcher who worked on interdisciplinary projects around life sciences and analytical chemistry, with positions in the UK and Germany. I spent seven years at open access publisher MDPI doing everything from running journals to handling production, developing services for authors and publishers, and supporting preprints. I’m very excited to be joining Crossref as a Product Manager and developing some great products and services that focus on how Crossref-indexed research creates impact. This includes supporting the use of preprint metadata. I’m also looking forward to getting my teeth into event data, which looks at how those in the research community and beyond reference, use, and reuse research. If you are interested in making use of event data or have examples of event data applications, I would like to hear from you.
Sara Bowman
I’m thrilled to have joined Crossref at this exciting time in the organization. As a member of the Product team, my primary area of focus is content registration, building, and improving tools for our members to deposit rich metadata. I’m particularly interested in how we can create a unified user experience for content registration while supporting the needs of our diverse membership. A scientist by training, I’ve spent the last 6 years working on open source technologies to support scholarly communication, most recently in the role of Product Manager at the Center for Open Science. I’m passionate about open tools and using data to drive product development, building innovative solutions to improve research and scholarly communication.
Laura Cuniff
I joined Crossref two months ago as a part-time Billing Support Specialist on the Finance and Operations team. With the help of my supportive and knowledgeable colleagues, I took on learning the various systems. My goal is to make the billing process as simple as possible for our members by researching, retrieving, and relaying billing information. This allows our members to focus on the reason for their engagement with Crossref. With several part-time jobs cobbled together at different times of the day, I have the flexibility to volunteer with a few organizations in my hometown of Ipswich, MA. If you find yourself at the Ipswich Visitor Center, I may greet you, recommend the most beautiful spots in town, give you a tour of the Ipswich Museum, or send you off with a wonderful Ipswich Humane Group cat or dog! I’m very excited to be here!
Mark Woodhall
I am an open-source enthusiast who has worked in a range of technology roles at a variety of companies as a polyglot programmer with experience in Clojure(Script), Java, C#, and JavaScript. It’s really exciting to be working at Crossref as a Senior Software Developer on the Technology team and I’m proud to be part of a team with open source at its heart. I’m really looking forward to getting more involved with event data and building a scalable solution to support its future uses.
Welcome to the Crossref community Martyn, Laura, Sara, and Mark.
