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We’re putting the final touches on the changes that will allow preprint publishers to register their metadata with Crossref and assign DOIs. These changes support Crossref’s CitedBy linking between the preprint and other scholarly publications (journal articles, books, conference proceedings). Full preprint support will be released over the next few weeks.

Crossref began its service by linking publications to other publications via references. Today, this extends to relationships with associated entities. People (authors, reviewers, editors, other collaborators), funders, and research affiliations are important players in this story. Other metadata also figure prominently in it as well: references, licenses and access indicators, publication history (updates, revisions, corrections, retractions, publication dates), clinical trial and study information, etc. The list goes on.

What is lesser known (and utilized) is that Crossref is increasingly linking publications to associated scholarly artifacts. At the bottom of it all, these links can help researchers better understand, reproduce, and build off of the results in the paper. But associated research objects can enormously bolster the research enterprise in many ways (e.g., discovery, reporting, evaluation, etc.).

Did you know that we have a shiny, not so new, API kicking around? If you missed Geoffrey’s post in 2014 (or don’t want a Cyndi Lauper song stuck in your head all day), the short explanation is that the Crossref Metadata API exposes the information that publishers provide Crossref when they register their content with us. And it’s not just the bibliographic metadata either-funding and licensing information, full-text links (useful for text-mining), ORCID iDs and update information (via Crossmark)-are all available, if included in the publishers’ metadata.

TL;DR… In a few weeks, publishers can upgrade to the new and improved Crossmark 2.0 including a mobile-friendly pop-up box and new button. We will provide a new snippet of code for your landing pages, and we’ll support version v1.5 until March 2017.

We recently revealed a new look for the Crossmark box, bringing it up-to-date in design and offering extra space for more metadata. The new box pulls all of a publication’s Crossmark metadata into the same space, so readers no longer have to click between tabs. Linked Clinical Trials and author names (including ORCID iDs) now have their own sections alongside funding information and licenses. Feedback so far tells us that the new box is a vast improvement.

While preprints have been a formal part of scholarly communications for decades in certain communities, they have not been fully adopted to date across most disciplines or systems. That may be changing very soon and quite rapidly, as new initiatives come thick and fast from researchers, funders, and publishers alike. This flurry of activity points to the realization from these parties of preprints’ potential benefits:

To acknowledge them as a legitimate part of the research story, we need to fully build preprints into the broader research infrastructure. Preprints need infrastructure support just like journal articles, monographs, and other formal research outputs. Otherwise, we (continue to) have a two-tiered scholarly communications system, unlinked and operating independently.

One of the cool things about working in Crossref Labs is that interesting experiments come up from time to time. One experiment, entitled “what happens if you plot DOI referral domains on a chart?” turned into the Chronograph project. In case you missed it, Chronograph analyses our DOI resolution logs and shows how many times each DOI link was resolved per month, and also how many times a given domain referred traffic to DOI links per day.

If you ever see me in the checkout line at some store do not ever get in the line I’m in. It is always the absolute slowest.

Crossref’s metadata system has a sort of checkout line, when members send in their data they got processed essentially in a first come first served basis. It’s called the deposit queue. We had controls to prevent anyone from monopolizing the queue and ways to jump forward in the queue but our primary goal was to give everyone a fair shot at getting processed as soon as possible. With many different behaviors by our members this could often be a challenge and at times some folks were not 100% happy.