Blog

Time to put the “R” back in “R&D”

Geoffrey Bilder

Geoffrey Bilder – 2021 June 07

In Labs

It is time to put the ‘R’ back into R&D. The Crossref R&D team was originally created to focus on the kinds of research projects that have allowed Crossref to make transformational technology changes, launch innovative new services, and engage with entirely new constituencies. Some Illustrious projects that had their origins in the R&D group include: DOI Content Negotiation Similarity Check (originally CrossCheck) ORCID (originally Author DOIs) Crossmark The Open Funder Registry The Crossref REST API Linked Clinical Trials Event Data Grant registration ROR And for each project that has graduated, there have been several that have not.

The road ahead: our strategy through 2025

Ginny Hendricks

Ginny Hendricks – 2021 June 03

In Strategy

This announcement has been in the works for some time, but everything seems to take longer when there is a pandemic going on, including finding time and headspace to plan out our strategy for the next few years. Over the last year or so we have had our heads down addressing how to scale our 20-yr-old system and operation – and adapting to new ways of working. But we’ve also spent time talking to people, forging alliances, looking ahead, and making plans.

Our annual open call for board nominations

Crossref’s Nominating Committee is inviting expressions of interest to join the Board of Directors of Crossref for the term starting in 2022. The committee will gather responses from those interested and create the slate of candidates that our membership will vote on in an election in September. Expressions of interest will be due Friday, June 25th, 2021. Board roles and responsibilities The role of the board at Crossref is to provide strategic and financial oversight of the organization, as well as guidance to the Executive Director and the staff leadership team, with the key responsibilities being:

Service Provider perspectives: A few minutes with our publisher hosting platforms

Service Providers work on behalf of our members by creating, registering, querying and/or displaying metadata. We rely on this group to support our schema as it evolves, to roll out new and updated services to members and to work closely with us on a variety of matters of mutual interest. Many of our Service Providers have been with us since the early days of Crossref. Others have joined as scholarly communications has grown and services have evolved.

Next steps for Content Registration

UPDATE, 20 December 2021 We are delaying the Metadata Manager sunset until 6 months after release of our new content registration tool. You can expect to see the new tool in production in the first half of 2022. For more information, see this post in the Community Forum. Hi, I’m Sara, one of the Product Managers here at Crossref. I joined the team in April 2020, primarily tasked with looking after Content Registration mechanisms.

Doing more with relationships - via Event Data

Crossref aims to link research together, making related items more findable, increasing transparency, and showing how ideas spread and develop. There are a number of moving parts in this effort: some related to capturing and storing linking information, others to making it available. By including relationship metadata in Event Data, we are taking a big step to improve the visibility of a large number of links between metadata. We know this is long-promised and we’re pleased that making this valuable metadata available supports a number of important initiatives.

Open-source code: giving back

TL:DR; Hi, I’m Joel GitLab UI unsatisfactory Wrote a UI to use the API Wrote a missing API Open company contributes changes back to another open company Now have a method for getting work done much easier Hurrah! I’m Joel, a Senior Site Reliability Engineer here at Crossref. I have a long background in open source, software development, and solving unique problems. One of my earliest computer influences was my father.

Stepping up our deposit processing game

Some of you who have submitted content to us during the first two months of 2021 may have experienced content registration delays. We noticed; you did, too. The time between us receiving XML from members, to the content being registered with us and the DOI resolving to the correct resolution URL, is usually a matter of minutes. Some submissions take longer - for example, book registrations with large reference lists, or very large files from larger publishers can take up to 24 to 48 hours to process.

Discuss all things metadata in our new community forum

TL;DR: We have a Community Forum (yay!), you can come and join it here: community.crossref.org. Community is fundamental to us at Crossref, we wouldn’t be where we are or achieve the great things we do without the involvement of you, our diverse and engaged members and users. Crossref was founded as a collaboration of publishers with the shared goal of making links between research outputs easier, building a foundational infrastructure making research easier to find, cite, link, assess, and re-use.

Event Data: A Plan of Action

Event Data uncovers links between Crossref-registered DOIs and diverse places where they are mentioned across the internet. Whereas a citation links one research article to another, events are a way to create links to locations such as news articles, data sets, Wikipedia entries, and social media mentions. We’ve collected events for several years and make them openly available via an API for anyone to access, as well as creating open logs of how we found each event.