Strategy on Crossref

Highlights of a very busy year: our 2025 annual report

Ginny Hendricks — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As we finish celebrating our 25th anniversary, we can look back on a truly transformational year, defined by the successful delivery of several long-planned, foundational projects—as well as updates to our teams, services, and fees—that position Crossref for success over the next quarter century as essential open scholarly infrastructure. In our update at the end of 2024, we highlighted that we had restructured our leadership team and paused some projects. The changes made in 2024 positioned us for a year of getting things done in 2025. We launched cross-functional programs, modernised our systems, strengthened connections with our growing global community, and streamlined a bunch of technical and business operations while continuing to grow our staff, members, content, relationships, and community connections.

Read on for the highlights of a very busy year, grouped around our four strategic themes.

Strategic theme 1: Contribute to an environment where the community identifies and co-creates solutions for broad benefit

Enhanced tools and services

In October, we released an enhanced Participation Reports dashboard that shows metadata coverage across all 180 million records and provides individual member organisations with actionable gap reports to guide them to improve metadata completeness. The new tool provides more complete coverage of all members and resource types, now including funders and grants, with up to 11 best-practice metadata elements publicly tracked.

We launched support for journal articles in the New Metadata Manager record registration form (initially only for grants), which includes built-in reference and relationships deposit capabilities. In the New Metadata Manager, it’s now also possible to search for previously registered DOIs to edit your metadata records. In the coming years, we are planning to expand the new Metadata Manager to support all the many different content types that you can register with Crossref DOIs.

After a long break between regular updates, we have fixed our process for and just released v.1.63 of the Open Funder registry. With the updated process, we’re now able to resume more frequent updates to the registry (while of course still working towards the transition to ROR for funders).

Throughout 2025, we conducted a website information architecture review to improve the information we provide to our members and the wider community. Based on the recommendations from this review, we will be renewing our website and documentation in 2026.

Deprecations and modernisation

‘Old’ Metadata Manager is to be retired at the end of 2025, with users transitioning to the ‘New’ version or to our other helper tools for registering and updating DOIs. All users have been contacted during 2025 and received training on how to use the New Metadata Manager.

We also announced the deprecation of Co-access, which will end in 2026, bringing an end to the service that allowed duplicate DOIs for book content. Users of co-access have been informed and are in the process of transitioning to multiple resolution.

Together with Turnitin and our members, we are working to transition all subscribers to our Similarity Check service to a new version of iThenticate 2.0. We are happy to report that all platforms with integrations with us transitioned to 2.0 during 2025, and we will continue working with our members to get everyone transitioned during 2026.

Eating our own DOI dogfood

In June this year, we were particularly pleased to finally support the registration of DOIs for our own content, this very blog, through partnering with Rogue Scholar. Blogs are a growing format for scholarly discourse and our own blog is no different as it’s the main way that we share guidelines and best practices, as well as news and stories from the scholarly community. With a Crossref DOI for all blogs going back to 2006, we’re setting ourselves up to ensure better future preservation of the discussion and information about Crossref.

Community connections

We delivered 29 metadata health-check webinars over the course of the year, in French, Indonesian, Spanish, and English, reaching 2,166 participants with practical advice on identifying gaps in journal metadata using Participation Reports.

Crossref Accra took place in March as our first in-person event in a GEM country. We also held similar events in Ecuador and Türkiye with Crossref Quito in September and Crossref Ankara in November. At these three events, we welcomed key figures from each country’s library, government, publishing, and academic communities and we learned so much about the thriving communities there, and also that even more dedicated workshops on the specifics of metadata quality improvements would be appreciated.

Our metadata sprint in Madrid in April brought together community members to tackle specific problems collaboratively, with teams exploring coding, documentation, translation, and research using our open metadata. We’re already planning our next sprint in São Paulo for March 2026, and it will be held in three languages: Portuguese, Spanish, and English.

A strategic goal for Crossref is to grow research funders’ adoption of the Grant Linking System, and we produced the first in a series of interviews with funder members this year to highlight how and why Crossref DOIs are fulfilling goals to assess the reach and return of their research support for FWF (Austria), NWO (Netherlands), FCCN|FCT (Portugal), and Wellcome. This year, we welcomed more funders including Fonds de recherche du Québec (Canada) and Independent Research Fund Denmark as part of their national research platform NORA; we look forward to reporting on their experiences and outcomes next year and others as they work towards Crossref Grant DOI adoption.

We continued working closely with PKP and renewed our partnership to help drive better experience for OJS users registering metadata with Crossref. We also delivered a proportion of the metadata health-checks together to maximise the learning opportunities for our members using OJS; and we joined PKP’s Sprint in Oslo to help make improvements to OJS and OMP.

Crossref staff members serve on almost 50 committees, boards, and other community bodies alongside our own direct work. These include in the areas of research integrity, metascience, metadata and PID standards, open science policy or monitoring, development of new models (such as Diamond OA), editorial production, library and institutional publishing, and citation and other metadata analyses. We also work with other DOI Registration Agencies and support the sustainability of the DOI Foundation with an additional annual subsidy. Many DOI RAs are also Crossref Sponsors so that their members can access our unique reference matching service. While we often might advise, we also learn a huge amount from collaborating with the numerous systems and initiatives that make up the wider research community.

Our involvement with developing the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information led us to become the fiscal host and to participate in most of the working groups on open metadata. Of particular note this year was the Funding Metadata Working Group round table about moving forward the state of funding metadata, which we co-hosted with Barcelona Declaration colleagues, and three funding bodies, NWO (Netherlands), FWF (Austria), and ANR (France) as we heard from publishers and their vendors about challenges and how to overcome them to increase the quantity and quality of available open funding metadata.

All our community engagement activities have been enthusiastically supported and enriched by our indispensable Ambassadors and our group of now 130 Sponsors, organisations that help thousands of Crossref members with local language and technical support and lower cost access to our membership.

Strategic theme 2: A sustainable source of complete, open, and global scholarly metadata and relationships

Schema developments

The grant schema version 0.2.0 was released in January, adding support for ROR identifiers to identify funders and new funding types for in our taxonomy, including APC, BPC, and infrastructure. All of these funding types can be specified in the metadata of our grant-giving members alongside the existing types such as use of facilities or salary/training awards, etc.

Version 5.4 of our publications schema was released in March, marking our first update in many years and a great opportunity to learn how to do this and make the process more efficient. This release introduced typed references to denote the type of object referenced (dataset, blog, software, etc.), preprint status indicators, and version numbering.

Just last week, we also added a dedicated field for grant DOIs to our publications schema. This means it’s now possible to indicate in an article’s metadata which grant(s) funded the research using the persistent identifier. This is an essential step toward better alignment between grant funding and research, enriching the Research Nexus.

We also launched our new Metadata Advisory Group and they have already devised sub-working groups in three focus topic areas:

Multilingual metadata
Subjects and keywords
Relationships

Public data file

We released the 2025 public data file in March, containing metadata for (at the time) over 165 million research outputs from more than 22,000 organisations.

Inaugural Metadata Awards

In May, we launched the first-ever Metadata Awards to recognise members demonstrating excellence in metadata completeness and enrichment. Winners included Noyam Publishers (Ghana), GigaScience Press (Hong Kong), eLife (UK), American Society for Microbiology (USA), Universidad La Salle Arequipa (Peru), and Instituto Geologico y Minero de España (Spain). The awards will be held biennially going forward.

Metadata Matching project

In April, we launched the metadata matching project with the aim of building a more complete picture of the research nexus over time by automatically identifying missing relationships between entities across the scholarly record. The project’s goal is to modernise Crossref’s enrichment workflows by rebuilding them using modern software development and data science practices.

We are in the throws of developing a consolidated matching workflow that will eventually replace all existing production matching processes, with results exposed through the REST API. All new matching strategies will be rigorously evaluated, and the resulting data will be accompanied by clear provenance information. This project covers six matching tasks:

bibliographic reference matching
funder name matching
preprint matching
affiliation matching
grant matching
title matching

In the meantime, while work continues on integrating matching results into the REST API, we’ve been releasing standalone matching datasets for separate download and analysis. These include relationships between preprints and journal articles, relationships involving research organisations, and relationships between grants and research outputs.

Data infrastructure and Research Nexus participation dashboard

Staying on the data science front, we’ve established an internal data environment that combines all relevant data sources (scholarly metadata, logs and usage data, and external datasets) in their raw forms into a single place. This environment is supported by a suite of modern tools and data processing techniques, enabling data science experiments and analytics pipelines to run effectively at scale.

Building on this foundation, we plan to develop a series of dashboards to monitor the state of the scholarly record over time. These dashboards will feature both work-level and member-level statistics (for example, how many works of a given type have been registered, or how many members are registering grant IDs) as well as more detailed insights at the relationship level (for example, how many bibliographic references have been automatically matched, or how many times ROR IDs are included in funder assertions). Some of these statistics are already available in a public spreadsheet for now, pending the dashboard.

Retraction Watch integration

In 2023, Crossref acquired the Retraction Watch database to make it open data. Initially, this was done through sharing simple CSV files, but this year we have set up a pipeline to feed this information into our REST API, which means that Retraction Watch data is now fully available through the REST API, integrated with Crossref member-supplied retraction and correction metadata. This is the first example of Crossref integrating third-party metadata, and we’re learning a lot about how to best incorporate other datasets in future.

Metadata API and services improvements

From 1 December 2025, we revised rate limits for the REST API to ensure system stability whilst maintaining free access to metadata for everyone. Changes were made to the rate limits for our ‘public’ and ‘polite’ APIs, while the limits for our Metadata Plus users stayed the same. We continue to make all metadata openly available to the whole community.

We also improved how information from our content system feeds into the REST API. A tool we call ‘pusher’—because it pushes information from the content system to the REST API—was rebuilt so that we now have a more reliable transfer of information between our two systems.

While adding to technical improvements, we’ve also worked to better understand the use of and streamline the service offering for paid options. We’ll share more about this year’s Metadata Plus consultation soon. And based on feedback, we have already retired the ‘Query Affiliate’ service, where a handful of organisations still paid us a fee to access our XML API, whereas no credentials have been required for some time.

Strategic theme 3: Manage Crossref openly and sustainably, modernising and making transparent all operations so that we are accountable to the communities that govern us

Infrastructure modernisation

One of our biggest projects of 2025—if not the biggest—was the move from our data centre into the cloud (AWS). For 25 years, Crossref had been running a physical data centre in Massachusetts, USA, but as part of modernising our systems, it was high time to move everything into the cloud. The move to AWS took several months, but we successfully completed this move to the cloud in July this year. We’re spending these last weeks of 2025 fully decommissioning our data centre, which means that we are removing all the equipment we had there and locking the door for the last time.

A part of the move to AWS included moving onto an open-source database solution, PostgreSQL. This reduced our reliance on closed, costly licensed solutions, while also aligning with our POSI commitment to open-source. Running our entire system in AWS provides a more stable, modern approach to our infrastructure, but it also is expensive. We expect to spend about 2 million USD on AWS fees next year, with the majority of this cost coming from REST API usage. Some of the improvements described above will help us manage those costs and better observe traffic patterns.

Our new cloud infrastructure is a bittersweet milestone: while we are happy to not have to rely on a physical presence to support a 24/7 global infrastructure, we also say a sad farewell to our much-loved and long-suffering Sys Admin, Tim Pickard, who has been with Crossref since 2002, and has contributed significantly and unwaveringly to keeping our system up and running in the data centre. Tim will be leaving Crossref at the end of the year; we’re grateful to Tim for all his years of dedication, and we will greatly miss his impressive Hawaiian shirt game on our all-staff calls.

After 25 years, it was also time to get serious about modernising our core content system, because even though it serves our community well, an older system with legacy code is a constant risk and frustration. We’ve therefore embarked on a multi-year modernisation project where we are replacing our old code piece by piece. We no longer want to have one big content system (a monolith), but are planning to identify different pieces of functionality and rebuild these as separate services (a modular, flexible, and robust approach). This year, we already managed to reconstruct some smaller pieces (for example, the ‘pusher’ mentioned above), and next year we will tackle larger projects, such as Metadata Matching and Authentication.

We continue to prioritise open, timely communication for planned or unplanned service interruptions and encourage everyone to monitor our status page at status.crossref.org. We’ll further hone our incident response processes in 2026, including openly posting incident reviews, and we’ll also centre system maintenance and documentation clarity in everything we do.

RCFS Projects

The Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability projects (RCFS) and the work of our Membership & Fees Committee resulted in deciding not to change some things (such as the basis for annual membership fees), but to change three things about our fees, as reported in July:

A new lower membership fee tier of 200 USD for members with annual revenues/expenses of under 1000 USD - so far, this includes around 3000 members. See below for more info.
A removal of volume discounts to reduce complexity in our billing code; they were little used, and those who did use these were fine with the loss of the discount.
A removal of the rule that only publishers of a title could register peer review reports (including comments and annotations) at the lower 0.25 USD fee for the first review; this lower fee is now available to any member to register any reviews of any other members’ works.

