Blog

Have you attended any of our annual meeting sessions this year? Ah, yes – there were many in this conference-style event. I, as many of my colleagues, attended them all because it is so great to connect with our global community, and hear your thoughts on the developments at Crossref, and the stories you share.

Let me offer some highlights from the event and a reflection on some emergent themes of the day. You can browse the recordings and slides archived on our Annual Meeting page.

Hello, readers! My name is Luis, and I’ve recently started a new role as the Technical Community Manager at Crossref, where I aim to bridge the gap between some of our services and our community awareness to enhance the Research Nexus. I’m excited to share my thoughts with you.

My journey from research to science communications infrastructure has been a gradual transition. As a Masters student in Biological Sciences, I often felt curious about the behind-the-scenes after a paper is submitted and published. For example, the fate of data being stored in the drawer or copied and forgotten in the hard drive after the paper is online. I come from a university that shares its name with at least three completely different universities in Latin America, and that also is pretty similar to another one with multiple offices across the region, which made me wonder if there was a standard way of identifying our affiliations. And then we have the topic of our names in hispanoamerica. We use two family names, and more often than not, we have a middle name (and then I could tell you stories about multiple-word middle names), which inevitably leads to authors having many combinations of full names and hyphenations.

In May, we updated you on the latest changes and improvements to the new version of iThenticate and let you know that a new similarity report and AI writing detection tool were on the horizon.

On Wednesday 1 November 2023, Turnitin (who produce iThenticate) will be releasing a brand new similarity report and a free preview to their AI writing detection tool in iThenticate v2. The AI writing detection tool will be enabled by default and account administrators will be able to switch it off/on.

Our Perspectives blog series highlights different members of our diverse, global community at Crossref. We learn more about their lives and how they came to know and work with us, and we hear insights about the scholarly research landscape in their country, the challenges they face, and their plans for the future.

Notre série de blogs Perspectives met en lumière différents membres de la communauté internationale de Crossref. Nous en apprenons davantage sur leur vie et sur la manière dont ils ont appris à nous connaître et à travailler avec nous, et nous entendons parler du paysage de la recherche universitaire dans leur pays, des défis auxquels ils sont confrontés et de leurs projets pour l’avenir.

Thank you to everyone who responded with feedback on the Op Cit proposal. This post clarifies, defends, and amends the original proposal in light of the responses that have been sent. We have endeavoured to respond to every point that was raised, either here or in the document comments themselves.

We strongly prefer for this to be developed in collaboration with CLOCKSS, LOCKSS, and/or Portico, i.e. through established preservation services that already have existing arrangements in place, are properly funded, and understand the problem space. There is low level of trust in the Internet Archive, also given a number of ongoing court cases and erratic behavior in the past. People are questioning the sustainability and stability of IA, and given it is not funded by publishers or other major STM stakeholders there is low confidence in IA setting their priorities in a way that is aligned with that of the publishing industry.

I’m pleased to share the 2023 board election slate. Crossref’s Nominating Committee received 87 submissions from members worldwide to fill seven open board seats.

We maintain a balance of eight large member seats and eight small member seats. A member’s size is determined based on the membership fee tier they pay. We look at how our total revenue is generated across the membership tiers and split it down the middle. Like last year, about half of our revenue came from members in the tiers $0 - $1,650, and the other half came from members in tiers $3,900 - $50,000. We have two large member seats and five small member seats open for election in 2023.

I’m pleased to share the 2023 board election slate. Crossref’s Nominating Committee received 87 submissions from members worldwide to fill seven open board seats.

We maintain a balance of eight large member seats and eight small member seats. A member’s size is determined based on the membership fee tier they pay. We look at how our total revenue is generated across the membership tiers and split it down the middle. Like last year, about half of our revenue came from members in the tiers $0 - $1,650, and the other half came from members in tiers $3,900 - $50,000. We have two large member seats and five small member seats open for election in 2023.

https://doi.org/10.13003/c23rw1d9

Crossref acquires Retraction Watch data and opens it for the scientific community

Agreement to combine and publicly distribute data about tens of thousands of retracted research papers, and grow the service together

12th September 2023 —– The Center for Scientific Integrity, the organisation behind the Retraction Watch blog and database, and Crossref, the global infrastructure underpinning research communications, both not-for-profits, announced today that the Retraction Watch database has been acquired by Crossref and made a public resource. An agreement between the two organisations will allow Retraction Watch to keep the data populated on an ongoing basis and always open, alongside publishers registering their retraction notices directly with Crossref.

Today, we are announcing a long-term plan to deprecate the Open Funder Registry. For some time, we have understood that there is significant overlap between the Funder Registry and the Research Organization Registry (ROR), and funders and publishers have been asking us whether they should use Funder IDs or ROR IDs to identify funders. It has therefore become clear that merging the two registries will make workflows more efficient and less confusing for all concerned. Crossref and ROR are therefore working together to ensure that Crossref members and funders can use ROR to simplify persistent identifier integrations, to register better metadata, and to help connect research outputs to research funders.

Ten years on from the launch of the Open Funder Registry (OFR, formerly FundRef), there is renewed interest in the potential of openly available funding metadata through Crossref. And with that: calls to improve the quality and completeness of that data. Currently, about 25% of Crossref records contain some kind of funding information. Over the years, this figure has grown steadily. A number of recent publications have shown, however, that there is considerable variation in the extent to which publishers deposit these data to Crossref. Technical but also business issues seem to lie at the root of this. Crossref - in close collaboration with the Dutch Research Council NWO and Sesame Open Science - brought together a group of 26 organizations from across the ecosystem to discuss the barriers and possible solutions. This blog presents some anonymized lessons learned.