Latest blog posts
Martyn Rittman
2024 November 15

Research Integrity Roundtable 2024

For the third year in a row, Crossref hosted a roundtable on research integrity prior to the Frankfurt book fair. This year the event looked at Crossmark, our tool to display retractions and other post-publication updates to readers. Since the start of 2024, we have been carrying out a consultation on Crossmark, gathering feedback and input from a range of members. The roundtable discussion was a chance to check and refine some of the conclusions we’ve come to, and gather more suggestions on the way forward.

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Dominika Tkaczyk
2024 November 06

How good is your matching?

In our previous blog post in this series, we explained why no metadata matching strategy can return perfect results. Thankfully, however, this does not mean that it’s impossible to know anything about the quality of matching. Indeed, we can (and should!) measure how close (or far) we are from achieving perfection with our matching. Read on to learn how this can be done! How about we start with a quiz? Imagine a database of scholarly metadata that needs to be enriched with identifiers, such as ORCIDs or ROR IDs.

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Kornelia Korzec
2024 October 28

Update on the Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability research

We’re in year two of the Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability (RCFS) research. This report provides an update on progress to date, specifically on research we’ve conducted to better understand the impact of our fees and possible changes. Crossref is in a good financial position with our current fees, which haven’t increased in 20 years. This project is seeking to future-proof our fees by: Making fees more equitable Simplifying our complex fee schedule Rebalancing revenue sources In order to review all aspects of our fees, we’ve planned five projects to look into specific aspects of our current fees that may need to change to achieve the goals above.

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Lucy Ofiesh
2024 September 24

Meet the candidates and vote in our 2024 Board elections

On behalf of the Nominating Committee, I’m pleased to share the slate of candidates for the 2024 board election. Each year we do an open call for board interest. This year, the Nominating Committee received 53 submissions from members worldwide to fill four open board seats. We maintain a balanced board of 8 large member seats and 8 small member seats. Size is determined based on the organization’s membership tier (small members fall in the $0-$1,650 tiers and large members in the $3,900 - $50,000 tiers).

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Documentation

Journals and articles

Our journals model supports registration of records for journal titles and articles, as well for individual volumes and issues of a journal. We recommend registering DOI records for journal titles and articles, and optionally for volumes and issues.

Journal titles

Do:

  • be consistent - journal title records are created from the metadata submitted when you first register your journal and articles. You determine the exact title and ISSN included in the deposit, and we record that title and ISSN in a title record in our database. The title, ISSN, and title-level persistent identifier supplied in your content registration files must be consistent across submissions.
  • register a title-level DOI for your journal
  • include all registered ISSN for your journal - the ISSN is crucial for identifying a serial. If you are supplying us with data for older titles that predate ISSN assignment, you should request ISSNs from your ISSN agency as they can be assigned retroactively. This isn’t only for our convenience - libraries, database providers, and other organizations using your data will welcome (and often require) an ISSN for anything defined as a journal.
  • supply distinct ISSN and / or title DOI for each distinct version of a title. If a title changes significantly the publisher should obtain new ISSNs (both print and online). This rule is established by the ISSN International Centre, not us, but we support and enforce it. Minor title changes (such as changing ‘and’ to ‘&’) don’t require a new ISSN.
  • supply all commonly used title abbreviations within the repeatable abbrev element
  • supply a journal language using the language attribute

Do not:

  • register issues and articles published under a past title under the current title - this makes it hard to match DOIs to citations and accurately identify items published over time. ome publishers consolidate all versions of a title under the most recent title. This isn’t recommended practice as it causes a lot of linking and citing confusion – you’ve essentially created two (or more) versions of a title. This is particularly confusing when volume and issue numbers overlap between title iterations.
  • Journal titles should reflect the journal title at the time of publication, and should not be updated if the journal title changes later on.
  • vary your journal title without obtaining a new ISSN

For recommendations on displaying information about journals, see the ISSN Manual, and NISO’s recommended practice on Presentation & Identification of E-Journals.

Journal issue and volume metadata You can register DOIs for volumes and issues of journals if you want to make them citeable and linked persistently. If you do not opt to register DOIs for volumes and issues you should still provide clean and complete metadata as it is needed for the article records within each issue.

Do:

  • supply accurate issue and volume numbers
  • for special issues, include additional metadata to make the issue identifiable and citable - this includes:
    • editors in the contributors section
    • issue title (as title)
    • any special issue numbering, including text (as special_numbering)

Do not:

  • include non-essential text in the volume or issue elements

Journal articles

You should register all research articles published by your journal, as well as other cite-able content (book reviews, case studies, editorials).

Do:

  • pay close attention to title best practice - journal article metadata is used for display and discoverability, so it is vital that article titles are accurate.
  • include all contributors and (again) pay close attention to the metadata you are sending us.
  • include affiliation info for each contributor
  • include abstracts (recommended for all types of content, but particularly useful for journal articles)
  • include all relevant funding, license, and relationship metadata
  • include full text URLs to facilitate text and data mining
  • include information on updates, corrections, withdrawals, and retractions via Crossmark
  • include references
  • include a language (using the language attribute on the journal_article element)

Do not:

  • register records for items you do not intend to maintain long-term, such as advertisements
  • supply titles in all caps - titles in article metadata are used for display and citation formatting, and if it supplied in all caps, it will appear in all caps wherever our metadata is used.

Review our Journals and Articles Markup Guide for XML and metadata help.

Page owner: Patricia Feeney   |   Last updated 2023-October-28