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Human intelligence and curiosity are the lifeblood of the scholarly world, but not many people can afford to pursue research out of their own pocket. We all have bills to pay. Also, compute time, buildings, lab equipment, administration, and giant underground thingumatrons do not come cheap. In 2017, according to statistics from UNESCO, $1.7 trillion dollars were invested globally in Research and Development. A lot of this money comes from the public - 22c in every dollar spent on R&D in the USA comes from government funds, for example.

The Open Funder Registry plays a critical role in making sure that our members correctly identify the funding sources behind the research that they are publishing. It addresses a similar problem to the one that led to the creation of ORCID: researchers’ names are hard to disambiguate and are rarely unique; they get abbreviated, have spelling variations and change over time. The same is true of organizations. You don’t have to read all that many papers to see authors acknowledge funding from the US National Institutes of Health as NIH, National Institutes for Health, National Institute of Health, etc.

More and better license information is at the top of a lot of Christmas lists from a lot of research institutions and others who regularly use Crossref metadata. I know, I normally just ask for socks too. To help explain what we mean by this, we’ve collaborated with Jisc to set out some guidance for publishers on registering this license metadata with us.

You can’t go far on this blog without reading about the importance of registering rich metadata. Over the past year we’ve been encouraging all of our members to review the metadata they are sending us and find out which gaps need filling by looking at their Participation Report.

The metadata elements that are tracked in Participation Reports are mostly beyond the standard bibliographic information that is used to identify a work. They are important because they provide context: they tell the reader how the research was funded, what license it’s published under, and more about its authors via links to their ORCID profiles. And while this metadata is all available through our APIs, we also display much of it to readers through our Crossmark service.

The Simple Text Query form (STQ) allows users to retrieve existing DOIs for journal articles, books, and chapters by cutting and pasting a reference or reference list into a simple query box. For years the service has been heavily used by students, editors, researchers, and publishers eager to match and link references.

We had changes to the service planned for the first half of this year - an upgraded reference matching algorithm, a more modern interface, etc. In the spirit of openness and transparency, part of our project plan was to communicate these pending changes to STQ users well in advance of our 30 April completion date. What would users think? Could they help us improve upon our plans?

Whenever we send out our quarterly deposit invoices, we receive queries from members who have registered a lot of backlist content, but have been charged at the current year’s rate. As the invoices for the first quarter of 2019 have recently hit your inboxes, I thought I’d provide a timely reminder about this in case you spot this problem on your invoice.

In January, I wrote about how we’ve simplified the journal title transfer process using our new Metadata Manager tool. For those disposing publishers looking for an easy, do-it-yourself option for transferring ownership of your journal, I suggest you review that blog post. But, whether you choose to process the transfer yourself via Metadata Manager or need some help from Paul, Shayn, or myself, there’s more to a transfer than just the click of a transfer button or the submission of an email to support@crossref.org, as I’m sure those of you who have been through a title transfer can attest.

TL;DR

About 11% of available references in records in our OAI-PMH & REST API don’t have DOIs when they should. We have deployed a fix, but it is running on billions of records, and so we don’t expect it to be complete until mid-April.

Note that the Cited-by API that our members use appears to be unaffected by this problem.

Hello. Isaac here again to talk about what you can tell just by looking at the prefix of a DOI. Also, as we get a lot of title transfers at this time of year, I thought I’d clarify the difference between a title transfer and a prefix transfer, and the impact of each.

When you thought about your resolutions for 2019, Crossref probably didn’t cross your mind—but, maybe it should have…