A new late-breaking addition to these fee decisions is the reduction of fees for members registering grants. As of January 1st 2026, there will be no fee for back-year (BY) grant registration, to encourage the faster adoption of older grants, which are more likely to have research outputs to be matched. This will be a two-year pilot to trial how a reduced fee incentivises adoption and boosts metadata connections, and could be extended to other record types as we monitor its success and sustainability. In addition, the 2 USD fee per current-year (CY) grant record is being reduced to 1 USD in line with the next-nearest fee, this is a permanent change for the foreseeable future.

Membership growth, efficiencies, and accessibility

In March, the board voted to update membership terms and bylaws to clarify processes for suspending and revoking membership, and to be more explicit about member practices that preserve the integrity of the scholarly record. A short-term Member Practices Working Group will be meeting in the first half of 2026 to draft these.

Crossref now serves 23,600 members across 164 countries, with continued growth particularly in Asia and Latin America. We’ve continued our ongoing member onboarding activities to support new members joining the community. We see around 230 new members join each month, and have welcomed 2,700 this year so far. We recently reported on how the shape of membership has evolved over our 25 years of operation.

From January 2026, we’re introducing a new lower membership fee tier of 200 USD for organisations with annual revenue or expenses of 1,000 USD or less, making membership more accessible to low-resourced organisations. Already, over 3000 members have been eligible to move into or join under that fee, and the idea is to monitor how this affects Crossref’s financial sustainability and potentially adjust the 200 USD annual fee down again in future years.

From 1 January 2026, the GEM program, which offers fee-free membership and content registration for all members from certain countries, will expand to include 18 additional countries, further reducing financial barriers to participation in the scholarly record, so we expect several hundred further members to join the existing 600 organisations in this category. More information about the GEM program expansion here.

As our membership base continues to grow, the Membership and Finance teams are constantly exploring ways to make shared processes more efficient. A key component in this work has been the efforts to automate several tasks within both teams to help us manage the additional work caused by our growth and allow our teams to focus more on providing the best quality service we can.

Our membership team continues to support our members, sponsors, service providers, metadata users and the wider community by email and through our community forum. The membership team includes staff members who focus on member support, and staff members who focus on technical support. During 2025 so far, we’ve received 36.8k member enquiries through our support system, a 17% increase from last year. This includes 22.6k inquiries related to general membership and 13k technical support enquiries. We’ve received 3.8k membership applications, and welcomed 2.7k new members.

Growth by the numbers

Crossref continues its steady revenue growth in 2025 due to the expansion of our membership base. With the addition of new members and the general growth of Crossref, comes an increase in the transaction-based tasks our Finance team handles.

So far in 2025 we have issued 14,833 invoices, which is a 9% increase since last year. We’ve seen an 11% increase in the number of payments received and applied, and a 12% increase in the amount of credit and debit memos applied over the same time last year. We have also seen a 42% increase in the number of billing-related tickets, totalling 20,723. A large segment of these tickets are related to fee updates associated with the new $200 membership tier.

Not all transactional work in Finance has increased as steadily, with increased revenue of 8% we have also seen a 14% increase in operating expenses. Through the strategic consolidation of vendors and use of financial tools, we have only seen a 1% increase in Accounts Payable invoices processed.

Organisational sustainability

Finance-wise, we’re doing well. We’re projecting to finish this year with revenue of 14,200,000 USD and expect revenue next year of 14,500,000 USD. We’re budgeting 2% growth in overall revenue, accounting for some of the changes to fees that will reduce our earnings on membership dues, but anticipating continued growth of content registration revenue.

Revenue and expenses trends

About 67% of our expenses come from personnel costs, and the other 33% include non-personnel costs like AWS, travel, legal fees, etc. As we continue to build out the team, we have ten new positions planned for the next year (recruitment for many of these is already underway or done). With additional staff roles and AWS expenses, we’re expecting expense growth of 16%. We post our financial statements and Form 990 filings on the financials page on our website.

Revenue per member size (by tier)

As the chart above shows, we still see ’the long tail’ of smaller members in the lowest fee category (275 USD) contributing more revenue than those in the largest category (50,000 USD) at 5.8 million USD versus 5 million USD.

Another aspect of sustainability is our impact on the world around us. And this year we were able to publish a second report on Crossref’s carbon footprint, having monitored and controlled for several carbon-heavy activities, primarily staff travel. Our reported emissions went up 40% from 2023 to 2024, due to more travel given our growth in staff and members, better recording our emissions (for example, with hotel stays), and including travel that we support for our partners, ambassadors and board members. In terms of travel spending, we are still well below 2019 when we were smaller, demonstrating that we are following through on not going back to the pre-pandemic norm.

We were one of the first open infrastructure organisations to adopt the POSI Principles and now have a few years’ experience in trying to meet them. Together with other adopters, we proposed updates and additions to the principles, based on real-world practice, and gathered a lot of community comment, resulting in the group publishing POSI v2 in October. We conduct a self-assessment every other year and we’ll be involving all our staff in the next self-assessment, due later in 2026.

Open governance through board election and annual meeting

We continued our commitment to being member-led and community-driven. This year’s anniversary Annual Meeting in October brought together members to discuss strategy, metadata developments, and hear the results of their voting in our board election. It comprised two half-days of online conferencing and several in-person satellite meetings spread across five continents, gathering close to 500 members of our community. It was a platform to reflect together on the past quarter of the century of building community infrastructure and connections underpinning the progress of scholarship, and to share plans for the future.

Each member has one vote, and together they elected the following organisations to serve a three-year term alongside the rest of the board:

Tier 1 candidates (electing one seat):

Rebecca Wambua, Distance, Open and e-Learning Practitioners’ Association of Kenya

Tier 2 candidates (electing four seats):

Damian Bird, CABI
Rose L’Huillier, Elsevier*
Anjalie Nawaratne, Springer Nature*
Nick Lindsay, The MIT Press*

*returning board member

Congratulations to the remaining and incoming board members as we start their new term in January 2026. Have a look at all the outputs from our Annual Meeting.

Strategic theme 4: Foster a strong team—because reliable infrastructure needs committed people who contribute to and realise the vision, and thrive doing it

Team structure

We reorganised the team heading into 2025 because we had ambitious goals that required a more structured, collaborative approach. We reorganised the work around three strategic, mission-driven areas of focus described above. This was our first full year with the cross-functional program groups in place, and the activities reported here make it evident that our team members, both existing and new, are firing on all cylinders.

New staff and new roles

We welcomed eight new team members in 2025. In February, we welcomed our new Director of Programs & Services, Helena Cousijn, and a new member of the Technical Support team, Arley Soto. In March, we welcomed our new Community Manager for funders, Rocío Gaudioso Pedraza. In April, we launched our new Data Science team by welcoming Jason Portenoy and Alex Bédard-Vallée. In November, we welcomed our new DevOps Engineer, Thelma Laryea, and our new Program Technical Lead for the OSO program, Bharath Govindarajan. In December, we welcomed another member of the Technical Support team, Natali Giorgobiani.

We also had team members step up into new roles. Dominika Tkaczyk completed the new leadership team by taking on the Director of Technology role, Paul Davis has started his new role as Product Manager, and Michelle Cancel has taken on the Head of Human Resources role. And there’s more to come! As next year begins, two team members will step into Program Technical Lead roles: Carlos del Ojo Elias for the CRN program and Patrick Vale for the CCT program. Together with the Program Technical Lead for the OSO program and the Head of Infrastructure Services, these roles will complete the new structure of the technology team. This structure is more closely aligned with how our work is organised and will enable stronger coordination both within and across cross-functional programs.

Supporting a thriving global culture

As our team grows in different aspects within our new org structure to meet the needs of the community, we remain committed to supporting a thriving culture through training, conducting regular temperature checks, and organising our annual staff retreat. This year, we continued our work on psychological safety and introduced workshops on giving and receiving feedback and on consensus building. We were able to put some of this training into practice at our in-person all-staff event in Split, Croatia, where we all came together to build our roadmap.

We are ending the year with 51 staff in 14 countries and look forward to diversifying and evolving even further as a team in 2026—we’re currently hiring in UX, Communications, and Membership—and keep an eye on our jobs page for forthcoming opportunities in Software, DevOps, Metadata, and Operations!

Thank you to our community of members, partners, board, ambassadors, sponsors, metadata users, service providers, integrators—and of course our team—for making 2025 such a productive year. Together, we’re building a richer, more connected research ecosystem for the benefit of society. We can’t wait to continue the work together in 2026.

The programs approach: our experiences during the first quarter of 2025

Helena Cousijn — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

At the end of last year, we were excited to announce our renewed commitment to community and the launch of three cross-functional programs to guide and accelerate our work. We introduced this new approach to work towards better cross-team alignment, shared responsibility, improved communication and learning, and make more progress on the things members need.

In line with the Crossref strategic agenda, the three programs focus on:

Co-creation and Community Trends (CCT): This program is responsible for interfaces such as reports/dashboards, record registration interfaces, connections and collaborations such as Open Funder Registry, ROR, ORCID auto-update, as well as OJS and other partner integrations. This program also includes the Crossref website and any front-end interfaces to support other programs. It includes initiatives aimed at upholding the integrity of the scholarly record and our tools in this area, such as Crossmark and retraction/correction tooling, and Similarity Check for text comparisons.
Contributing to the Research Nexus (CRN): This program manages and oversees all activities relating to contributing to the Research Nexus. A lot of the work in this program revolves around our REST API, but also includes our other APIs, incorporating external data sources like Retraction Watch and Event Data, building out metadata matching services with the new data science team, supporting the community of metadata users with API sprints and more modern options for retrieving metadata based on usage and need.
Open and Sustainable Operations (OSO): This program manages and oversees all activities related to making our operations more open, transparent, and sustainable. This program focuses on supporting and strengthening the core functions our members rely on and enabling future growth. It includes metadata deposit and processing, most apps for e.g. managing titles, authentication, and architectural and infrastructural projects like moving from the data centre to the AWS cloud service. This program also includes modernising our operations in general, which is not just technology but also finance and human resources, so projects like membership process automation, financial analyses, and business system integrations.

The approach we are taking is to support the work within the programs through (internal) cross-functional steering groups. Led by three program leads (who share updates on their programs below), three program steering groups meet regularly to discuss the topics and work that fall within the scope of each program. The steering groups consist of representatives from all teams within Crossref, which means every steering group has people from the community team, membership team, technical team, data science team, and operations and finance team, bringing all the perspectives and expertise needed to prioritise the next steps for Crossref and fostering broad knowledge sharing and shared responsibility.

Although the whole organisation contributes to these programs, they are coordinated by the Programs and Services team. The team was formed towards the end of 2024, and on the 1st of February, Helena Cousijn joined Crossref in the new role of Director of Programs and Services. Helena has a background in both product management and community engagement and is very excited to help Crossref shape the programs approach and work with all teams across the organisation to drive the strategic agenda forward!

If you’d like to keep an eye on the work that is happening within each program, you can find more information on the Crossref productboard.

Co-creation and Community Trends (CCT)

The mission of the CCT program is to build and foster relationships with our community and other services and organisations within it, so that Crossref can meet and anticipate community needs. Curiosity and listening are at the core of how we co-create to tackle emerging challenges, develop best practices, and explore new ideas for building the Research Nexus. We want our work to benefit all of Crossref’s diverse stakeholders - from our own colleagues and members to underrepresented communities in the wider scholarly ecosystem.

In the first quarter of 2025, our focus areas have been:

Improvements to our new record registration form for journal articles, which already supports grants, and was launched in beta for articles in 2024. For example, the form now has a built-in reference deposit feature. Join the conversation on the community forum for updates and feedback on this new helper tool.
Running a series of multilingual metadata health check webinars. There are more of these coming up throughout Q2, so it’s not too late to sign up for one if you are interested.
Integrating with Rogue Scholar to automate the assignment of DOIs to, and the archiving of, posts on this very blog.
Planning for the inaugural Crossref Metadata Awards - join our upcoming community call on 7 May to find out what this is all about.

In the coming months, we are hoping to tackle the following:

Kick off a project to review the information architecture of this website and look into how we can make our documentation and related information more helpful and easier to navigate.
Expand the record registration form for journal articles to allow easy editing of previously submitted records. This will allow us to sunset the long-deprecated Metadata Manager tool, as was first announced in 2021.
Begin building new record registration forms for more work types. Watch this space.
Explore options for supporting the integration of additional software systems with Crossref, building on our existing approach with OJS plugins, with a focus on open-source tools relied upon by our members for registering metadata.
Restore faceted search on Crossref Metadata Search. This feature was disabled in 2022 following intermittent performance issues. We believe recent improvements to Metadata Search will allow us to bring some filters back, although we will need to start small so as not to overload our systems with these more complex queries.

Contributing to the Research Nexus (CRN)

The research nexus is a rich and reusable open network that represents scholarly activity. It consists of connections between research organisations, people, things, and actions; it’s an evolving model of the scholarly record that the global community can build on forever for the benefit of society.

