Blog

Rallying the community is a key Crossref role. Sometimes this means collaborating on new initiatives but it is also an ongoing process, a cornerstone of our outreach efforts. Part of rallying the community is bringing people together, literally, in a series of outreach days around the globe. It means we encourage dialog with us and among members and non-publisher affiliates. We want to hear from the community and we hope to facilitate conversations in it. Not just about Crossref, but larger issues of scholarly communications and your particular part in it. The Crossref outreach team is doing a number of events around the world to bring together the community for updates, feedback and discussion.

Test out the early preview of Event Data while we continue to develop it. Share your thoughts. And be warned: we may break a few eggs from time to time!

Want to discover which research works are being shared, liked and commented on? What about the number of times a scholarly item is referenced? Starting today, you can whet your appetite with an early preview of the forthcoming Crossref Event Data service. We invite you to start exploring the activity of DOIs as they permeate and interact with the world after publication.

What happens to a research work outside of the formal literature? That’s what Event Data will aim to answer when the service launches later this year.

Following the successful DOI Event Tracker pilot in Spring 2014, development has been underway to build our new service, newly re-named Crossref Event Data. It’s an open data service that registers online activity (specifically, events) associated with Crossref metadata. Event Data will collect and store a record of any activity surrounding a research work from a defined set of web sources. The data will be made available as part of our metadata search service or via our Metadata API and normalised across a diverse set of sources. Data will be open, audit-able and replicable.

The rebranding of Crossref was top priority when I joined in May in a new role called “Director of Member & Community Outreach”. Since then I’ve been working to understand the array of services, attributes, and audiences we have developed; to answer the questions “What do we do, for whom, and why?”

As Crossref prepares to celebrate turning fifteen at our annual meeting next week, I am thrilled to present our new brand identity with key messages and logo. And along with “thrilled” you may also detect “nervous excitement”.

The Taxonomies Interest Group would like to invite Crossref members to an informal drop-in at the Frankfurt Book Fair:

4-5pm on Wednesday 14th October at the TEMIS booth H76

Publishers, researchers, funders, institutions and technology providers are all interested in better understanding how scholarly research is used. Scholarly content has always been discussed by scholars outside the formal literature and by others beyond the academic community. We need a way to monitor and distribute this valuable information.

Do you want to see if a Crossref DOI (typically assigned to publications) refers to DataCite DOIs (typically assigned to data)? Here you go:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150121025249/http://api.labs.crossref.org/graph/doi/10.4319/lo.1997.42.1.0001

Conversely, do you want to see if a DataCite DOI refers to Crossref DOIs? Voilà:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150321190744/http://api.labs.crossref.org/graph/doi/10.1594/pangaea.185321

Background

“How can we effectively integrate data into the scholarly record?” This is the question that has, for the past few years, generated an unprecedented amount of handwringing on the part researchers, librarians, funders and publishers. Indeed, this week I am in Amsterdam to attend the 4th RDA plenary in which this topic will no doubt again garner a lot of deserved attention.