Blog

Last week a bunch of Crossref’s staff traveled to the 2016 Society for Scholarly Publishing Annual Meeting in Vancouver, BC.  After we returned en masse, all nine of us put our heads together to share some of our personal memories of the event.   

You might have missed it, but you haven’t missed out.  If you want to watch – or savor re-watching – the presentations from last week’s 2015 Crossref Annual Meeting, we’ve embedded each video below in chronological order. Sit back, relax, and take it all in (again) just as though you were in an air-conditioned ballroom at the Taj.

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”.

Curious about who will be speaking at Crossref’s Annual Meeting this year? We have a flock of scholarly communications talent gathering at the Taj Hotel in Boston from November 17-18, 2015.  In addition to our line-up of keynote speeches and technical workshops, we will be celebrating Crossref’s 15^th Anniversary with a quindecennial fête on Wednesday evening, November 18^th. There’s still time to register, so please join us!  

Oktoberfest is in full swing and that makes me think that it’s almost Frankfurt Book Fair time again!

This year in addition to individual meetings we’ll have scheduled flash presentations on our booth, M91 in Hall 4.2. These short (10-minute) presentations are great for anyone wanting a quick intro to what Crossref is all about. Running on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday - at the following times each of those days:

We’d like to invite the scholarly publishing community to get together in Boston this November with the Crossref Annual Meeting as a rally point. This is the event we hold just once a year to get the whole team under one roof, host a lively discussion with the leading voices in scholarly communications, present technical workshops, and offer you the chance to get hands’ on with our latest metadata services. Our free two-day event takes place from November 17-18, 2015 in Boston, MA.

MIT’s Simile project has just released Exhibit, a ” lightweight structured data publishing framework.” Read that as “an easy-to-use mashup creation tool.” I have heard that Leigh has already started experimenting with it. I look forward to a writeup soon…

The STIX Fonts project funded by six major publishers to develop a comprehensive font set for STM publishing has completed its development phase and is about to move into beta testing (planned to commence in late October). Participation is open to all publishers - so now is the time to get involved to ensure your needs are met by this significant activity.

The World Association of Newspapers is developing ACAP - see the press release which will be machine readable rights information that search engines would read and act on in an automated way. Rightscom is working on the project and the IPA and EPC (European Publishers Council) are involved.

Publishers presenting a united front to search engines is a good thing but I’m somewhat skeptical about how such a system would work without being overly complicated. However, the idea of getting more information to the search engines when they are crawling sites is a good idea but what will the publishers say to the search engines? If you get much above crawl/don’t crawl then you need a bilateral agreement that has to be negotiated.