Our metadata is already a contribution to the research nexus, however, there is much more we would like to do. Our next steps will be to consolidate our existing data and services, and build the technical capacity, partnerships, and knowledge to enhance our contribution with new relationships. Some parts of our data storage and workflows don’t yet have the flexibility to fully capture all types of research objects and how they are connected.

To support this process, the main priorities in the program are:

Collaborate with our community. We want to get to know users of our metadata better and work more collaboratively alongside them. Also, we seek partners to contribute new data sources that will enhance our metadata with additional relationships.
Share the research nexus vision. We know that we aren’t alone in developing the research nexus, so we will reach out to others with a similar vision and identify where we have common goals.
Maintain our technology. We have already identified technical improvements we can make to our REST API, and we need to keep on top of monitoring and fixing bugs. We also need to build capacity for new types of data and relationships. Our other endpoints, such as the XML API and forwardlinks (for citations), need maintenance and are likely to be affected by a planned redesign of our core architecture.
Building a new matching service. Identifying relationships between metadata records is a key part of the research nexus. We have already improved reference matching over the years, and we’re looking to implement funding, affiliations, and version matching next. We’ve carried out research on several types of matching and are looking at building a new service to handle it in production.

In the first quarter of 2025, we’ve been working on:

Schema changes, making the first significant updates to our schema for several years, including adding the capacity for depositing ROR IDs for funding organisations in funding metadata.
Delivering Retraction Watch retractions via the REST API, integrated with member-supplied retraction/correction data.
Getting the community involved and understanding needs, planning a sprint and various workshops.
Plenty of under-the-hood updates to the REST API, and more significant upgrades to come later this year.

Next up, we will:

Plan and build out the new matching service.
Improve representation of some metadata in the REST API, including Crossref members, journals, and typed citations such as data citations.
Update the grants schema to extend the award types and respond to new funder member requests
Add contributor roles to the schema, including CRediT.
Ask our community about metadata retrieval, including the various APIs and the Metadata Plus subscription service.
Upgrade elements of the REST API and optimise the underlying technical infrastructure.

Open and Sustainable Operations (OSO)

The OSO program is centered on transparency and sustainability of our technical systems and our business and people operations. We focus on maintaining critical systems and operations and ensuring their security, addressing technical and operational debt, and controlling or reducing costs - to Crossref, our community, or the environment. We’re always keen to tackle projects to automate repetitive and manual tasks – of which we have many – and pay down technical debt, being as open and transparent as possible along the way.

Our most recently completed work includes:

Moving from Oracle to an open-source database, PostgreSQL. This work aligns with the POSI principles and sets us up for a more robust, reliable, and modern infrastructure.
Implementing metadata schema changes for deposit submission and processing, so we can now accept ROR IDs in funding metadata, as well as the changes in latest schema version (5.4.0) which includes the new ability to label references with a type (such as dataset, software, blog post, article, etc.).
Automating parts of the process to keep Sponsor information on our website up to date and make it easier to search, so our community can find relevant and accurate information about our Sponsors and how to work with them, and our membership team spends less time keeping the website current.

Ongoing work in our program includes:

Moving from a physical data center into the cloud (AWS). The PostgreSQL migration was the first step needed to enable our move to the cloud, which will allow us to operate more sustainably and efficiently.
Automating new member setup in our systems, which is largely a manual process now.

And coming up are:

Making changes in our core system to accept the upcoming 5.5 metadata schema version.
Extracting billing code from our main codebase, to set up as its own service. This will allow us to simplify our code and make it easier to maintain. We’ll also be implementing the changes to billing enacted as part of the Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability program (TBD!).
Holding a “systems workshop” in April, to understand how our current system(s) are and aren’t meeting staff, member, and community needs, and how we might go about building the open, sustainable Crossref system of the future.

What have we learned so far?

Internal communication

One of the reasons to implement a programs approach was to improve internal communication across the organisation. With all teams being represented on all steering groups, everyone is in the loop when decisions are taken. We see that this way, people feel more connected to the strategic agenda and, importantly, the ‘why’ is clearer to people. It is easier to get perspectives from across the organisation because contributing to these conversations is now part of people’s day jobs and so it’s easier to ask for their time. We are still looking to improve how we facilitate group discussions and decision-making to ensure we make the most of the program steering groups.

Planning and delivery

Working closely with people from across the organisation has helped with more effective planning. A closer collaboration between program leads and developers makes the delivery of new features and functionality more accurate and predictable. With the community and support teams also being part of the conversation, they can plan related comms and support/documentation efforts in a timely manner. So far, it has also been easier to get more things delivered. We have some big projects coming up this year that will be a good test for the programs approach!

Cross-cutting topics

The implementation of a cross-functional approach facilitates discussions around cross-cutting topics, but also leads to the question of how cross-cutting topics fit within a specific program! Maybe you already noticed that work on metadata schema 5.4 and the planned work on 5.5 is included under both Contributing to the Research Nexus and Open and Sustainable Operations in the update above. Because metadata development impacts many of our systems, work was needed within all programs to enable these changes - the input, the output and the interfaces. Later this year, we’re planning to share some visuals that better explain which projects sit with which program and how we deal with cross-cutting topics.

Alignment

One of the most important things for the approach to be successful is that people are bought in and willing to participate and communicate. For cross-organisational alignment, a culture needs to be in place (or developed) where people are willing to collaborate and be open and transparent about their work. In a practical sense, we are still looking at how we can better align our code bases with the current programs so that it is easier to develop the relevant expertise within the programs.

We hope to see many of you at our upcoming community call on 7 May. Please register to join as we discuss some of the work included in this update.

Looking ahead: the Research Nexus and the state of metadata in 2050

Ed Pentz — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Looking Ahead: The Research Nexus and the State of Metadata in 2050

Published in Science Editor (Vol. 48, No. 1, March 2025), this feature article uses 25 years of scholarly metadata history as a lens to look forward. The authors trace the journey from Crossref’s first DOIs in 2000 — when records carried little more than journal title, author, volume, issue, and page number — to today’s Research Nexus of 30+ output types and rich relationships between works, people, organisations, and funders. They then sketch what scholarly metadata might look like in 2050.

Strategists

Understand where scholarly metadata is heading. A long-view perspective on how the Research Nexus reshapes what gets counted, assessed, and valued in scholarship over the next 25 years.

Decision-makers

Plan for richer assessment beyond publication counts. The authors anticipate research evaluation shifting toward practices, broader impact, and the wider set of activities around research — not just papers.

Practitioners

Prepare for new output types and tighter relationships. Computational notebooks, AI-assisted research, and immersive scholarly outputs will need persistent identifiers and structured relationships if they are to participate in the record.

What this article covers

Looking back to look forward — how Crossref metadata grew from a handful of bibliographic fields in 2000 to over 30 research output types and rich relationship data today
The Research Nexus concept — the “complex, evolving network of objects, along with descriptions of how they relate”, and why this framing now underpins scholarly infrastructure
PIDs as the backbone — how DOIs, ORCID iDs, ROR IDs, and other persistent identifiers make the Research Nexus tractable at scale
Research Nexus in 2050 — emerging output types (computational notebooks, virtual and augmented reality experiences, AI-assisted research) and what they require from metadata infrastructure
Beyond publication counts — a future where assessment recognises research practices, broader impact, and activities alongside research, not just published papers
Challenges ahead — cultural resistance to open-data defaults, the financial sustainability of open infrastructure, and the importance of globally inclusive systems that resist regionalisation and fragmentation

Read the article

Read on Science Editor

A progress update and a renewed commitment to community

Ginny Hendricks — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Looking back over 2024, we wanted to reflect on where we are in meeting our goals, and report on the progress and plans that affect you - our community of 21,000 organisational members as well as the vast number of research initiatives and scientific bodies that rely on Crossref metadata.

In this post, we will give an update on our roadmap, including what is completed, underway, and up next, and a bit about what’s paused and why. We’ll describe how we have been making resourcing and prioritisation decisions, including a revised management structure, and introduce new cross-functional program groups to collectively take the work forward more effectively.

It’s important to acknowledge that Crossref has evolved significantly from just five years ago - our member count has more than doubled from 10,000 to 21,000 organisations since 2019 and they include all kinds of organisations such as funders, universities, government bodies, NGOs, and of course scholar- and library-led publishers. The smaller organisations now collectively contribute the majority of Crossref funding. We’ve gone from 100 million records to 160 million in five years, and our metadata is retrieved more than 2 billion times monthly, quadrupling what it was five years ago.

It’s within this context that we’ve spent quite a lot of time thinking about scalability, how we collect and process feedback and contributions from many organisations, how to automate our operations, and refining the plans for the next few years.

Our strategic agenda remains the same

A few times a year we update the strategy page where there is a quadrant of projects showing what’s completed, in progress, up next, and in planning/ideas - for each strategic theme. We also link from there to our live public roadmap which shows more specifics about individual projects, including projected timelines, and is updated more frequently.

If you’ve been watching the strategy page, checking in on the public roadmap or this blog, or joining webinars and annual meetings, you’ll know that we’ve had some longstanding plans to—among other things—reduce technical debt, rebuild our metadata management system, move to the cloud, modernise our schema, support multiple languages, and partner with multiple data sources to build the Research Nexus.

You’ve heard us talk about these initiatives a lot, but you’ve not seen particularly swift action.

Moving the work forward more effectively

Earlier this year, it became clear that our almost three-year project to build a new relationships API had not worked out. The project, dubbed ‘manifold’, was to initially deliver data citations, and eventually replace our central metadata system, but what was prototyped didn’t scale, even with a subset of our metadata. We weren’t confident enough about the project’s timeline or costs to justifiably continue investing further time and resources.

Meanwhile, we’d barely scratched the surface of our aim to pay down technical and operational debt, and we’d also been neglecting to keep the live system up to date with the numerous metadata changes that have been queued up, waiting to be implemented.

We knew the manifold project was ambitious – our system has grown in complexity over the years. We were trying to rebuild the car while driving it (our system needed to continue to operate and be maintained by our team) while trying to design a new approach to manage the many relationships between 160+ million database records. In the years we worked on this project, we learned a lot that will inform future plans for a large system redesign.

In March this year, we decided to pause the manifold project. We apologised to our community partners for not delivering the promised data<->literature matches they hoped to use. They were frustrated but thankfully understanding.

We then resolved to focus on backend infrastructural changes, conduct cross-training so that all of our staff would become familiar with current in-use systems instead of greenfield tech (for now), and start to make a dent in the backlog of bugs and long-promised schema updates in our mainstream services.

We’re happy to report some movement on these things and some milestones that have been achieved in these areas in recent months.

Fostering a happy and dedicated team

Any kind of work can only happen when our staff are in a good place, feeling supported and comfortable to question things, and well-equipped with information, purpose, and clear priorities. In June, when the whole staff met up in person, we had some really good conversations about culture, communication, and about sharing responsibilities. Some people ran birds-of-a-feather sessions to explore the issues that had been keeping them up at night, such as authentication/security, and rebuilding the Crossref System (CS), and the team also co-created a set of prioritisation drivers that are now in use within our roadmap and planning processes.

Taking on feedback from the all-staff meeting and then the July board meeting, we thought strategically about the organisational structure Crossref would need over the next few years to reflect the growth in scope and size, and fulfil its longer term goals. We have long had an ambitious agenda but realised we didn’t yet have the capacity to do it all. So we came to the conclusion that we needed an updated team and management structure to take us through the next phase of our development.

The structural changes were concluded at the end of November. They included:

Moving Technology under Operations, since Technology—though a vital enabler—still works in service to our mission and in support of our community, just like other operational things like board governance and finance.
Reframing product development as Programs and Services, and reducing our workstreams from five product portfolios to three programs. We formed cross-team steering groups around clearly articulated program areas (more on those below).
Broadening the leadership to include an Executive team and an extended Director team, and forming a Senior Management Team (SMT). These changes ensure that the collective responsibility for Crossref now rests on a wider group of experts who can back each other up and share the risk and the knowledge, rather than on just a few individuals.
We started recruiting for directors for two new leadership positions. We’ll welcome a new Director of Programs and Services and a new Director of Technology in the new year.
Evolving the strategic initiatives team into a data science team, integrating research & development functions throughout all teams and with the SMT taking collective responsibility for strategic initiatives.

Unfortunately, with the shift in approach for product development and by sharing responsibility for strategic initiatives and research among the wider team, we made the difficult decision that four positions would no longer work within the new structure.

A new approach: joined-up initiatives and cross-functional programs

Research has always been an important role for Crossref, but as this function had been annexed from our regular work, it became hard to coordinate strategic initiatives across the wider organisation. In recent years we inadvertently created more technical debt for ourselves, i.e., built multiple prototype tools without plans for adoption or moving them into production. Strategic initiatives, by their nature, need thorough research and high-level alignment, so we made such initiatives—things like Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability (RCFS) and improving the Integrity of the Scholarly record (ISR)—the responsibility of the whole senior management team.

