Blog

My name is Johanssen Obanda. I joined Crossref in February 2023 as a Community Engagement Manager to look after the Ambassadors program and help with other outreach activities. I work remotely from Kenya, where there is an increasing interest in improving the exposure of scholarship by Kenyan researchers and ultimately by the wider community of African researchers. In this blog, I’m sharing the experience and insights of my first 4 months in this role.

Digital preservation is crucial to the “persistence” of persistent identifiers. Without a reliable archival solution, if a Crossref member ceases operations or there is a technical disaster, the identifier will no longer resolve. This is why the Crossref member terms insist that publishers make best efforts to ensure deposit in a reputable archive service. This means that, if there is a system failure, the DOI will continue to resolve and the content will remain accessible. This is how we protect the integrity of the scholarly record.

This is the first post in a series designed to showcase what we do in the Crossref R&D group, also known as Crossref Labs, which over the last few years has been strengthened, first with Dominika Tkaczyk and Esha Datta, last year with part of Paul Davis’s time, and more recently, yours truly. Research and development are, obviously, crucial for any organization that doesn’t want to stand still. The R&D group builds prototypes, experimental solutions, and data-mining applications that can help us to understand our member base, in the service of future evolution of the organization. One of the strategic pillars of Crossref is that we want to contribute to an environment in which the scholarly research community identifies shared problems and co-creates solutions for broad benefit. We do this in all teams through research and engagement with our expanding community.

The Crossref Nominating Committee invites expressions of interest to join the Board of Directors of Crossref for the term starting in March 2024. The committee will gather responses from those interested and create the slate of candidates that our members will vote on in an election in September.

Expressions of interest will be due Monday, June 26th, 2023.

About the board elections

The board is elected through the “one member, one vote” policy wherein every member organization of Crossref has a single vote to elect representatives to the Crossref board. Board terms are for three years; this year, seven seats are open for election.

We were delighted to engage with over 200 community members in our latest Community update calls. We aimed to present a diverse selection of highlights on our progress and discuss your questions about participating in the Research Nexus. For those who didn’t get a chance to join us, I’ll briefly summarise the content of the sessions here and I invite you to join the conversations on the Community Forum.

You can take a look at the slides here and the recordings of the calls are available here.

We have some exciting news for fans of big batches of metadata: this year’s public data file is now available. Like in years past, we’ve wrapped up all of our metadata records into a single download for those who want to get started using all Crossref metadata records.

We’ve once again made this year’s public data file available via Academic Torrents, and in response to some feedback we’ve received from public data file users, we’ve taken a few additional steps to make accessing this 185 gb file a little easier.

In 2022, we flagged up some changes to Similarity Check, which were taking place in v2 of Turnitin’s iThenticate tool used by members participating in the service. We noted that further enhancements were planned, and want to highlight some changes that are coming very soon. These changes will affect functionality that is used by account administrators, and doesn’t affect the Similarity Reports themselves.

From Wednesday 3 May 2023, administrators of iThenticate v2 accounts will notice some changes to the interface and improvements to the Users, Groups, Integrations, Statistics and Paper Lookup sections.

We’ve been spending some time speaking to the community about our role in research integrity, and particularly the integrity of the scholarly record. In this blog, we’ll be sharing what we’ve discovered, and what we’ve been up to in this area.

We’ve discussed in our previous posts in the “Integrity of the Scholarly Record (ISR)” series that the infrastructure Crossref builds and operates (together with our partners and integrators) captures and preserves the scholarly record, making it openly available for humans and machines through metadata and relationships about all research activity. This Research Nexus makes it easier and faster for everyone involved in research performance, management, and communications to understand information in context and make decisions about the trustworthiness of organizations and their published research outputs. Conversely, it can make it harder for parties to pass off information as trustworthy when the information doesn’t include that context.

Do you want to help make research communications better in all corners of the globe? Come and join the world of nonprofit open infrastructure and be part of improving the creation and sharing of knowledge.

We are recruiting for three new staff positions, all new roles and all fully remote and flexible. See below for more about our ethos and what it’s like working at Crossref.

🚀 Technical Community Manager, working with our ‘integrators’ so all repository/publishing platforms and plugins, all API users incl. managing contracts with subscribers, and generally helping a very nice bunch of RESTful API dabblers, both novice and intermediate. The goal is to offer more interactive engagement such as sprints, and more technical consultation to help the community with things like query efficiency, public data dump ingestion, etc. Thousands of users exist, from individual researchers and small academic tools to giant technology companies. Researching and analysing usage and building tools to meet their needs is key, so this role works closely with Product and R&D colleagues and likely needs a developer or developer-advocacy background.

The Publishers Learning And Community Exchange (PLACE) at theplace.discourse.group is a new online public forum created for organisations interested in adopting best practices in scholarly publishing. New scholarly publishers can access information from multiple agencies in one place, ask questions of the experts and join conversations with each other.

Scholarly publishing is an interesting niche of an industry – it appears at the same time ancillary and necessary to the practice and development of scholarship itself. The sooner and more easily a piece of academic work is shared, the greater the chance that others will find and build upon it. Many practices of the publishing industry have been developed to support discovery and integrity of the scholarship that produces shareable works, and as the landscape of scholarly communications constantly evolves, a number of agencies arose to promote and continuously update the standards and best practices within it.