Blog

After 20 years in operation, and as our system matures from experimental to foundational infrastructure, it’s time to review our documentation. Having a solid core of education materials about the why and the how of Crossref is essential in making participation possible, easy, and equitable. As our system has evolved, our membership has grown and diversified, and so have our tools - both for depositing metadata with Crossref, and for retrieving and making use of it.

To help better support the discovery, sale and analysis of books, Jennifer Kemp from Crossref and Mike Taylor from Digital Science, present seven reasons why publishers should collect chapter-level metadata. Book publishers should have been in the best possible position to take advantage of the movement of scholarly publishing to the internet. After all, they have behind them an extraordinary legacy of creating and distributing data about books: the metadata that supports discovery, sales and analysis.

Hello, I’m Paul Davis and I’ve been part of the Crossref support team since May 2017. In that time I’ve become more adept as a DOI detective, helping our members work out whodunnit when it comes to submission errors.

If you have ever received one of our error messages after you have submitted metadata to us, you may know that some are helpful and others are, well, difficult to decode. I’m here to help you to become your own DOI detective.

TL;DR Many organizations are doing what they can to aid in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Crossref members can make it easier for researchers to identify, locate, and access content for text mining. In order to do this, members must include elements in their metadata that: Point to the full text of the content. Indicate that the content is available under an open access license or that it is being made available for free (gratis).

A lot of people have been using our public, open APIs to collect data that might be related to COVID-19. This is great and we encourage it. We also want to make it easier. To that end we have made a free data file of the public elements from Crossref’s 112.5 million metadata records. The file (65GB, in JSON format) is available via Academic Torrents here: https://doi.org/10.13003/83B2GP It is important to note that Crossref metadata is always openly available.

It seems like ages ago, particularly given recent events, but we had our first public request for feedback on proposed schema updates in December and January. The feedback we received indicated two big things: we’re on the right track, and you want us to go further. This update has some significant but important changes to contributors, but is otherwise a fairly moderate update. The feedback was mostly supportive, with a fair number of helpful suggestions about details.

TL;DR: We no longer charge fees for members to participate in Crossmark, and we encourage all our members to register metadata about corrections and retractions - even if you can’t yet add the Crossmark button and pop-up box to your landing pages or PDFs.

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Publisher metadata is one side of the story surrounding research outputs, but conversations, connections and activities that build further around scholarly research, takes place all over the web. We built Event Data to capture, record and make available these ‘Events’ –– providing open, transparent, and traceable information about the provenance and context of every Event. Events are comments, links, shares, bookmarks, references, etc.

At Crossref, we’re committed to providing a simple, usable, efficient and scalable web-based tool for registering content by manually making deposits of, and updates to, metadata records. Last year we launched Metadata Manager in beta for journal deposits to help us explore this further. Since then, many members have used the tool and helped us better understand their needs.

Detective Matcher stopped abruptly behind the corner of a short building, praying that his loud heartbeat doesn’t give up his presence. This missing DOI case was unlike any other before, keeping him awake for many seconds already. It took a great effort and a good amount of help from his clever assistant Fuzzy Comparison to make sense of the sparse clues provided by Miss Unstructured Reference, an elegant young lady with a shy smile, who begged him to take up this case at any cost.