Some useful research had been conducted, but we were never in a position to act on any of it. Particularly promising work has been in the field of metadata matching, and with the growth in the community reliance on our metadata, and attention on data quality rightly increasing, we decided to create a new data science team to be dedicated to this work, led by Dominika Tkaczyk.

We had also struggled with a traditional product management approach since all our tools and activities are interconnected, and we found we were trying to do too many things at once but not all of them very effectively. We also acknowledged that product management comes from the commercial e.g. retail world and therefore is designed to help companies sell/upsell, which is not our goal. So we looked to other approaches more suitable to mission-based nonprofits.

Introducing three programs

We have introduced cross-functional program management in order to work towards the following:

better cross-team alignment
shared responsibility
improve communication and learning
make more progress on the things members need.

Supporting the strategic theme of co-creation, a new program, facilitated by Program Lead Lena Stoll, now manages and oversees all activities around co-creation and community trends. A cross-team steering group just began meeting regularly and will be responsible for interfaces such as reports/dashboards, record registration interfaces, connections and collaborations such as Open Funder Registry, ROR, ORCID auto-update, as well as OJS and other partner integrations. This program also includes the Crossref website and any front-end things to support other programs. And it includes ISR (the integrity of the scholarly record) and our tools in this area such as Crossmark and retraction/correction tooling, and Similarity Check for text comparisons.

Supporting the strategic theme of complete and global metadata and relationships, a new program, facilitated by Program Lead Martyn Rittman, now manages and oversees all activities relating to contributing to the Research Nexus. Working particularly closely with the metadata team, led by Patricia Feeney, this program addresses how metadata is modelled, used, enriched, and extended. Work includes our APIs, incorporating external data sources like Retraction Watch and Event Data, building out metadata matching services with the new data science team, supporting the community of metadata users with API sprints and more modern options for retrieving metadata based on usage and need.

Supporting the strategic theme of open and sustainable operations and keeping to the POSI framework, a new program, facilitated by Program Lead Sara Bowman, now manages and oversees all activities relating to making our operations more open, transparent, and sustainable. This program focuses on supporting and strengthening the core functions our members rely on and enabling future growth. It includes metadata deposit and processing, most apps for e.g. managing titles, authentication, and architectural and infrastructural projects like moving from the data centre to the AWS cloud service. This program also includes modernising our operations in general, which is not just technology but also finance and human resources, so projects like membership process automation, fee modelling and financial analyses, and business system integrations.

The Programs will start to be reflected across our website and in our communications from next year.

What are Crossref’s new prioritisation drivers?

These are the drivers that our ~40 staff co-created in June that are guiding decisions about the priorities on our roadmap. New ideas will be evaluated in the following areas:

Encourage participation from new or under-represented communities
Respond to and lead trends in scholarly communications
Benefit the greatest number of members and users
Reflect on how the community works with each other and allow members to self-serve
Expand to support and connect relevant resource types and metadata fields
Make it easier to create and update metadata
Enhance metadata for completeness and accuracy
Make it easier to retrieve and use metadata
Automate repetitive/manual tasks
Address technical and operational debt
Maintain critical systems and operations and ensure their security
Control or reduce costs - to Crossref, our community, or the environment

We’re happy to report that the changes made this year have resulted in a productive last few months of the year. As reported in our annual meeting, here is the progress update.

What’s paused

A relationships API endpoint and, therefore, a specific data citation feed
Manifold, the three-year effort to modernise our tech stack
Most of the strategic initiatives prototypes that can’t yet be scaled, such as Labs API and Labs reports

What’s recently completed

We succeeded in moving the entire Crossref corpus to an open-source database, PostgreSQL
Fixed numerous REST API data quality issues and lots of troublesome bugs
Schema development - support for ROR as a Funder identifier is live and currently in testing
We automated some very manual membership and billing processes, saving hundreds of staff hours a year
Released a new form for journal article record registration, building on the grant registration form
Upgraded Participation Reports to include Affiliations and ROR IDs
Launched a new API Learning Hub

Since the rest of the community stops for no Crossref product roadmap issue, we also progressed a number of community and governance initiatives:

The Grant Linking System (GLS) reached 5 years with over 40 funders joining Crossref and registering over 130,000 grants and awards, including use of facilities and projects
Our research for Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability (RCFS) with the Membership & Fees Committee is going well, and we’ll have new fee proposals for review in 2025
The integrity of the Scholarly Record (ISR) conversations have deepened, and we’ve formed strong relationships with editorial experts and research integrity sleuths, who are getting up to speed on our metadata, and we’re working with some sleuthing consultants to change our processes to handle deceptive member behaviour such as paper mills, cloned journals, and citation manipulation. The new data science team plays a role here, along with membership and governance.

What’s currently in focus

In our efforts to do less but do it more effectively, we have two current priorities:

Get out of the physical data centre and into the cloud.
Develop Schema 5.4.

These two projects are underway, involving lots of communication and learning. Since we haven’t released any schema updates in many years, all our staff are learning for the first time how a metadata schema model is interpreted in a systemic way, learning about the structure of research objects, and honing the process as they go. We’ve high hopes we’ll be in a position to release continuous metadata schema versions and catch up on the backlog over the coming years.

What’s next

Continuous metadata development, with contributor roles up next
Retraction Watch data integrated into the REST API so users have a single source of retraction/correction data
Upgraded preprint matching and notifications
Modelling more equitable fees through the RCFS projects
Piloting a non-voting membership category

Once we’re fully in the cloud and in the groove of metadata updates, and with the support of newly-hired technology and program directors joining in the new year, we’ll turn our attention to rebuilding the central metadata system that we call the Crossref System, or “CS” and report more on this next year.

So that was our summary of 2024 and an indication of what’s coming in 2025 and beyond; sorry it’s so long, and thanks for reading this far! Next year we’ll get back to more regular updates as the strategic agenda and the programs progress.

ISR part four: Working together as a community to preserve the integrity of the scholarly record

Amanda Bartell — Wed, 26 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve been spending some time speaking to the community about our role in research integrity, and particularly the integrity of the scholarly record. In this blog, we’ll be sharing what we’ve discovered, and what we’ve been up to in this area.

We’ve discussed in our previous posts in the “Integrity of the Scholarly Record (ISR)” series that the infrastructure Crossref builds and operates (together with our partners and integrators) captures and preserves the scholarly record, making it openly available for humans and machines through metadata and relationships about all research activity. This Research Nexus makes it easier and faster for everyone involved in research performance, management, and communications to understand information in context and make decisions about the trustworthiness of organisations and their published research outputs. Conversely, it can make it harder for parties to pass off information as trustworthy when the information doesn’t include that context.

The community needs open scholarly infrastructure that can adapt to the changes in scholarly research and communications, and we’ve been changing and adapting already by building on the concept of the scholarly record with our vision:

Like others, we envision a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organisations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society.

We don’t assess the quality of the work that our members register, and we keep the barriers to membership deliberately low to ensure that we are capturing as much of the scholarly record as possible and encouraging best practice. We are careful to talk about Crossref’s specific role being with the Integrity of the Scholarly Record (ISR), and not the broader area of ‘research integrity’ (i.e. the integrity of the research process or content itself).

But there are many challenges and threats to research integrity and the integrity of the scholarly record, and there are tradeoffs with keeping the barriers to membership low. With that in mind, we have been dedicating more time to speaking with the community to explore what part we are and should in future play to help the community assess and improve trustworthiness in the scholarly record. We also want to work out where we can make use of our neutral, central role to convene different groups in scholarly communications to work together on these challenges.

A revealing afternoon in Frankfurt

Our starting point was a roundtable discussion in Frankfurt in October 2022. We organized it to coincide with the Frankfurt Book Fair, but the invited participants were from a wider spectrum than just publishers. The 40 invited participants represented editors, funders, research integrity professionals at publishers, representatives of ministries of science, and other partner organisations such as OASPA, COPE, STEM and DOAJ.

This half-day session enabled us to sense-check our thinking with the community and get input into whether our position is the best one for their needs.

Ed Pentz introduced the session by reminding participants that integrity is key to Crossref’s mission and is the basis of the shared Research Nexus vision. Amanda (that’s me) talked through our current membership processes, recent membership trends, and why wider participation is key and also the sort of questions the community comes to Crossref to solve (eg title ownership disputes). And finally, Ginny Hendricks talked through the specific services and metadata that Crossref has already developed to support the community as signals of trustworthiness, and introduced some new activities and ideas.

You can check out the slide deck and for more background, read our previous posts in the ISR series.

Participants then split into small groups representing a mix of communities, and we asked them to discuss three key questions:

Is Crossref’s role what you expected? What surprised you? What are we missing?
Are you aware of Crossref services? What are the barriers to more uptake? What are the challenges and opportunities?
What more could Crossref or its members do?

After discussion, each small group fed back to the room, and we followed up with a whole group discussion, before ending the day with a post-it note exercise for what Crossref should start doing, stop doing, and continue doing.

Here’s what we learned.

The importance of whole community involvement in research integrity and ISR

The need for all parts of the community to come together to solve the problems of research integrity came through loud and clear - there is no single group that can solve this problem on its own.

Publishers expressed frustration that responsibility for research integrity has been placed seemingly solely in their hands when institutions and funders can “unwittingly incentivise bad behaviour”. But it was clear that funders are just as concerned with research integrity issues, with many having made a dedicated trip for the roundtable. There were comments that bringing publishers and funders together around these issues was a rare but important opportunity, and there were calls for this to be an annual event. Both funders and publishers called for more involvement from and inclusion of research institutions in the discussion.

The group agreed that Crossref’s main focus should continue to be capturing and sharing the scholarly record, and that metadata and relationships are key for attribution, evidence, and provenance. One participant commented that “you can’t make open science work unless the metadata is complete” and that this would only happen with efforts throughout the community. Accurate and complete metadata needs to be:

pushed for by funders and institutions (through advocacy and policy)
provided by the authors and other contributors
collated, curated, and registered by the publishers and repositories
collected, matched, (sometimes cleansed), and distributed by Crossref.
(and we would add “prioritised by all who want to support open infrastructure over commercial alternatives”)

Interestingly, this echoes the ‘metadata personas’ output of the Metadata 20/20 initiative which defined roles in the community’s collective metadata effort:

Metadata Creators: providing descriptive information (metadata) about research and scholarly objects.
Metadata Curators: classifying, normalising, and standardising this descriptive information to increase its value as a resource.
Metadata Custodians: storing and maintaining this descriptive information and making it available for consumers.
Metadata Consumers: knowingly or unknowingly using the descriptive information to find, discover, connect, cite, and assess research objects.

Importance of whole-publisher involvement

A few participants, particularly those in editorial or integrity roles at publishing organisations, had not previously made the connection that metadata could be important signals of integrity. This highlighted a key problem - working with Crossref is seen by publishers as a technical/production workflow issue, and so knowledge of the benefits of metadata can be siloed within those teams. Crossref needs to reach out to editorial and research integrity teams to explain that good metadata isn’t just an end in itself and reinforce the impact it has on research integrity. This buy-in from across publisher organisations is vital.

We’re currently recruiting a Community Engagement Manager with editorial or research integrity experience to dedicate time to this area, to advocate for richer metadata within the editorial community, and progress this important conversation.

Agreement of the importance of metadata but an acknowledgment that this brings extra cost

Most participants agreed that rich metadata and relationships provide a core tool in establishing and protecting integrity. But they also acknowledged that collecting and registering more metadata often comes with an extra cost - whether that’s from system changes or just extra staff time. This is particularly true where publishers are working with third-party platforms and suppliers where there may be additional costs for adding fields and functionality to collect more metadata and register it with Crossref. Where knowledge of metadata is siloed in technical and production teams, and the wider benefits aren’t acknowledged, it can be hard to get internal buy-in for these extra costs and efforts.

The Frankfurt group also pointed out that the benefits of more comprehensive metadata (and what this means for ISR) are spread across the research ecosystem, but it is the publisher that usually bears the costs.

Need to define which metadata elements are trust signals and make it easier for the community to provide and access them

Through the course of the discussion, various elements were determined to be important to capture as “trust signals” and to identify relationships such as for retractions, conferences, reviewers, data, and when Crossref membership has been revoked for cause. We need to spend time identifying and prioritising these so that our members can do the same.

We need to make it easier for smaller, less technically-resourced members to provide this metadata, both through our tools and our documentation, as “doing this work can be very geeky and the documentation isn’t easy to understand as a layperson”.

There was also a discussion about where the metadata comes from - should community members be able to contribute metadata and assertions to other members’ records? If the provenance is captured then yes.

Once the metadata is captured, there remain challenges for users in where to start with the 145 million Crossref records. The groups asked Crossref to make it easier for community members to understand and use these records to make informed decisions, including by creating and sharing sample queries, libraries, and case studies.

We’re currently recruiting a Technical Community Manager to help improve the support we provide in this area to API users, service providers, and other metadata integrators .

