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Known unknowns If you follow this blog, you are going to notice a theme over the coming months- Crossref supports the deposit and distribution of a lot more kinds of metadata than people usually realise. We are in the process of completely revamping our web site, help documentation, and marketing to better promote our metadata distribution capabilities, but in the mean time we think it would be useful highlight one of our most under-promoted functions- the ability to distribute references via Crossref.

The act of registering a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) for scholarly content is sometimes conflated with the notion of conferring a seal of approval or other mark of good quality upon an item of content. This is a fundamental misunderstanding. A DOI is a tool, not a badge of honor. The presence of a Crossref DOI on content sends a signal that: The owner of the content would like to be formally cited if the content is used in a scholarly context.

I had a great chat with Danielle Padula of Scholastica, a journals platform with an integrated peer-review process that was founded in 2011. We talked about how journals get started with Crossref, and she turned our conversation into a blog post that describes the steps to begin registering content and depositing metadata with us. Since the result is a really useful description of our new member on-boarding process, I want to share it with you here as well.

I’m a co-founder with rOpenSci, a non-profit that focuses on making software to facilitate reproducible and open science. Back in 2013 we started to make an R client working with various Crossref web services. I was lucky enough to attend last year’s Crossref annual meeting in Boston, and gave one talk on details of the programmatic clients, and another higher level talk on text mining and use of metadata for research.

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.

We will shortly be adding a new feature to Crossmark. In a section called “Clinical Trials” we will be using new metadata fields to link together all of the publications we know about that reference a particular clinical trial. Most medical journals make clinical trial registration a prerequisite for publication. Trials should be registered with one of the fifteen WHO-approved public trial registries , or with clinicaltrials.gov which is run by the US National Library of Medicine.

<span >In the <a href="/crossref-live-annual/archive/#2015">2015 Crossref Annual Meeting</a>, I introduced a metaphor for the work that we do at Crossref. I re-present it here for broader discussion as this narrative continues to play a guiding role in the development of products and services this year.

<span ><b>Metadata enable connections</b>

<span ><span >``<a href="/wp/blog/uploads/2016/01/pasted-image-0.png" rel="attachment wp-att-1214"><img class="alignright wp-image-1214" src="/wp/blog/uploads/2016/01/pasted-image-0-200x300.png" alt="Cartography Borges" width="250" height="375" srcset="/wp/blog/uploads/2016/01/pasted-image-0-200x300.png 200w, /wp/blog/uploads/2016/01/pasted-image-0.png 540w" sizes="(max-width: 250px) 85vw, 250px" />``</a>At Crossref, we make research outputs easy to find, cite, link, and assess through DOIs. Publishers register their publications and deposit metadata through a variety of channels (XML, CSV, PDF, manual entry), which we process and transform into Crossref XML for inclusion into our corpus. This data infrastructure which makes possible scholarly communications without restrictions on publisher, subject area, geography, etc. is far more than a reference list, index or directory. `

<span ><span >We’ve been talking a lot about infrastructure here at Crossref, and how the metadata we gather and organize is the foundation for so many services - those we provide directly - and those services that use our APIs to access that metadata, such as <span ><a href="http://www.growkudos.com" target="_blank">Kudos</a><span > and <a href="http://www.chorusaccess.org/about/about-chorus/"><span >CHORUS</a><span >, which in turn provide the wider world of researchers, administrators, and funders with tailored information and tools.

<span ><b>The initiative formerly known as FundRef </b>

<span >Together Crossref’s <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20131229210637/http://search.crossref.org//funding" target="_blank">funding data</a> (previously known as FundRef  – we simplified the name)  and the <a href="/services/funder-registry/" target="_blank">Open Funder Registry</a>, our taxonomy of grant-giving organizations, comprise a hub for gathering and querying metadata related to the questions:

<span ><b>``<i>“Who funded this research?” </i></b>``<span >and <b><i>“Where has the research we funded been published?”```

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:

In the next few weeks, authors with an ORCID iD will be able to have Crossref automatically push information about their published work to their ORCID record. It’s something that ORCID users have been asking for and we’re pleased to be the first to develop the integration. 230 publishers already include ORCID iDs in their metadata deposits with us, and currently there are 248,000 DOIs that include ORCID iDs.