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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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News

Crossref hits the books—deposits grow, guidelines released

29 July 2009

29 July 2009, Lynnfield, MA USA—For the second year in a row Crossref deposits for books are growing faster than any other record type in the reference linking system. As of July 2009, more than 1.8 million Crossref Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) have been assigned for books. Each Crossref DOI represents a citable book title, chapter, or reference entry that can be used to link references from scholarly content. Book deposits range from monographs with a single Crossref DOI to massive reference works with tens of thousands of individual entries.

To encourage publishers to ramp up reference linking for scholarly books, and to explain how Crossref DOIs for books work, Crossref has published two documents. The first, Best Practices for Books, was created by Crossref’s Book Working Group. The second is a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) document explaining the relationship between Crossref DOIs and other DOI applications, such as the ISBN-A.

“We are very encouraged at the growth of books being used in Crossref reference linking,” said Michael Forster, Chair of Crossref’s Book Working Group, and Vice President and Associate Publishing Director, Physical Sciences, Scientific, Technical, Medical, and Scholarly Publishing, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. “We solicited feedback from the entire Crossref membership before finalizing these guidelines. Our goal is to encourage reference linking among books, proceedings, and journal content, and to enhance the discoverability of professional, reference, technical, and scholarly books.”

The best practices document, available at http://www.crossref.org/06members/best_practices_for_books.html, includes suggestions for improving reference matching results. It identifies minimum and recommended book metadata for deposits and queries in the Crossref system. Ways to handle editions and other types of versions, so important in book publishing, are also addressed. Crossref’s FAQ explains the differences between Crossref DOIs used for reference linking and some new types of identifiers emerging for books. The document, available at http://www.crossref.org/06members/otherdoifaq.html, goes into detail about an application called the ISBN-A—ISBNs made actionable through the DOI System.

“We wanted to make sure that people understand the purposes of these different applications of DOI technology,” said Crossref Executive Director Ed Pentz. “Crossref is a registration agency for the scholarly publishing community, and Crossref DOIs are designed to make citation linking possible in content published by this group. Other DOI applications serve the needs of other communities and provide other services, and we fully support making the different DOI applications interoperable.”

Almost 60 publishers have deposited Crossref DOIs for nearly 84,000 book titles since Crossref began accepting book deposits.

More information about assigning DOIs to books and book reference linking is available on the Crossref website.

About Crossref

Crossref (http://www.crossref.org) is a not-for-profit membership association founded and directed by publishers. Its mission is to enable easy identification and use of trustworthy electronic content by promoting the cooperative development and application of a sustainable infrastructure. Crossref provides reference linking services for 37 million content items.

Please contact our communications team with any questions.

Last updated: 2009-July-29