The importance of retractions/corrections information

There was a lot of discussion about retractions and their importance as trust indicators. The group was surprised by how few retractions are currently registered with Crossref through Crossmark (12k). There was a lot of discussion around why Crossmark isn’t currently being adopted, and interest in taking this forward.

This needs to be a focus for Crossref, to encourage members to register retractions, corrections, and updates, and to make it easier for smaller publishers. There are new and emerging publishers who really want tools to help them demonstrate the legitimacy of their research, and an easy way for them to record corrections and retractions is key.

In their paper Towards a connected and dynamic scholarly record of updates, corrections, and retractions (September 17th, 2022), Ginny Hendricks, Rachael Lammey, and Martyn Rittman discuss how retraction information could be more effectively used - for example, letting a preprint reader know that the resulting article has been retracted, or letting the author of an article know the data that they’ve based their work on has been withdrawn.

Collecting the information is just the start - cascading retraction information throughout the research ecosystem is the main goal, and Crossref plays a central role here. As noted in the Information Quality Lab’s project Reducing the inadvertent spread of retracted science: Shaping a research and implementation agenda, “Many retracted papers are not marked as retracted on publisher and aggregator sites, and retracted articles may still be found in readers’ PDF libraries, including in reference management systems such as Zotero, EndNote, and Mendeley”.

It’s particularly important that this information is fed back to funders and institutions, and the group discussed having push notifications to these audiences for retractions. Some funders even employ staff members whose main purpose is to identify retractions.

It was pointed out that there may be good sources of retraction information (such as Retraction Watch) that Crossref could incorporate and match in our metadata.

Gaps in ‘ownership’, and Crossref’s role

The group discussed the many gaps in ownership for elements of research integrity, and some groups wondered if Crossref should actually change our approach and take on more responsibility for vetting content. However, after discussion, the group mostly agreed that this would mean a change of mission (and more staff) for Crossref and potentially limit global participation, thus making the metadata corpus less useful. Crossref should provide the widest possible metadata in an easy-to-consume format, and “other organisations can provide the verification layer”.

It was acknowledged that it would be easy for Crossref to get overwhelmed, so we ended the day by discussing not only what we should start doing, but also what we should stop doing. Unsurprisingly, there was a lot more to continue or start doing than stop doing!

However, the fact remains that there are gaps in ownership - for example, there is no central arbiter of who ‘owns’ a journal. Also, where do you go if you have a problem with a journal? Often the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) is seen as a solution, but they can’t solve this problem alone - it needs a coordinated effort from funders, institutions, publishers, and other partner organisations such as the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA), the Directory of Opena Access Journals (DOAJ), and like-minded organisations.

Many noted that Crossref is well-positioned to convene horizontal multi-stakeholder discussions to start to find solutions.

We also know that there are other industry initiatives aimed at supporting this work. The STM Association’s work on an Integrity Hub is gathering pace and aims to provide, among other things ‘a cloud-based environment for publishers to check submitted articles for research integrity issues’.

What happened next? Turns out, it really is all about relationships…

Since this meeting in Frankfurt last October, we’ve been focusing on relationships - thinking about how we capture them in our metadata, and working in partnership with other organisations to bolster our support for ISR.

The rest of this blog post highlights some of the activities underway:

Increasing participation in Crossref

In January 2023, we launched our new GEM Program, which offers relief from fees for members in the least economically-advantaged countries in the world. By opening up participation even further, we aim to extend the corpus of open metadata, giving opportunities for more connections, more context, and more relationships.

Supporting members in meeting best practices

ISR blog 2 explained more about how we help new members become “good Crossref citizens” with automated onboarding emails, extensive documentation, events and webinars, and help from our support team, Ambassadors, and other members in our Community Forum.

We’ve recently joined forces with COPE, DOAJ, and OASPA to create a new online public forum for organisations interested in adopting best practices in scholarly publishing. At the Publishers Learning And Community Exchange or The PLACE, new scholarly publishers can access information from multiple agencies in one place, ask questions of the experts, and join conversations with each other. Do take a look!

Being clearer on the impact of better metadata

As discussed earlier, better metadata can sometimes bring extra costs, and it’s helpful to understand the impact of this investment. We know from our ongoing outreach work that it’s difficult for our members to keep hearing that Crossref needs more and better metadata. They ask us for resources and increasingly want to see hard evidence of benefits to them. We recently showcased the journey of the American Society for Microbiology which went from ‘zero to hero’ in terms of metadata participation and completeness in Crossref. They describe their efforts to increase their registered metadata over the last few years, and note a significant increase in their average monthly successful DOI resolutions from ~390,000 in 2015 to an average of ~3.7 million in 2022. They found that “the more metadata we push out into the ecosystem, the more it appears to be used… Remembering that your publishing program benefits as much as everyone else’s when you deposit more metadata can help refine your short-term and long-term priorities.”

We know we sound like a broken record sometimes, but now other members can take it from ASM!

Encouraging better metadata and more relationships and identifying ’trust signals'

We’re trying to make it easier for members to accurately register key metadata fields, with the launch of our new grants registration form which will be extended to journals and other record types soon. This includes a ROR lookup - adding this unique identifier for research organisations gives even better context for the metadata.

We are also working to make it possible for anyone to contribute to metadata records, and have the provenance of these contributions clearly asserted.

Metadata adoption is still a key goal for our staff; indeed our new 2023-2025 strategic roadmap specifies…

“We want to be a sustainable source of complete, open, and global scholarly metadata and relationships. We are working towards this vision of a ‘Research Nexus’ by demonstrating the value of richer and connected open metadata, incentivising people to meet best practices, while making it easier to do so.”

… with item number one under projects ‘in focus’, being: “Adoption activities to focus on top metadata adoption priorities, which are:

We’re continuing to talk with the community to work out which metadata elements are most useful as trust signals, and we’re trying to prioritise some of the schema changes required to capture new elements. If you haven’t already, please respond to Patricia Feeney’s metadata priorities survey.

Thinking about retractions and corrections

We’ve been closely involved with the NISO CREC working group, and they should be making the initial draft recommendations public soon - watch this space!

Making it easier to view and compare metadata and expand the relationships

Our Participation Reports provide a visualisation of the metadata that’s available via our free REST API. There’s a separate Participation Report for each member, and it shows what percentage of that member’s content includes nine key metadata elements. It’s an important tool to help those in the community understand our metadata more easily.

We have been working on a new version of Participation Reports, allowing more comparison between members, and extra metadata elements to communicate trustworthiness, including whether each member has thought about the long-term preservation of their content, and whether it has been added to a repository. There is a test version to look at in our Labs sandbox. Do take a look and provide feedback.

We’ve also made public our list of members whose membership was revoked for contravention of the membership terms.

Continuing to work with funders

We’re continuing to work with funders through our growing funder membership, the Funder Advisory Group and other groups, including the Open Research Funders Group, the HRA, Altum, Europe PMC, and the ORCID Funder Interest Group. And we’re continuing to build the important relationships between funding and outputs (see Dominika Tkaczyk’s recent report) and engage with this key audience for research integrity.

Discussions with the community

We’ll be talking about ISR at our next community update on May 3rd - there are two versions of the meeting depending on your timezone - do sign up if you haven’t already. And if you’re attending the SSP conference in June, do come along to our panel “Working together to preserve the integrity of the scholarly record in a transparent and trustworthy way”.

ISR part one: What is our role in preserving the integrity of the scholarly record?

Amanda Bartell — Thu, 22 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The integrity of the scholarly record is an essential aspect of research integrity. Every initiative and service that we have launched since our founding has been focused on documenting and clarifying the scholarly record in an open, machine-actionable and scalable form. All of this has been done to make it easier for the community to assess the trustworthiness of scholarly outputs. Now that the scholarly record itself has evolved beyond the published outputs at the end of the research process – to include both the elements of that process and its aftermath – preserving its integrity poses new challenges that we strive to meet… we are reaching out to the community to help inform these efforts.

Scholarly research, and therefore scholarly communications, are rapidly changing with the development of new approaches, technologies, and models. We need open scholarly infrastructure that can adapt to these changes and provide trust signals that enable assessment of the integrity of the research and reflect the ways that research is changing. Crossref has been changing and adapting by building on the concept of the scholarly record with our vision of the Research Nexus:

“a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organisations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society”.

The foundation of the scholarly record and Research Nexus is metadata and relationships - the richer and more comprehensive the metadata and relationships in Crossref records, the more context there is for our members and for the whole scholarly research ecosystem. This will lead to a range of benefits from better discovery and saving researchers time to the assessment of research impact and research integrity. This is why Crossref is focused on enriching metadata to provide more and better trust signals while keeping barriers to membership and participation as low as possible to enable an inclusive scholarly record.

We want to engage with the community to emphasise this role, share our plans for the future, and get feedback to establish if we are heading in the right direction.

This blog explains our current position and will be followed by subsequent posts exploring all our services and plans in this area, as well as more details on our membership operations and policies.

What is “Integrity of the Scholarly Record” (ISR), and how does it feed into Research Integrity?

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) defines research integrity as a set of values in scientific research: honesty; accuracy; efficiency; and objectivity. It’s concerned with the soundness of the process of science. As a subset of that, the outputs of the scholarly publishing process create a “scholarly record” which allows those in the community to find evidence and context to help confirm whether these values have been adhered to. The scholarly record is Crossref’s focus. This means that Crossref itself doesn’t assess the quality of content or the integrity of the research process but rather enables those who produce scholarly outputs to provide metadata (effectively evidence) about how they ensure the quality of content and how the outputs fit into the scholarly record (through reference links, ORCID iDs for authors, ROR IDs for affiliations, funding and licensing information, etc.).

Crossref members include any organisation that produces research objects and materials (publishers, societies, universities, funders, research institutions, scholars) so they can establish a persistent record—tied to a persistent and unique identifier—for these outputs and supply metadata about this content in an open, machine-readable way. Maintaining this record for the long term, and adding in an important layer of context, establishes the integrity of the scholarly record as well as ensuring it is something that can be used by the whole community to improve scholarly research for generations to come.

The scholarly record is about more than just published outputs - it’s also a network of inputs, relationships, and contexts

In the past, the Scholarly Record was seen as just the published outputs at the end of the research process - for example, journal articles or book chapters. But as the OCLC Research Group notes in their 2014 report on The Evolving Scholarly Record:

“The boundaries of the scholarly record are in flux, as they stretch to extend over an ever-expanding range of materials.”

OCLC describes how outputs at the “process” and “aftermath” stages of the research process are becoming increasingly important alongside the outputs at the traditional “outcomes” stage.

We like to take this even further. We think the evolving Scholarly Record is about more than just recording different types of works. As the above report notes “The scholarly record is evolving to have greater emphasis on collecting and curating context of scholarly inquiry […] One can imagine an article in quantitative biology published in a Wiley journal, the data for which resides in Dryad; the e-print in arXiv; and the conference poster in F1000. All of these materials may be considered part of the scholarly record, but no single institution will collect them all. Instead, access is achieved through a coordination of stewardship roles in which the scholarly record is decomposed into discrete, interrelated units that organisations specialize in collecting, preserving, and making available.”

It’s this interrelatedness that we think is important, and Crossref plays an important role in collecting, matching, and sharing those relationships. We now focus on this ‘nexus’ - so no longer primarily the different types of objects, but increasingly the interplay and relationships between them. The context, rather than the individual metadata elements, is what’s key.

Martin Eve explores this idea further in his blog What is the Scholarly Record, suggesting “the scholarly record is a decentralized network of evolving truth assertions” and “Whether a truth assertion is part of the scholarly record is determined by another set of distributed assertions and their power configurations (say, through institutional affiliation) of the individuals who make such assertions.”

Barbara Fister’s excellent talk about the importance of lateral reading as a way to understand information systems discusses how professional fact checkers “engaged in “lateral reading,” check other sources for context before spending time reading and analyzing a source.”

Fister highlights the “SIFT” approach from A Curriculum for Civic Online Reasoning, created by a group of educators at Stanford University for students to evaluate online content. And she argues that this approach is also useful for assessing scholarly materials noting

“The networked, social nature of scholarship is worth making explicit”.

Where does Crossref fit in? Where do we have the most impact and opportunity?

To address the question of our role in the integrity of the scholarly record, we need to understand several aspects that Crossref has to balance in this capacity, such as

We don’t have the means or desire to be the arbiter of research quality. However, we operate neutrally, at the centre of scholarly communications, and we can help develop a shared consensus or framework. Our metadata elements and tools can be positioned to signal or detect trustworthiness. An important distinction is that we can play a role in assessing legitimacy but not in assessing quality.
We must be cautious that our best practices for demonstrating legitimacy and handling less-than-legitimate behaviour do not raise already-high barriers for emerging publications or organisations that present in ways that some may not recognise as professional standards. Disruption is different from deception. In discussions with our board this point has come out strongly: that Crossref has an opportunity to think about how to help the community identify deceptive actions and pair that with our efforts to bring more people on board.
Addressing this issue may involve changes to our membership eligibility and processes, bylaws, policies, staff resources, and technical and metadata solutions; actually, a combination of all these aspects. Many of these are projects that are already planned and we have ideas for extending these.
We regularly review the process we use for evaluating when and why to revoke membership for reasons other than non-payment. The volume of cases that we believe justify membership revocation—while a tiny fraction of members—is growing and does take staff and legal resources to address.

