Blog

Having joined the Crossref team merely a week previously, the mid-year community update on June 14th was a fantastic opportunity to learn about the Research Nexus vision. We explored its building blocks and practical implementation steps within our reach, and within our imagination of the future. Read on (or watch the recording) for a whistlestop tour of everything – from what on Earth is Research Nexus, through to how it’s taking shape at Crossref, to how you are involved, and finally – to what concerns the community surrounding the vision and how we’re going to address that.

Earlier this year, Ginny posted an exciting update on Crossref’s progress with adopting ROR, the Research Organization Registry for affiliations, announcing that we’d started the collection of ROR identifiers in our metadata input schema. 🦁 The capacity to accept ROR IDs to help reliably identify institutions is really important but the real value comes from their open availability alongside the other metadata registered with us, such as for publications like journal articles, book chapters, preprints, and for other objects such as grants.

Crossref aims to link research together, making related items more findable, increasing transparency, and showing how ideas spread and develop. There are a number of moving parts in this effort: some related to capturing and storing linking information, others to making it available. By including relationship metadata in Event Data, we are taking a big step to improve the visibility of a large number of links between metadata. We know this is long-promised and we’re pleased that making this valuable metadata available supports a number of important initiatives.

Crossref has supported depositing metadata for preprints since 2016 and peer reviews since 2018. Now we are putting the two together, in fact we will permit peer reviews to be registered for any record type.

This blog was initially posted on the European Association of Science Editors (EASE) blog: “EASE Council Post: Rachael Lammey on the Research Nexus”. EASE President Duncan Nicholas accurately introduces it as a whole lot of information and insights about metadata and communication standards into one post… I was given a wide brief to decide on the topic of my EASE blog, so I thought I’d write one that tries to encompass everything - I’ll explain what I mean by that.

A couple of weeks ago we shared with you that data citation is here, and that you can start doing data citation today. But why would you want to? There are always so many priorities, why should this be at the top of the list?

Data citation is seen as one of the most important ways to establish data as a first-class scientific output. At Crossref and DataCite we are seeing growth in journal articles and other record types citing data, and datasets making the link the other way. Our organizations are committed to working together to help realize the data citation community’s ambition, so we’re embarking on a dedicated effort to get things moving.

“Pre-prints” are sometimes neither Pre nor Print (c.f. https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.11408.1, but they do go on and get published in journals. While researchers may have different motivations for posting a preprint, such as establishing a record of priority or seeking rapid feedback, the primary motivation appears to be timely sharing of results prior to journal publication.

So where in fact do preprints get published?

Peer review publications—not peer-reviewed publications, but peer reviews as publications Our newest dedicated record type—peer review—has received a warm welcome from our members since rollout last November. We are pleased to formally integrate them into the scholarly record, giving the scholars who participated credit for their work, ensuring readers and systems dependably get from the reviews to the article (and vice versa), and making sure that links to these works persist over time.

Exciting news! We are getting very close to the beta release of a new tool to publicly show metadata coverage. As members register their content with us they also add additional information which gives context for other members and for services that help e.g. discovery or analytics.

Richer metadata makes content useful. Participation reports will give—for the first time—a clear picture for anyone to see the metadata Crossref has. This is data that’s long been available via our Public REST API, now visualized.