Latest blog posts
Ginny Hendricks
2024 December 12

A progress update and a renewed commitment to community

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.

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Rosa Morais Clark
2024 December 09

A summary of our Annual Meeting

The Crossref2024 annual meeting gathered our community for a packed agenda of updates, demos, and lively discussions on advancing our shared goals. The day was filled with insights and energy, from practical demos of Crossref’s latest API features to community reflections on the Research Nexus initiative and the Board elections. Our Board elections are always the focal point of the Annual Meeting. We want to start reflecting on the day by congratulating our newly elected board members: Katharina Rieck from Austrian Science Fund (FWF), Lisa Schiff from California Digital Library, Aaron Wood from American Psychological Association, and Amanda Ward from Taylor and Francis, who will officially join (and re-join) in January 2025.

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Lucy Ofiesh
2024 December 07

2024 POSI audit

Background The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) provides a set of guidelines for operating open infrastructure in service to the scholarly community. It sets out 16 points to ensure that the infrastructure on which the scholarly and research communities rely is openly governed, sustainable, and replicable. Each POSI adopter regularly reviews progress, conducts periodic audits, and self-reports how they’re working towards each of the principles. In 2020, Crossref’s board voted to adopt the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure, and we completed our first self-audit.

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Ed Pentz
2024 December 05

Summary of the environmental impact of Crossref

In June 2022, we wrote a blog post “Rethinking staff travel, meetings, and events” outlining our new approach to staff travel, meetings, and events with the goal of not going back to ‘normal’ after the pandemic. We took into account three key areas: The environment and climate change Inclusion Work/life balance We are aware that many of our members are also interested in minimizing their impacts on the environment, and we are overdue for an update on meeting our own commitments, so here goes our summary for the year 2023!

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Documentation

Deposit harvester

The deposit harvester allows you to retrieve metadata records for content that you’ve registered. The metadata retrieved is in our UNIXSD output format, which delivers the exact metadata submitted in a deposit, including any citations registered. Members (or their designated third parties) may only retrieve their own metadata.

The harvester uses Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) to deliver the metadata. The verbs Identify, ListMetadataFormats, ListSets, ListIdentifiers, ListRecords, and GetRecord are supported.

Ownership and retrieval restrictions - who can retrieve records?

The deposit harvester will only retrieve records for the authorized owner of the metadata records. Metadata ownership is established by the DOI prefix(es) associated with a user’s account (learn more about transferring responsibility for DOIs. Many members have one prefix and one account, but some members may have multiple prefixes. For example, Member A has been assigned account abcd, which is associated with prefixes 10.xxxx, 10.yyyy, and 10.zzzz. Member A can retrieve metadata owned by prefixes 10.xxxx, 10.yyyy, and 10.zzzz using their abcd account.

Ownership of DOIs and titles often moves from member to member, so a title-owning prefix will not always match the prefix of the DOIs attached to the title. Retrieval permission is granted to the current owner, not the original depositor. For example, Member B registers identifier 10.5555/jfo.33425. Ownership of the journal and all identifiers is transferred to Member A with prefix 10.50505. The DOI is now “owned” by prefix 10.50505, and only Member A may harvest the metadata record for that identifier.

Sets

The deposit harvester supports a hierarchy of sets. The hierarchy is in three parts: <work-type>:<prefix>:<publication-id>. For example, the set J:10.12345:6789 will return metadata for a journal (J), with prefix 10.12345, and publication id 6789. The set B will return all book metadata. The set S:10.12345 will return all the series metadata associated with the 10.12345 prefix.

The work-type designators are:

  • J for journals
  • B for books and book-like works (reports, conference proceedings, standards, dissertations)
  • S for non-journal series and series-like works.

If no set is specified, the set “J” is used.

Example requests

ListSets

Retrieve list of titles owned by the prefixes assigned to your account:

https://oai.crossref.org/DepositHarvester?verb=ListSets&usr=username&pwd=password

ListRecords

Retrieve data for a prefix:

https://oai.crossref.org/DepositHarvester?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=cr_unixsd&set=work-type:prefix&usr=username&pwd=password

Retrieve data for a single title:

https://oai.crossref.org/DepositHarvester?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=cr_unixsd&set=work-type:prefix:title ID&usr=username&pwd=password

GetRecord

Retrieve data for a single DOI:

https://oai.crossref.org/DepositHarvester?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=cr_unixsd&identifier=info:doi/DOI&usr=username&pwd=password

When using GetRecord, the <DOI> value should be URL encoded.

Identify

Use to check the status of the deposit harvester (no account needed):

https://oai.crossref.org/DepositHarvester?verb=Identify

ListMetadataFormats

Lists available metadata formats (currently UNIXREF)

https://oai.crossref.org/DepositHarvester?verb=ListMetadataFormats

Request parameters

  • work-type: J for journals, B for book or conference proceeding titles, S for series
  • prefix: the owning prefix of the title being retrieved
  • title ID: the title identification number assigned by us. Title IDs are included in the ListSets response described above.
  • username and password: account details for the prefix/title being retrieved

Results

Results conform to Crossref’s UNIXREF format and may contain the following root elements:

  • journal
  • book
  • conference
  • dissertation
  • report-paper
  • standard
  • sa_component
  • database

Using resumption tokens with the deposit harvester

Some OAI-PMH requests are too big to be retrieved in a single transaction. If a given response contains a resumption token, the user must make an additional request to retrieve the rest of the data. You must provide the account name and password with both the initial request and subsequent resumption requests. A resumption without authentication details will fail. Learn more about resumption tokens.

Initial request

https://oai.crossref.org/DepositHarvester?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=cr_unixsd&set=J:10.4102:83986&usr=username&pwd=password

Request with resumption token

https://oai.crossref.org/DepositHarvester?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=cr_unixsd&set=J:10.4102:83986&usr=username&pwd=password&resumptionToken=01f7f30e-f692-4cc4-97b2-1eaf88b3f17f

Page owner: Martyn Rittman   |   Last updated 2020-April-08