Crossref and our members aleady help preserve the integrity of the scholarly record in significant ways

Almost all of our services in some way touch on enabling people to express and evaluate trustworthiness; our mission statement commits us to “making research objects easy to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse […] all to help put research in context.”

We have, of course, specific tools and services that augment this activity too. Many members are active in:

Reporting corrections and retractions through Crossmark metadata.
Assessing originality using Similarity Check.
Conveying their stewardship via the public participation report.
Establishing provenance and stakeholders through funding metadata, ORCID, and ROR.
Acknowledging funding through the use of the Open Funder Registry and registering grants metadata.
Citing data for transparency and reproducibility, including linking to related research data via Event Data.
Demonstrating open peer review by registering peer review reports.

As recently concluded in this Nature editorial calling for us to think beyond open references,

“Depositing all relevant metadata in Crossref should become the norm in scholarly publishing.”

For those members just starting out on their journey, there are some immediate specific things that all members are able to do. Check your participation report and start registering more metadata to add that contextual layer:

References
Abstracts
Corrections and retractions via Crossmark
License links
ORCID IDs for authors
ROR IDs for affiliations
Grant IDs for funding acknowledgements
Cite data (preferably using DataCite DOIs in reference lists)
Register all related objects such as versions and translations via relationships
Register grants with Crossref (funder members).

By enabling our members to register their research objects and create metadata records about them that are freely and openly shared with the scholarly community, we facilitate them in being able to communicate the context and trustworthiness of that object.

And within that metadata, they can create relationships not just between research objects and also between research stakeholders - the individuals, affiliations, funders, and other players involved. That’s why we work so closely with other parts of foundational scholarly infrastructure (ORCID, DataCite, ROR) and why we now have more than 30 funders registering grants with us. We want to help to capture, identify, and link together all these important elements and more to deliver context for the scholarly record.

We started this blog by talking about the changes that are taking place in the world of research and how the infrastructure needs to adapt and change. Although we have extensive plans in place to improve our contribution to ISR, we need your help to establish whether our role is still the right one, whether we are missing anything and what else we might be able to do.

Join the discussion about the integrity of the scholarly record, and the Research Nexus on our Community Forum.
Keep an eye out for future blog posts and meetings. We are having a small, in-person discussion prior to the Frankfurt Book Fair and will report on this in a future blog post.
Sign up to attend Crossref LIVE22 for updates on these topics and all things Crossref.
Join and support initiatives and organisations that we partner with or who use our metadata to look at ethical practices in publishing, for example, COPE, DOAJ, and OASPA, and review the Principles of Transparency in Scholarly Publishing, which these organisations worked on with WAME.

In the coming weeks, we will post more about our product and metadata plans and also about the specifics of membership operations and cases we see and how we’re currently addressing them.

The road ahead: our strategy through 2025

Ginny Hendricks — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This announcement has been in the works for some time, but everything seems to take longer when there is a pandemic going on, including finding time and headspace to plan out our strategy for the next few years.

Over the last year or so we have had our heads down addressing how to scale our 20-yr-old system and operation – and adapting to new ways of working. But we’ve also spent time talking to people, forging alliances, looking ahead, and making plans. So we’re happy to now let everyone know exactly what we’ve been up to lately, what we are heading towards in 2025, and what projects and programs are prioritised on our near-term agenda.

Tl;dr

Introducing the new Crossref strategy through 2025, extending the one we published in 2018
There are now two additional strategic goals, to make six: bolstering our team; living up to POSI
Good progress has been made in reducing operational and technical debt - a lot of learning too
We’re unblocking stuff to get more done, including expanding R&D (more on that next week)
We have a new public roadmap 🎉
Come to next week’s mid-year update webinar to hear what’s happening and up next.

The emergence of a strategic agenda

2018 seems like a decade ago, doesn’t it? Back then we set out a 2018-2021 strategic direction—now archived—that described four goals: adapt to expanding constituencies; simplify and enrich services; selectively collaborate and partner with others; and improve our metadata quality and comprehensiveness. These themes were formed from the output of a planning exercise with our board in mid-2017 which tackled scenarios that remain true today, including: the increasing diversity in scholarly publishing (library-publishing, academic-led journals, shifting geographic dominance, etc.); the growth in preprints and other content formats; the sustainability of scholarly publishing (who is funding it and whether that is an expanding or shrinking pool); and the increase in policy and regulation in this space.

That meeting was the catalyst for embracing openness and a broader set of constituents. It was also decisive about Crossref’s role in this evolving community to focus on our core competencies, defined as:

A reputation as a trusted, neutral one-stop source of metadata and services

Managing scholarly infrastructure with technical knowledge and innovation

Convening and facilitating scholarly community collaboration.

So you can see how we got to focusing on metadata, services, infrastructure, and broad community collaboration.

Ahh, 2019, such an innocent time

When we wrote our post at the end of 2019 A turning point is a time for reflection we highlighted—with data—how different the Crossref community is nowadays. The post also linked to the results of our ‘value’ research project and a fact file which had even more hard data and posed the question Which Crossref initiatives should be top or bottom priorities?. To answer that, the LIVE19 annual meeting group voted (using betting chips) on priority initiatives, with the following results:

Support and implement ROR
Metadata best practices and principles
Support for multiple languages
Address technical and operational debt
Schema updates such as JATS and CRediT
Engagement with funders

We all know what happened next: the collective health and social trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic. All of us struggled. You all did too. Homeschooling, homeworking, homestaying. Caring for—and even saying goodbye to—sick friends and family. Also beloved colleagues. Alongside these unfamiliar new stresses, members were joining in growing numbers, funders kept joining to register grants, conferences went online and we loved them (before then hating them), the number of records we hosted kept going up, and publishing (especially preprints) skyrocketed.

The plan hasn’t actually changed much. Those charts in the 2019 fact file still make for remarkable reading as those same trends continue. We simply haven’t had time to update people on where we are with plans. So it’s high time we give an update on these priorities as well as contextualise them in longer-term goals.

But first, some framing

The chart below shows the approach we took to organise our thinking. A lot of it isn’t new; we have had the current mission statement, key messages (rally, tag, run, play, make), and truths since the rebranding work in 2015/2016. More recently, we have added POSI to our values, describing the principles and rules by which we operate as a committed open scholarly infrastructure organisation.

We already have a lot of 'words'. So why do we also need a vision statement and where do the goals fit in? In order to prioritize the things we will work on first, we need to be able to track everything to a higher vision, ensuring that everything we do is working toward an agreed destination. When we have organisation-wide goals, it means that everyone is clear on the direction, is able to prioritize individual and team work, and can see how their contribution fits in. This, in turn, instills confidence, and motivation - amongst staff as well as members and users.

Our working vision statement (feedback needed!) is:

We envision a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organisations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society.

A vision is, of course, shared. It isn’t Crossref-specific but describes the world in which we all want to work together in future.

Now for those contextual six goals

Full details are on the new strategy page but here’s a summary below.

This goal is all about people, support, culture, and resilience. Not just because we’re coming through a panedmic, but also because we’re growing and we need to be able to scale and manage growth more purposefully, with appropriate policies, fees, and resources.

We published a POSI self-assessment earlier this year and like-minded initiatives are following suit. This is a stated goal because we want to be held publicly accountable to the Principles of Scholarly Infrastructure standards of governance, insurance, and sustainability.

This goal centres on growth, strengthening relationships, community facilitation, and content. Working with a growing number of Sponsors helps us lower barriers to participation around the world, including in languages other than English. Expanding the support we offer for research funders and institutions are priorities.

This goal involves researching and communicating the value of richer, connected, and reusable, open metadata, and incentivising people to meet best practices, while also making it possible (and easier) to do so.

We’ve always collaborated but we want to work even more closely with like-minded organisations to solve problems together. Perhaps in future we could also partner with others to find operating efficiencies for our overlapping stakeholders.

This goal is all about focus. And about delivering easy-to-use tools that are critically important for our community. A lot of invisible work has been happening behind the scenes; we’ve been strengthening (and will continue to strengthen) our code-base (while opening up all code) in order to unblock some of the initiatives we know people have been waiting for.

Read more about what projects are included in the above goals in our full 2025 strategic agenda.

You’re invited to a mid-year update webinar

Rather than saving everything for our annual—usually November—meeting, we’ll also do a mid-year update and plan to do so in May or June every year from now on, in addition to the November updates which include the board election and governance and budget information.

This year, we’re covering some of the main product development work we have completed, underway, and planned for the next quarter. We’ll run it live twice - once for those nearby The Americas timezones (June 8th 3pm UTC) and once for those nearby Asia Pacific timezones (June 9th 6am UTC). We have a lot to cover in 90 minutes—including unveiling [our public roadmap[(http://bit.ly/crossref-roadmap)]—but we’re going to try really hard to have a few minutes to discuss questions too.

In the meantime, or indeed anytime, join the discussion over on our community forum - see the discussion below and join in on our forum.

We want to be held accountable to these goals so we’re reliant on you, as a community, to let us know what you think of our 2025 strategic agenda. As always; we’re grateful for your support and advice.

Crossref is 20

Ed Pentz — Tue, 14 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It seems like only yesterday…

On January 19th, 2000 a new not-for-profit organisation was registered in New York State. It was called Publishers International Linking Association, Inc but was more commonly referred to as “CrossRef”. This means that Crossref will be 20 years old on January 19th, 2020 so I wanted to mark the occasion with a short post. We are planning more ways to mark our 20th anniversary later this year so keep a lookout.

Crossref becoming a legal entity was the result of developments over the previous few years and the DOI-X pilot in 1999. Moving quickly, the fledgling organisation issued its first news release on February 2nd, 2000 - Crossref Update Journal Reference Linking Service Names Executive Director, Board of Directors, New Members, and a “Go Live” Timetable - announcing the appointment of an Executive Director (me!), that there were 22 members, and a plan for launching the system. From these beginnings, Crossref has grown into one of the most successful examples of sustainable scholarly infrastructure. This is due to the hard work and support of many people and organisations, and an organisational structure and governance and sustainability model that has proven very robust.

Looking back, Crossref has achieved an amazing amount but it certainly wasn’t a forgone conclusion that we would be successful. On our tenth anniversary we wrote an overview of Crossref’s founding and early years The Formation of Crossref: A Short History, which highlights that vision, collaboration, trust and utility all contributed to Crossref’s success. I particularly want to recognize Eric Swanson, from Wiley, and Pieter Bolman, from Academic Press/Harcourt Brace for their critical role in the founding of Crossref and in its early success by providing the vision, bringing everyone together, serving as the first Chair and Treasurer of the organisation, and providing me with support and guidance in Crossref’s early start-up phase.

Our history document notes that Crossref grew more quickly than expected, “By the end of 2003, CrossRef had 300 members with 12 million DOIs assigned, compared to the initial projection of 60 participating publishers and 3 million DOIs assigned.” Looking at the 2010 annual report at the ten year mark, Crossref had 43 million content items, 943 members and 15 staff. Since then, Crossref has continued to grow faster than expected and, in fact, at the start of of 20th year, growth is increasing. Our latest annual report “Crossref Annual Report & Fact File 2018-19” highlights that there we have 111 million content items - an average annual increase of 15%; over 11,500 members with over 180 joining per month - an average annual increase of 112%; and 37 staff - an average annual increase of 7%. Crossref is also financially stable, having generated surpluses every year since 2003 and with no fee increases in 15 years - an effective 30%+ decrease for members.

Some of the most important statistics for me are those around DOI resolutions - humans and machines following persistent DOI links - and metadata dissemination via our open APIs and paid services. In 2010 there were around 470 million DOI resolutions for the entire year - we now see over 400 million resolutions per month. With metadata dissemination in 2010 there were on average about 40 million queries per month and there are now over 600 million per month meaning that huge amounts of metadata are flowing out into the ecosystem and improving persistent linking, discovery, and the research process. Also, very importantly, we are much more global and diverse than we were, with members and users from over 120 countries, representing all disciplines and all types of organisations (societies, commercial publishers, funders, start-ups, universities and other research institutions). And in a big change, the members in the top three fee categories accounted for 36% of revenue in 2019 - down from 56% in 2011, while the bottom three categories accounted for 46% of revenue in 2019 - up from 25% in 2011.

