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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.

As of this week, there are 80,000,000 scholarly items registered with Crossref! By the way, we update these interesting Crossref stats regularly and you can search the metadata. The 80 millionth scholarly item is [drumroll…] Management Approaches in Beihagi History from the journal Oman Chapter of Arabian Journal of Business and Management Review, published by Al Manhal in the United Arab Emirates. There have been loads of changes since Wiley registered “Designer selves: Construction of technologically mediated identity within graphical, multiuser virtual environments” with the DOI http://dx.

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”.

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.

We’re pleased to announce that a Crossref working group has released a set of best practice recommendations for scholarly publishers producing RSS feeds. Variations in practice amongst publisher feeds can be irritating for end-users, but they can be insurmountable for automated processes. RSS feeds are increasingly being consumed by knowledge discovery and data mining services. In these cases, variations in date formats, the practice of lumping all authors together in one <dc:creator> element, or generating invalid XML can render the RSS feed useless to the service accessing it.

The other day Noel O’Boyle wrote to tell me that he had updated the Ubiquity plug-in that we had developed in order to to make it work with the latest version of Firefox. The problem was, I had *also* updated the Ubiquity plug-in, but I hadn’t really indicated to anybody how they could find updates to the plug-in. /me=embarrassed. So it seemed time to provide a home for some of the prototypes and experiments that we’ve been developing at Crossref.

Crossref Technical Meeting* The Charles Hotel, Cambridge, MA Monday, November 9th, 2009 2:00 pm - 5:00 pm Please register today! We also encourage you to register for our 10th Anniversary Celebration Dinner, which will take place Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 6:30 pm following the Crossref Technical Meeting at the Museum of Science in Boston, MA. Transportation from the Charles Hotel to the Museum of Science will be provided. Our 2009 Annual Meeting will take place on Tuesday, November 10th at 9:00 am in the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, MA and we urge you to register soon (if you haven’t already done so)

We are looking to hire an R&D Developer in our Oxford offices. We are look for somebody who: Is passionate about creating tools for online scholarly communication. Relishes working with metadata. Has experience delivering web-based applications using agile methodologies. Wants to learn new skills and work with a variety of programming languages. Enjoys working with a small, geographically dispersed team. Groks mixed-content model XML. Groks RDF. Groks REST. Has explored MapReduce-based database systems.

Crossref is hiring an R&D software engineer to work in our Oxford office. This is a fantastic opportunity to work on wide range of projects that promise to revolutionize scholarly publishing.

OK, after a number of delays due to everything from indexing slowness to router problems, I’m happy to say that the first public beta of our WordPress citation plugin is available for download via SourceForge. A Movable Type version is in the works.

And congratulations to Trey at OpenHelix who became laudably impatient, found the SourceForge entry for the plugin back on February 8th and seems to have been testing it since. He has a nice description of how it works (along with screenshots), so I won’t repeat the effort here.

Having said that, I do include the text of the README after the jump. Please have a look at it before you install, because it might save you some mystification.