For the third year in a row, Crossref hosted a roundtable on research integrity prior to the Frankfurt book fair. This year the event looked at Crossmark, our tool to display retractions and other post-publication updates to readers.
Since the start of 2024, we have been carrying out a consultation on Crossmark, gathering feedback and input from a range of members. The roundtable discussion was a chance to check and refine some of the conclusions we’ve come to, and gather more suggestions on the way forward.
In our previous blog post in this series, we explained why no metadata matching strategy can return perfect results. Thankfully, however, this does not mean that it’s impossible to know anything about the quality of matching. Indeed, we can (and should!) measure how close (or far) we are from achieving perfection with our matching. Read on to learn how this can be done!
How about we start with a quiz? Imagine a database of scholarly metadata that needs to be enriched with identifiers, such as ORCIDs or ROR IDs.
We’re in year two of the Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability (RCFS) research. This report provides an update on progress to date, specifically on research we’ve conducted to better understand the impact of our fees and possible changes.
Crossref is in a good financial position with our current fees, which haven’t increased in 20 years. This project is seeking to future-proof our fees by:
Making fees more equitable Simplifying our complex fee schedule Rebalancing revenue sources In order to review all aspects of our fees, we’ve planned five projects to look into specific aspects of our current fees that may need to change to achieve the goals above.
On behalf of the Nominating Committee, I’m pleased to share the slate of candidates for the 2024 board election.
Each year we do an open call for board interest. This year, the Nominating Committee received 53 submissions from members worldwide to fill four open board seats.
We maintain a balanced board of 8 large member seats and 8 small member seats. Size is determined based on the organization’s membership tier (small members fall in the $0-$1,650 tiers and large members in the $3,900 - $50,000 tiers).
For the third year in a row, Crossref hosted a roundtable on research integrity prior to the Frankfurt book fair. This year the event looked at Crossmark, our tool to display retractions and other post-publication updates to readers.
Since the start of 2024, we have been carrying out a consultation on Crossmark, gathering feedback and input from a range of members. The roundtable discussion was a chance to check and refine some of the conclusions we’ve come to, and gather more suggestions on the way forward. As in previous years, we were able to include a range of organisations, which led to lively and interesting discussions. See below for the full participant list.
Crossmark feedback
We started by presenting Crossmark and a summary of the consultation process. There are a number of areas where we have learned more about how the community operates or found that Crossmark needs to adapt. These include:
Implementation: Our members have struggled to implement Crossmark and uptake is low. At the same time, in many organisations the workflows for handling retractions are not well-defined because they are rarely used, if ever. The responsibility for updating Crossref metadata can be unclear and this may be a factor in the low uptake.
Education: There are different levels of understanding about how to handle retractions. Some members are very defensive when asked about retractions, others state they will never make updates to published works. How can we have a constructive conversation where the value of communicating updates appropriately is recognised?
Community engagement: Given the different scales, locations, disciplines, and technologies used by our members, it looks like one size will not fit all when it comes to updates. How can we get continual, representative feedback on new tools and processes?
Metadata assertions: Crossmark allows the deposit of metadata using custom field names, however this metadata seems to have low usefulness and is not highly valued by the community. Should we continue to collect it? Can we make some of the most-used field names part of our standard schema?
Changing the Crossmark UI: Although we didn’t specifically ask about it during the consultation, the look of the Crossref logo often came up, and concern that it is not recognised and not well-used. Can we change the look and behaviour so that it has more impact?
NISO Recommendations
Patrick Hargitt represented the NISO group on Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CREC). The group’s recommendations were published earlier this year and cover how retractions are communicated. CREC arose from an earlier project, IRSRS. A large part of the motivation is that retracted works continued to be cited, with citing authors apparently unaware of the retraction.
Patrick presented the CREC recommendations, which cover:
Metadata receipt, display, and distribution,
Which metadata elements to communicate,
How to implement the recommendations,
Discussion of some special cases,
Key stakeholders and their responsibilities.
The two presentations prompted discussion, which was taken into the first of two workshops.
First workshop: Improving collection of retractions and Crossmark
The first workshop looked at proposed changes to Crossmark and how to encourage more members to deposit their retractions, corrections, and other post-publication updates. Several important themes emerged.
First, the question of whose responsibility it should be to provide metadata on retractions and similar updates. Crossref has a responsibility to work with the community to obtain high quality and complete metadata; publishers should take responsibility for handling issues of research integrity and reporting them to relevant downstream services, like Crossref; and platforms need to provide tools that allow easy reporting of retractions.
The value of Crossmark appearing in PDFs was reiterated. The fact that a PDF can be downloaded, and years later there is a way to tell whether it has been retracted or not is highly valued. There was also the suggestion that the Crossmark logo on web pages can indicate a change before it has been clicked. This is something that we have been considering at Crossref and it was useful to have the idea reinforced. Another suggestion was that a browser plugin would make a good complement to Crossmark.
Implementation issues with Crossmark were raised, including that it’s difficult to validate whether a specific implementation is complete. There are a number of different changes (to metadata deposit and content, and websites) that need to work together to have Crossmark fully functional. There were several questions and a discussion about Retraction Watch data. Some were about understanding its collection and validation. A number of participants are actively using the data and it was great to see the variety of applications.
Second workshop: Community use of retraction metadata
The second workshop focused on a broader set of downstream organisations that might want to make use of retraction metadata. We looked at stakeholders and their needs, and attempted to match them up with existing tools. Several gaps were identified as a result, which may provide opportunities for new services or collaborations to fill them.
We identified a number of tools available for publishers, editorial systems, metadata researchers, and readers. A good example is reference managers, many of which are now highlighting retracted works to authors. This can help to reduce the number of retracted works being cited. Publishing platforms are also providing support to editors, using tools that include retraction metadata.
Some of the stakeholders identified have limited tools for identifying retractions that are relevant to them. These include funders, archives and repositories, journalists, and institutions.
Often, there are pathways for retraction data to be communicated but they are not being sufficiently used. There needs to be a concerted effort to improve the quality of retraction metadata for tools to function better. For example, a second author on a paper might not know that a correction or retraction is planned for their article. If their email or ORCID isn’t included in the metadata, an alerting tool wouldn’t be able to let them know. A similar argument can be made for institutions or funders if they are not well-identified in the metadata.
The question of standardisation of metadata was raised. It seems too early to implement a full set of standards at the moment. CREC and similar initiatives have documented and accommodated for a range of practices while providing guidance and principles to work towards. More discussion is needed in the community to work out paths that could be applied across the broad spectrum of scholarly communication.
Conclusion
The event was very valuable in bringing up a range of topics related to retraction and communication of post-publication changes to scholarly works. We are grateful to all of the participants for their contributions and sharing their diverse experience and opinions with us.
Research integrity is an area of flux, with significant changes over the past few years. While there has been progress, there remain gaps in metadata and tools to communicate retractions. This is something that Crossref will continue to contribute to, and Crossmark clearly still has a role to play.
Some of the ideas and suggestions from the discussion can be implemented in the near future. Others need further development, and we will continue to engage the community. Reading this, there may be topics where you feel you have a role to play. We are keen to partner with other organisations in this space as we continue to improve the transparency and communication of metadata for post-publication updates.
Participants
Many thanks to the participants. Here is the full list of those that attended:
