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Crossref was founded to enable collaboration between publishers.  As our membership has grown and diversified over recent years, it’s becoming even more vital that we take input from a representative cross-section of the membership. This is especially important when considering how fees and policies will affect our diverse members in different ways.

Crossref LIVE16 opened with a Mashup Day on 1st November 2016 in London. Attendees from the scholarly communications world met to chat with Crossref team members in an open house atmosphere. The Crossref team put their latest projects on display and were met with questions, comments, and ideas from members and other metadata folks. Here’s what it looked like — you may recognize a few familiar faces. 

As the linking hub for scholarly content, it’s our job to tame URLs and put in their place something better. Why? Most URLs suffer from link rot and can be created, deleted or changed at any time. And that’s a problem if you’re trying to cite them.

We’re excited to say that we’ve finished the work on our infrastructure to allow members to register preprints. Want to know why we’re doing this? Jennifer Lin explains the rationale in detail in an earlier post, but in short we want to help make sure that:

• links to these publications persist over time
• they are connected to the full history of the shared research results
• the citation record is clear and up-to-date

Doing so will help fully integrate preprint publications into the formal scholarly record.

The scholarly communications sector has built and adopted a series of open identifier and metadata infrastructure systems to great success.  Content identifiers (through Crossref and DataCite) and contributor identifiers (through ORCID) have become foundational infrastructure to the industry.  

A bit different from our traditional meetings, Crossref LIVE16 next week is the first of a totally new annual event for the scholarly communications community.  Our theme is Smart alone; brilliant together.  We have a broad program of both informal and plenary talks across two days. There will be stations to visit, conversation starters, and entertainment, that highlight what our community can achieve if it works together.

Check out the final program.

New features, new indexing, new name - oh my!

TL;DR The indexing of Similarity Check users’ content into the shared full-text database is about to get a lot faster. Now we need members assistance in helping Turnitin (the company who own and operate the iThenticate plagiarism checking tool) to transition to a new method of indexing content.

Watch for two important emails on September 30th – one with a voting link and material, and one with your username and password. Running Crossref well is a key part of our mission. It’s important that we be as neutral and fair as possible, and we are always striving for that balance. One of our stated principles is “One member, one vote”. And each year we encourage each of our members-standing at over 6000 today-to participate in the election of new board members.

TL;DR

Crossref will be updating its DOI Display Guidelines within the next couple of weeks.  This is a big deal.  We last made a change in 2011 so it’s not something that happens often or that we take lightly.  In short, the changes are to drop “dx” from DOI links and to use “https:” rather than “http:”.  An example of the new best practice in displaying a Crossref DOI link is: https://doi.org/10.1629/22161

You might recognize my name if you’ve ever applied for Crossref membership on behalf of your organization. It recently occurred to me that, since I’ve been working in our membership department for eight years, I’ve been a part of shepherding new members for half of our history. And my, how we’ve grown.