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My name is Isaac Farley, Crossref Technical Support Manager. We’ve got a collective post here from our technical support team - staff members and contractors - since we all have what I think will be a helpful perspective to the question: ‘What’s that one thing that you wish you could snap your fingers and make clearer and easier for our members?’ Within, you’ll find us referencing our Community Forum, the open support platform where you can get answers from all of us and other Crossref members and users. We invite you to join us there; how about asking your next question of us there? Or, simply let us know how we did with this post. We’d love to hear from you!

Tl;dr Forthcoming amendments to Crossref’s membership terms will include: Removal of ‘reference distribution preference’ policy: all references in Crossref will be treated as open metadata from 3rd June 2022. An addition to sanctions jurisdictions: the United Kingdom will be added to sanctions jurisdictions that Crossref needs to comply with. Sponsors and members have been emailed today with the 60-day notice needed for changes in terms. Reference distribution preferences In 2017, when we consolidated our metadata services under Metadata Plus, we made it possible for members to set a preference for the distribution of references to Open, Limited, or Closed.

Event Data is our service to capture online mentions of Crossref records. We monitor data archives, Wikipedia, social media, blogs, news, and other sources. Our main focus has been on gathering data from external sources, however we know that there is a great deal of Crossref metadata that can be made available as events. Earlier this year we started adding relationship metadata, and over the last few months we have been working on bringing in citations between records.

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?

From time to time we get questions from members asking what the difference is between reference linking and registering references as part the Content Registration process. Here’s the distinction: Linking out to other articles from your reference lists is a key part of being a Crossref members - it’s an obligation in the membership agreement and it levels the playing field when all members link their references to one another.

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.