As we noted in our blog post from November 2019, A turning point is a time for reflection, “different people have always wanted different things from us and, since our founding, we have brought together diverse organisations to have discussions—sometimes contentious—to agree on how to help make scholarly communications better. Being inclusive can mean slow progress, but we’ve been able to advance by being flexible, fair, and forward-thinking.” While we’ve been very successful, there is a lot we can do better and it is tricky keeping all our stakeholders happy - but that’s what we’ve always done and we’ll continue to do it by being open, inclusive, collaborative, and willing to change and adapt. The one constant in Crossref’s 20 years has been change. The staff and board will be reviewing Crossref’s strategy in 2020 with the value research report and LIVE19 Amsterdam workshops as input. I’m confident we can continue to play a vital role in the scholarly research ecosystem.

A huge thank you to everyone over the years who has contributed to Crossref’s success - it’s a very long list and includes staff, board members, members, users, supporters, partners, consultants, and many others. Personally, I’m proud and honored to have played a role in Crossref’s success and development over the last 20 years and the best part is that there is more to come.

Keep an eye out for the publication of the outputs from our LIVE19 meeting and further 20th anniversary activities.

A turning point is a time for reflection

Ed Pentz — Sat, 09 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Crossref strives for balance. Different people have always wanted different things from us and, since our founding, we have brought together diverse organisations to have discussions—sometimes contentious—to agree on how to help make scholarly communications better. Being inclusive can mean slow progress, but we’ve been able to advance by being flexible, fair, and forward-thinking.

We have been helped by the fact that Crossref’s founding organisations defined a clear purpose in our original certificate of incorporation, which reads:

“To promote the development and cooperative use of new and innovative technologies to speed and facilitate scientific and other scholarly research.”

As Crossref prepares to turn 20 in January 2020, it’s an opportunity to reflect on achievements and highlights from 2018-19 and also ponder the preceding decades. Change is a constant at Crossref but the organisation has never strayed from its initial defined purpose. Our services and value now extend well beyond persistent identifiers and reference linking, and our connected open infrastructure benefits our 11,000+ membership as well as all those involved in scholarly research. This expansion is exactly what was envisioned to meet the goal of “speeding and facilitating” research.

This year’s annual report is different from previous years’; it has been expanded into a ‘fact file’ so that we can invite comments on the path ahead, based on transparent access to data about our membership, activities, and finances. As we were pulling together the charts and tables for this annual report we noticed stark differences in where Crossref is today compared to years past.

The rate of membership growth has accelerated and we now have over 180 new members joining every month, leading to one of the most striking changes we found. The lowest three membership tiers now account for 46% of revenue (up from 25% in 2011) while the highest three tiers account for 36% (down from 56% in 2011).

Today, the typical Crossref member has just a few hundred registered content items.

One way we have been able to accommodate this growth efficiently is by collaborating with sponsors in different countries. Very small members can join via a local sponsor that is able to provide technical, financial, language, and administrative support. We now have more members joining via sponsors, who otherwise would largely not be able to join at all. While you’d need to be a millionaire by US standards to join directly from Indonesia in our lowest fee tier (calculated using Purchasing Power Parity), the sponsor program—supported often by government investment in science and education—has enabled Indonesian organisations to join Crossref in large numbers, supporting their aim to become one of the fastest-growing nations in open research, and to help that research be discovered.

Crossref has repeatedly stayed ahead of developments in the community

In 2007, when the Similarity Check working group discussions and pilot started, there was disagreement on the board about whether Crossref should provide such a service and whether it was a strategic priority for members. By the end of the pilot, when the decision came to launch a production service, it was seen as essential and a top priority. This conclusion has been borne out in recent research into the value of Crossref; Similarity Check is one of the services of most importance to members.

Adding preprints as a record type was controversial at the time. The board discussed the topic of “duplicative works” for about two years with strong opinions on all sides. The working group delivered a good set of policies and technical specifications and in the July 2015 board meeting there was a majority—but not 100%—agreement on the motion to approve. We implemented preprints as a record type just in time to accommodate the snowballing of preprint servers emerging from existing and new members.

Another example of a former—and current—area of contention is the approach to metadata. When Crossref first launched, there were lengthy discussions about what metadata we should collect. The initial focus was on the minimal set of metadata to enable reference matching in support of reference linking. In the beginning, neither article titles, lists of authors, references, nor abstracts were included in the minimal metadata set. We supported them as optional but most members opted out. However, the huge set of metadata that Crossref collects and disseminates now is seen as essential, providing a lot of value for members in terms of discoverability.

Today, Crossref enables metadata retrieval on a large scale—an average of more than 600 million queries per month—through a variety of interfaces, most notably the REST API (Public, Polite, and Plus versions). The metadata is used by thousands of organisations and services—both commercial and not-for-profit—increasing the discoverability of member content. In fact, members of all stripes have long initiated projects to expand the metadata Crossref is able to collect and disseminate: from facilitating text mining (through license and full-text URLs); to enabling better connections with and evidence of contributions (through Funder IDs, ORCID iDs, and soon CRediT roles and ROR IDs).

These are all examples of where Crossref has successfully “promoted the cooperative use of new and innovative technologies” and where we are meeting our mission to make scholarly communications a little bit better. As ever, we need to thank our brilliant staff for their unfailing resilience, balance, and diligence, in these times of dynamic change.

Considering the value and future of Crossref

Research is global, and supporting a diverse global community is a challenge. This year, we conducted our first wide-ranging investigation into what people value from Crossref. This involved telephone interviews with over 40 community members as well as an online survey of 600+ respondents.

The results of the value research are referenced throughout the annual report/fact file and are available online publicly. We will be discussing the insights in various forums and posing some questions, such as:

How should Crossref balance the different dynamics in the community?
Are the right members involved in key decisions?
Are the sustainability model we have and the fees we charge fair?
Which initiatives should be top or bottom priorities?

Director of MIT Press, Amy Brand, recently reflected that Crossref is currently at a crossroads, envisioning that:

“The Crossref of 2040 could be an even more robust, inclusive, and innovative consortium to create and sustain core infrastructures for sharing, preserving, and evaluating research information.”

But only if Crossref is not:

“held back, and its remit circumscribed, by legacy priorities and forces within the industry that may perceive open data and infrastructure as a threat to their own evolving business interests.”

We welcome this public commentary and encourage others in the community to respond and report what value Crossref offers as community-owned infrastructure, and how they’d like to see the organisation evolve.

More than ever, we need to have this discussion with a broad and representative group. So please, read the value research report and the annual report/fact file, and get ready to voice your opinions!

LIVE19, the strategy one: have your say

Ginny Hendricks — Sun, 11 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

With a smaller group than usual, we’re dedicating this year’s annual meeting to hear what you value about Crossref. Which initiatives would you put first and/or last? Where would you have us draw the line between mission and ambition? What is “core” for you? How could/should we adapt for the future in order to meet your needs?

Striving for balance

Different people want different things from us. As Aristotle said: “There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.” As we prepare for our 20th year of operation, please join this unique meeting to help shape the future of Crossref.

There won’t be any plenary talks about trends in scholarly communications, but instead workshop-style activities to help hone our strategy, do some scenario planning, and prioritize goals together, as a community.

Have your say

Whether you can make it in person or not, you can still pitch in by giving us your opinion in advance. We’re gathering broad input on what you think we’re doing well, whether we’re on the right track strategically, and how we can improve. There’s never been such a comprehensive study of what value we offer so we hope to learn a lot and will adjust plans based on the results.

Please take the “Value of Crossref” survey. It’ll take 10-12 minutes.

At the meeting

Please join us at the Tobacco Theater in central Amsterdam on the afternoon of 13th November from 12:30 pm and for the full day of 14th November. The first afternoon will involve some scene-setting talks with key information you’ll need for the following day’s workshops, including the results of the survey above. There will also be some announcements, including who members have voted onto our board (this year’s slate is yet to be communicated), and of course plenty of time for discussion and questions among peers.

In addition to the results of the survey, during the meeting each participant will be furnished with a ‘fact pack’ to reference in their discussions and recommendations. It will include answers to questions like who pays to keep Crossref sustainable?. I’m looking forward to busting some myths on that one! Everyone will be pre-assigned to a particular table/topic (like a wedding!) and will stay in those groups for roundtable discussions. There will be a community facilitator and a staff member on each table. You will be able to mingle more widely in the breaks and the evening drinks reception on the 13th.

Based on this provided data, we’ll be asking participants to think about key questions such as:

Who, ultimately, does Crossref serve?
What should Crossref’s product development priorities be?
What (if anything) would be missed if Crossref went away? (i.e. what’s our central value)
What does ‘community’ really mean and how should Crossref work to better balance opposing priorities?

Research is global, and supporting a diverse global community is a challenge. Come and have your say. Register today.

I can’t wait to see you there and hear your thoughts.

Phew - its been quite a year

Ed Pentz — Thu, 13 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

As the end of the year approaches it’s useful to look back and reflect on what we’ve achieved over the last 12 months—a lot! To be honest, there were some things we didn’t get done—or didn’t make as much progress with as we hoped—but that happens when you have an ambitious agenda. However, we also got some things done that we didn’t expect to or that weren’t even on our radar at the end of 2017—this is inevitable as the research and scholarly communications landscape is rapidly changing.

In my blog post from the beginning of the year, the key projects I highlighted were Metadata Plus, Event Data, organisation IDs, Grant IDs and Metadata 2020, and that richer metadata and more record types were key goals. We did make very good progress on all of these projects as reported below.

For 2018 we were operating in the framework of the four strategic themes, or areas of focus, developed by the board and staff. These are: 1) Simplifying and enriching our services; 2) Improving our metadata; 3) Expanding constituencies, and 4) Selectively collaborating and partnering. These themes will also be guiding us in 2019.

Simplifying and enriching our services

Upgrading our tools

Over the past year, we’ve been busy streamlining our processes, developing new tools and adding new services. A key new tool is Metadata Manager which supports the Content Registration service by offering a simpler, more user-friendly, non-technical way to register and update metadata. It provides lots of context-sensitive help, registers content immediately, in real time, and provides guidance on how to make corrections—thereby ensuring each deposit is successful. Metadata Manager currently supports journal deposits (we would have liked to add more in 2018) but we will be adding other record types in 2019.

Upgrading our services

Crossref metadata has always been open through a number of interfaces without restriction, but this year we introduced an option for extra support and functionality, through Metadata Plus. Metadata Plus provides guaranteed uptime, snapshots of the complete set of metadata and enhanced support for organisations (members or not) that want to use Crossref metadata in their own services and systems.

Improving the member experience: New membership terms

This year we began to redesign the member experience and have made a lot of improvements to the sign-up and onboarding process, the most significant of which is the new click-through membership terms, introduced in July for new members and coming into effect for existing members in March 2019, which is proving to be a huge time saver for both our members and our team.

Improving our metadata

Our objective this year was to better communicate what metadata best practice is, to equip our members with all the data and tools they need to meet this best practice, and to achieve closer cooperation from service providers.

Best practice tools: Participation Reports

Released in Beta in August this year, Participation Reports provides a dashboard that gives a clear picture of the metadata that each member provides. This is a useful visualization of metadata that has long been available via our public REST API. Members can see where the gaps in the metadata are and get information on how to fill those gaps.

Communicating metadata best practice: Data Citations

The importance of linking data with literature can’t be understated. Research integrity and reproducibility depend on it. We’re committed to exposing the links between the literature and the data or software that supports it, and earlier this year we partnered with DataCite to make this a reality. All the data citations coming in from Crossref and DataCite are being pulled into Event Data.

Equipping members with all the data: Event Data

Event Data reached technical readiness. Event Data captures and records “events” such as comments, links, shares, bookmarks, and references. It provides open, transparent, and traceable information about the provenance and context of every event.

Expand constituencies

Crossref currently has 15,000 members in 140 countries. With that comes the need to increasingly and proactively work with emerging markets as they start to share research outputs globally.

Ambassador program

The Crossref Ambassador program launched in January and now has a team of 16 trusted contacts who work within our communities (as librarians, researchers, publishers, and innovators) around the world. They share great enthusiasm and belief in our work. We provide them with training and support, and they help us improve education about global research infrastructure in general and the opportunities that are enabled through richer metadata.

Funders and grant identifiers

I’m very happy to report that the Crossref board approved grants as a new record/resource type to be rolled out in 2019 - we made faster progress on this than expected. The proposal for grant identifiers was developed by staff in collaboration with the Crossref Funder Advisory Group and the Membership and Fees Committee. This means that funders will be joining Crossref and registering a standard set of metadata and a persistence identifier - a DOI - for their grants.

Collaborate and partner

So that our alliances with others have the greatest impact, we have aligned our strategic plans for scholarly infrastructure with others. Some of these alliances are led or driven by Crossref and with others we are involved but not leading.

ROR

We are working with the California Digital Library, DataCite and Digital Science as the Steering group for ROR - the Research Organization Registry - which is a new, community-led project that is developing an open, sustainable, usable, and unique identifier for research organisations based on the work done by the organisation Identifier Working Group in 2017 and 2018.

