This year, metadata development is one of our key priorities and we’re making a start with the release of version 5.4.0 of our input schema with some long-awaited changes. This is the first in what will be a series of metadata schema updates.
What is in this update?
Publication typing for citations
This is fairly simple; we’ve added a ‘type’ attribute to the citations members supply. This means you can identify a journal article citation as a journal article, but more importantly, you can identify a dataset, software, blog post, or other citation that may not have an identifier assigned to it. This makes it easier for the many thousands of metadata users to connect these citations to identifiers. We know many publishers, particularly journal publishers, do collect this information already and will consider making this change to deposit citation types with their records.
Every year we release metadata for the full corpus of records registered with us, which can be downloaded for free in a single compressed file. This is one way in which we fulfil our mission to make metadata freely and widely available. By including the metadata of over 165 million research outputs from over 20,000 members worldwide and making them available in a standard format, we streamline access to metadata about scholarly objects such as journal articles, books, conference papers, preprints, research grants, standards, datasets, reports, blogs, and more.
Today, we’re delighted to let you know that Crossref members can now use ROR IDs to identify funders in any place where you currently use Funder IDs in your metadata. Funder IDs remain available, but this change allows publishers, service providers, and funders to streamline workflows and introduce efficiencies by using a single open identifier for both researcher affiliations and funding organizations.
As you probably know, the Research Organization Registry (ROR) is a global, community-led, carefully curated registry of open persistent identifiers for research organisations, including funding organisations. It’s a joint initiative led by the California Digital Library, Datacite and Crossref launched in 2019 that fulfills the long-standing need for an open organisation identifier.
We began our Global Equitable Membership (GEM) Program to provide greater membership equitability and accessibility to organizations in the world’s least economically advantaged countries. Eligibility for the program is based on a member’s country; our list of countries is predominantly based on the International Development Association (IDA). Eligible members pay no membership or content registration fees. The list undergoes periodic reviews, as countries may be added or removed over time as economic situations change.
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.
🎯 Member Experience Manager, ramping up to handle the mammoth operation that is… membership, currently 18,000 members from 150 countries, and onboarding the ~180 new joiners we welcome monthly, mostly from Africa and Asia. This role involves lots of education and relationship management, but because of the scale, we also need someone with a real business process/analysis approach, improving how our systems function so that the operation flows seamlessly and isn’t a pain for people (both members and staff). This role manages two full-time Member Support Specialists (UK and Indonesia) and three part-time contractors (USA, France, and one other as yet unknown).
🎈 Community Engagement Manager, working with the global community of scholarly editors at a time when research integrity is top of mind for our entire ecosystem. This is a classic community role for someone keen to cross over from managing or editing journals or books and perhaps make your volunteer work official. Activities will include program and project management, event and working group facilitation, communications and content creation. You’d be interacting with groups like the Asian Council of Science Editors, the European Association of Science Editors, and the Council of Science Editors, plus many more that you’d identify. It’s all about helping editors, who work hand-in-hand with authors, to think about metadata as signals of trust and better use available services, such as those for retraction management or plagiarism checking, and helping to define needs for emerging activity too, such as machine-generated content.
Working at Crossref
We’re a not-for-profit membership organization that exists to make scholarly communications better. We rally the community; tag and share metadata; run an open infrastructure; play with technology; and make tools and services—all to help put research in context.
Crossref sits at the heart of the global exchange of research information, and our job is to make it possible—and easier—to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse research, from journals and books, to preprints, data, and grants. Through partnerships and collaborations we engage with members in 150 countries (and counting) and it’s very important to us to nurture that community.
We’re about 45 staff and remote-first. This means that we support our teams working asynchronously and with flexible hours. We are dedicated to an open and fair research ecosystem and that’s reflected in our ethos and staff culture. We like to work hard but we have fun too! We take a creative, iterative approach to our projects, and believe that all team members can enrich the culture and performance of our whole organisation. Check out the organisation chart.
We are active supporters of ongoing professional development opportunities and promote self-learning at every opportunity. Crossref has a healthy financial situation and we only continue to grow. While we won’t have a clear hierarchical path for staff to follow, there are always evolving opportunities to progress and be challenged.
We especially encourage applications from people with backgrounds historically under-represented in research and scholarly communications.
Bookmark our jobs page to watch for future opportunities!
