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One of the challenges that we face in Labs and Research at Crossref is that, as we prototype various tools, we need the community to be able to test them. Often, this involves asking for deposit to a different endpoint or changing the way that a platform works to incorporate a prototype.

The problem is that our community is hugely varied in its technical capacity and level of ability when it comes to modifying their platform. Some mega-publishers, for instance, outsource their platforms and so are dependent on third party developers/organizations when they want to make a change. Many smaller publishers, by contrast, use systems such as OJS, which come with Crossref plugins that make life very easy… but that require hard code changes to accommodate prototypes. Such changes are way beyond the technical capacity of most journal editors.

When each line of code is written it is surrounded by a sea of context: who in the community this is for, what problem we’re trying to solve, what technical assumptions we’re making, what we already tried but didn’t work, how much coffee we’ve had today. All of these have an effect on the software we write.

By the time the next person looks at that code, some of that context will have evaporated. There may be helpful code comments, tests, and specifications to explain how it should behave. But they don’t explain the path not taken, and why we didn’t take it. Or those occasions where the facts changed, so we changed our mind.

When each line of code is written it is surrounded by a sea of context: who in the community this is for, what problem we’re trying to solve, what technical assumptions we’re making, what we already tried but didn’t work, how much coffee we’ve had today. All of these have an effect on the software we write.

By the time the next person looks at that code, some of that context will have evaporated. There may be helpful code comments, tests, and specifications to explain how it should behave. But they don’t explain the path not taken, and why we didn’t take it. Or those occasions where the facts changed, so we changed our mind.

To this end, I wrote a basic application, credcheck, that will allow you to test a Crossref credential against an API.

To this end, I wrote a basic application, credcheck, that will allow you to test a Crossref credential against an API.

Subject classifications have been available via the REST API for many years but have not been complete or reliable from the start and will soon be deprecated. dfdfd

The subject metadata element was born out of a Labs experiment intended to enrich the metadata returned via Crossref Metadata Search with All Subject Journal Classification codes from Scopus. This feature was developed when the REST API was still fairly new, and we now recognize that the initial implementation worked its way into the service prematurely.

Crossref and DOAJ share the aim to encourage the dissemination and use of scholarly research using online technologies and to work with and through regional and international networks, partners, and user communities for the achievement of their aims to build local institutional capacity and sustainability. Both organisations agreed to work together in 2021 in a variety of ways, but primarily to ‘encourage the dissemination and use of scholarly research using online technologies, and regional and international networks, partners and communities, helping to build local institutional capacity and sustainability around the world.’ Some of the fruits of this labour are:

Crossref holds metadata for approximately 150 million scholarly artifacts. These range from peer reviewed journal articles through to scholarly books through to scientific blog posts. In fact, amid such heterogeneity, the only singular factor that unites such items is that they have been assigned a document object identifier (DOI); a unique identification string that can be used to resolve to a resource pertaining to said metadata (often, but not always, a copy of the work identified by the metadata).

Crossref holds metadata for approximately 150 million scholarly artifacts. These range from peer reviewed journal articles through to scholarly books through to scientific blog posts. In fact, amid such heterogeneity, the only singular factor that unites such items is that they have been assigned a document object identifier (DOI); a unique identification string that can be used to resolve to a resource pertaining to said metadata (often, but not always, a copy of the work identified by the metadata).

We’re equally sad and proud to report that Rachael Lammey is moving on in her career to the very lucky team at 67Bricks. Her last day at Crossref is today, Friday 16th February. Which is too soon for us, but very exciting for her!

It’s hard to overstate Rachael’s impact on Crossref’s growth and success in her 12 years here. She started as a Product Manager where she developed that role into a broad and central function, and soon moved into the newly-formed community team as International Outreach Manager where she grew important programs such as Sponsors, Ambassadors, a series of ‘LIVE’ events around the world, and she went on to manage her own team and establish some of the most important strategic relationships that Crossref now feels fortunate to have.