Latest blog posts
Martyn Rittman
2024 July 02

Crossmark community consultation: What did we learn?

In the first half of this year we’ve been talking to our community about post-publication changes and Crossmark. When a piece of research is published it isn’t the end of the journey—it is read, reused, and sometimes modified. That’s why we run Crossmark, as a way to provide notifications of important changes to research made after publication. Readers can see if the resesarch they are looking at has updates by clicking the Crossmark logo.

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Kornelia Korzec
2024 July 01

Celebrating five years of Grant IDs: where are we with the Crossref Grant Linking System?

We’re happy to note that this month, we are marking five years since Crossref launched its Grant Linking System. The Grant Linking System (GLS) started life as a joint community effort to create ‘grant identifiers’ and support the needs of funders in the scholarly communications infrastructure. The system includes a funder-designed metadata schema and a unique link for each award which enables connections with millions of research outputs, better reporting on the research and outcomes of funding, and a contribution to open science infrastructure.

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Dominika Tkaczyk
2024 June 27

The anatomy of metadata matching

In our previous blog post about metadata matching, we discussed what it is and why we need it (tl;dr: to discover more relationships within the scholarly record). Here, we will describe some basic matching-related terminology and the components of a matching process. We will also pose some typical product questions to consider when developing or integrating matching solutions. Basic terminology Metadata matching is a high-level concept, with many different problems falling into this category.

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Luis Montilla
2024 June 15

Drawing on the Research Nexus with Policy documents: Overton’s use of Crossref API

Update 2024-07-01: This post is based on an interview with Euan Adie, founder and director of Overton._ What is Overton? Overton is a big database of government policy documents, also including sources like intergovernmental organizations, think tanks, and big NGOs and in general anyone who’s trying to influence a government policy maker. What we’re interested in is basically, taking all the good parts of the scholarly record and applying some of that to the policy world.

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Warnings, Caveats and Weasel Words

Most of the experiments linked to here are running on R&D equipment in a non-production environment. They may disappear without warning and/or perform erratically. If one of them isn’t working for some reason, come back later and try again.

Labs

 4 minute read.

Crossref Labs is the dedicated R&D arm of Crossref. In late 2021 we announced that we are re-energizing Labs after a period of working mostly on development tasks.

What’s our focus?

The division between what the R&D group does at the group-level, and what the wider organisation does will always be more of a gradient than a line. But at the highest level we’d say that R&D will focus on projects that:

  • Address new constituencies.
  • Involve fundamentally new approaches (technology or process or both).
  • Are exploratory with no clear product application yet.

And that a “strategic initiative” (as opposed to a new feature, service, or product) is something that:

  • Involves something we’ve never done before.
  • Involves potential changes to our membership model and fees.
  • Would require a large investment of resources outside of normal budget.

We’re certainly not the only group at Crossref who experiment, build proof of concepts (POCs), and do research, but we hope to support other groups who do - both inside our organization and in the wider research ecosystem.

Sound right up your street? Interested in collaborating on something you’re working on? Let us know.

labs_email

What are we working on now?

All the projects we are working on can be browsed here. We also have a list of Labs ideas.

A few current highlights are:

  • Measuring how good our community is at preservation. Dashboard at https://the-vault.fly.dev/ and these are displayed on the Labs prototype (see next…!)
  • Playing around with how we might evolve our Participation Reports.
  • Looking at running a “labs” version of our API where we can experiment with exposing new functionality and metadata in order to get quick feedback from the community.
  • Making the Retraction Watch data openly available via the Labs API (and in .csv format) so we can get feedback on it before integrating it into our REST API.
  • Looking at how we can extend the classification information we currently make available via our API across more journal titles.
  • Exploring how we currently do citation matching with a view to evolving this approach i.e. making it better, more transparent and open to community contributions.
  • Creating a sampling framework that can be used to extract samples of works and make them publicly available.
  • Building POC tools to help our members and support team more easily accomplish common tasks.

A flavor of Labs research and experiments

Documents

Graduated to production services (or became part of them)

Retired

Labs Group

Alumni

Page owner: A Crossref Labs creature   |   Last updated 2023-February-20