Metadata 2020

Metadata 2020 is a collaboration that advocates richer, connected, and reusable, open metadata for all research outputs, which will advance scholarly pursuits for the benefit of society. Over 140 volunteers—including publishers, librarians, researchers, platforms/tools, and other stakeholders—from 86 organisations, are working in six project groups. The projects are very strategically focused, looking at key issues like researcher communications, incentives, and shared best practices.

I can’t close off the year without mentioning the incredible milestone we reached this September when the 100th million content item was registered with Crossref. This was made possible by our members’ and the wider community’s commitment and contribution, so once again, thank you.

Roll on 2019!

New Board Chair Paul Peters shares our mission

Ginny Hendricks — Thu, 22 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

At the end of last year, Paul Peters—CEO of our member Hindawi—became the new Chair of the Crossref Board. The announcement was made in Singapore at our first LIVE Annual ever held in Asia. I caught up with Paul back in London, UK, where he answered a few questions about what he hopes to bring to the Board, and to the Crossref community as a whole.

1. Congratulations, Paul. How delighted were you to be voted in by your fellow board members, old and new?

That’s a rather leading question ;-)

Seriously though, I am incredibly honored to have been chosen to lead Crossref’s board at such an important point in the organisation’s development. The current composition of the board is as diverse as it has ever been, which is essential if the board is to represent Crossref’s global membership, as well as the wide range of business and publication models that our members use. This diversity on the board will help to support Crossref’s aim of encouraging innovation in scholarly communication by providing open infrastructure that benefits all researchers.

2. You’ve been on our board for nine years. How has it changed in that time and what should the board be most proud of?

When I first joined the board, Crossref was at the stage where you had successfully established persistent reference linking as a standard practice among scholarly journal publishers. And, although this was the original purpose of Crossref, it was by no means an easy task, as it required a diverse group of competing publishers to work together in building shared infrastructure for the common good.

In the nine years since then, I’ve seen Crossref continue to build on this core foundation of technological expertise, the trust and goodwill of its membership, and the diverse skills of its small staff. The result has been the development of important new services (such as Similarity Check) that have become an essential component of the scholarly communications system, support new record types (including both preprints and peer review reports) that are becoming increasingly important in the move towards an Open Science future, and the expansion of Crossref’s membership to include almost 10,000 members of all shapes and sizes from 114 countries around the world.

With regard to the board itself, I have been pleased to see Crossref undergo important changes that have provided greater transparency in the organisation’s governance, as well as more active participation from its members. Last year Crossref put out an open call to invite members to put themselves forward for consideration on the board. As a result of holding its first contested election, Crossref saw a dramatic increase in the engagement of members in the election process. Not only is this important for ensuring that the board is truly representative of the diverse membership, but it will also help to actively engage a larger pool of members in the important work that lies ahead.

3. What do you see as Crossref’s strengths and role?

I believe that Crossref’s past and future success relies on two key strengths. The first is its ability to bring together a large and disparate community of organisations and individuals to create tools and services that no single organisation could develop alone. People sometimes overlook how successful Crossref has been in building the trust and support of a diverse group of stakeholders, however I believe this has been an essential ingredient in the organisation’s success and will be essential as Crossref develops new tools and services in the years to come.

Crossref’s other core strength has been the expertise, passion, and ambitious vision of its staff, many of whom I have had the pleasure of knowing since my first days on the board. The ability to develop and maintain real-time infrastructure serving millions of end-users, while simultaneously developing new products and services, requires an incredible range of skills from technology and product development, to marketing, community outreach, and customer support. Moreover, as a growing non-profit organisation with thousands of members around the world, and an international staff working across national boundaries, Crossref’s legal, financial, and administrative support team have also been an essential ingredient in the organisation’s success.

4. We’ve grown beyond just the publisher constituency to libraries, scholars, and platforms and tools, which constituencies do you see us involving next?

Over time I believe that Crossref’s constituency will grow to cover all organisations that contribute to the creation and dissemination of scholarly research, although I recognize this may take several years to achieve.

In the short-term, I believe that research funders are the most important stakeholder group for Crossref to focus on, for the following reasons:

First, with the development of the open Funder Registry and the addition of structured funding data to the Crossref registry, Crossref has already become an important provider of open infrastructure for research funders.
Second, as the result of several key initiatives within the Open Science movement I believe that research funders will play an increasingly important role in determining how scholarly research outputs are created, shared, evaluated, and re-used. Therefore, the active involvement of research funders in Crossref’s membership and governance is essential.
Finally, I believe that there is an important opportunity for Crossref to enable a range of new services across the research lifecycle by providing persistent identifiers and structured metadata research grants. Given how critical grants are within the research process, I’m amazed by the lack of infrastructure to monitor, evaluate, and build upon grants as first-class research objects. In many cases there is minimal, if any, public information about the grants that have been awarded by a particular funder. Even in cases where such data is available, it is rarely structured in a way that enables it to be searched or analyzed across multiple funding agencies.

In the absence of a community-driven, non-profit organisation like Crossref to provide this infrastructure on an open basis, there is a risk that funders will be forced to rely on proprietary alternatives that limit how this information is used and by whom. Fortunately there are already efforts underway within Crossref to develop both the tools and the community of funders that will be required to create persistent identifiers and structured metadata for grants and other forms of research funding.

5. What are the biggest challenges facing Crossref?

I believe that Crossref’s greatest challenge will be to continue to bring together a diverse group of stakeholders, some of whom are regularly at odds with each other, in order to collaborate in developing tools and services for the benefit of the research community.

As challenging as it has been for Crossref to bring together competing publishers to build the shared services that we have all come to depend on, I believe that keeping the community focused towards a common goal will become even more challenging as that community expands to include funders, universities, and the many other organisations involved in the scholarly communications ecosystem. However, I think that Ed and his team have as good of a chance of succeeding as anyone could hope for, which is why I am so excited about Crossref’s future in the years ahead.

6. How will things change with you as Chair? You’ll be busier I guess. But enough about you already, what can we expect as staff and Board?

As my first order of business I’ll be getting rid of Crossref’s corporate jet, lavish office spaces, and executive chef. </sarcasm>.

On a more serious note, my hope is that as Chair I will be able to work with the other members of the board in supporting Crossref’s staff as they work to achieve the ambitious goals we have set out during the past year. I believe that Crossref’s board members and staff are aligned in the desire to significantly expand the range of services Crossref provides, as well as the communities it serves.

The board still has an important role to play in shaping the organisation’s strategic vision, while giving staff ample space to execute on this vision. Said another way, I hope to enable some lively strategic conversations among the board while making sure that we don’t get in the way of Ed and his team once it’s time to put ideas into action.

On a more personal note, I hope to be a good sounding board for Ed on any issues that he faces, either internally or externally, on the road ahead. Given my own experience in leading a growing organisation through a period of significant change, I know how important it can be to have someone to talk to when difficult challenges arise, which they inevitably will. I hope that I can be a good advisor—and also a good friend—to Ed as he leads Crossref into the exciting future that lies ahead.

Ginny: Thanks, Paul. I know Ed will miss his personal chef… but we look forward to working with you too!

A year in the life of Crossref

Ed Pentz — Tue, 23 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

We are delighted to report that last year Crossref welcomed a record-breaking 1,939 new members and, because our member base is growing so rapidly in both headcount and geography—with the highest number of new members joining from Asia—we thought it was a good time to reiterate what Crossref is all about, as well as show off a little about the things we are proud to have achieved in 2017.

What is Crossref?

We are an organisation that runs a registry of metadata and DOIs of course, but we are much more than that—staff, board, working groups, and committees as well as a broad range of collaborators, users, and supporters in the wider scholarly communications community. Increasingly, our community includes new contributors like scholars, funders, and universities. Together, we are all working toward the same goal—to enhance scholarly communications. Everything we do is designed to put scholarly content in context so that the content our members publish can be found, cited, used, and re-used.

Here’s how we did that over the past year:

We rallied the community

Rallying the community is all about working together to forge new relationships and pave the way for future generations of researchers—in 2017 we were closely involved with the launch of Metadata 2020; a collaboration that advocates richer, connected, and reusable metadata for all research outputs.

We tagged and shared metadata

To make sure that our APIs continue to have real, genuine utility, we introduced a new service called Metadata Plus in 2017 so that platforms and tools can leverage the power of our rich, immense database to increase the value and discoverability of content.

We played with new technology

To keep pace with changes in the industry and stay true to our mission, we often play with new technology with the goal of offering a bigger and better infrastructure. In 2017 we formed a working group and an advisory group for two new identifiers that will see this infrastructure increase; organisation IDs which became ROR, and Grant IDs which became the Crossref Grant Linking System.

We made new tools and services

Combining our own knowledge and experience with input from the wider community, in 2017 we were able to launch in Beta a new and exciting tool called Event Data. Event Data provides a record of where research has been bookmarked, linked, recommended, shared, referenced, commented on etc, beyond publisher platforms—which is a great example of putting scholarly research in a wider context.

So, while richer metadata (including more record and resource types) remains our focus 2018 and beyond, we also hope that as we become a bigger and more global community we can move beyond the basics and work together to make sure that DOIs, are not the be-all and end-all when they are, in fact, just the beginning.

Scenario planning for our future

Ed Pentz — Mon, 28 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Crossref is governed by a board of directors that meets in person three times a year in March, July and November. At the July meeting the board typically spends a significant amount of time on strategic planning in addition to its usual activities such as financial oversight, approving investment in new services based on staff and committee recommendations, reviewing and approving policies and fees for new and existing services and generally making sure Crossref is healthy and well run.

This year we worked with a facilitator to look farther into the future than normal using a technique called scenario planning to map out “strategic agendas” for the next five years. Scenario-based strategic planning doesn’t try to predict the future but allows us to be flexible in planning by looking at a range of different possible eventualities. This is particularly useful for Crossref because scholarly research and communications is changing rapidly and we operate in a very complex environment.

To prepare for the meeting our facilitator, Susan Stickely, prepared 12 “critical uncertainties” - impactful issues that could go either way and that will affect how Crossref works, its mission and even whether it needs to exist. To develop the critical uncertainties Susan interviewed Crossref staff, board members, general members and scholarly communications community influencers and we held a preparatory group exercise at the March board meeting. The critical uncertainties are:

Scholarly Communication Landscape: Increasing diversity? Or publishing disintermediated?
Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence: Supporting? Or obsoleting the researcher and publishers?
Policy and Regulation: Limiting? Or visionary?
Financing of Scholarly Communication: Shrinking Pool? Or Expanding Pool?
Rise of Pre-print, New Content Sources: New, non-traditional? Or De-formalizing?
Tracking and Privacy: Increased Privacy? Or Loss of Privacy?
Cybersecurity: Secure? Or Vulnerable, Insecure?
Publisher Sustainability: Slow Progress? Or Fast Progress?
Impact of Open: Open or Closed? Or Slow to Change?
Source of Prestige and Recognition: New Source? Or Publisher, Institution?
Quality and Accuracy of Content: High? Or Low?
Geopolitical Stability and Stance: Stable, Unified? Or Unstable, Fragmented

In addition, from the interviews Susan was able to summarize Crossref’s distinctive competencies as:

Having a reputation as a trusted, neutral one-stop source of metadata and services
Managing scholarly infrastructure with technical knowledge and innovation
Convening and facilitating scholarly communications community collaboration

To be successful Crossref will need to continue to invest in, apply, and evolve these distinctive competencies and strategic dilemmas and challenges.

Over a day and half of discussions and breakout sessions the board and staff drew up a number of scenarios and created a draft strategic agenda for Crossref. Over the next couple of months we’ll be working on refining the strategic agenda and will be presenting the results to members in the next couple of months.

One theme that emerged is for Crossref to engage more with funders and build on the work with done with them in creating the Crossref Funder Registry. We have started a new Funder Advisory Group and, among other things, are working with them on a prototype for a new registry of grant identifiers.

In the regular board session the board approved three recommendations from the Membership and Fees Committee:

To approve the recommendations with respect to volume discounts for current deposits of posted content (i.e. preprints).
To create a new “peer review report” record type with a specific metadata schema and a bundled fee of $1.25 to be charged for a content item and all the reports associated with it.
To update the metadata delivery offering to have a single agreement that covers all metadata APIs/delivery routes, to adopt a single (updated) fee structure, and to remove case-by-case opt-outs for metadata.

Item number 3 involves a number of big changes - for example the removal of the case-by-case opt outs requires a change to the main Membership Agreement - so we will be sending out more information to members and Affiliates in September and October about the changes and our implementation plans.

You can see the full history of the motions from every Board meeting on our website.

Another major issue that the board discussed is the upcoming election for the board of directors. In order to broaden participation and be inclusive there was a new process this year. The Nominating Committee put out a call for expressions of interest for candidates to be on the slate for the election. We had a great response and there were 25 expressions of interest reviewed by the Nominating Committee who came up with a slate of nine excellent candidates for the six seats up for election. This is the first time that there are more candidates than seats on the slate so it’s particularly important for members to vote this year. See the recent blog post about the election process and the slate for more details.

The next board meeting is in November in conjunction with Crossref LIVE17 in Singapore.