2019 on Crossref

Resolution reports: a look inside and ahead

Isaac Farley — Tue, 17 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Isaac Farley, technical support manager, and Jon Stark, software developer, provide a glimpse into the history and current state of our popular monthly resolution reports. They invite you, our members, to help us understand how you use these reports. This will help us determine the best next steps for further improvement of these reports, and particularly what we do and don’t filter out of them.

Isaac joined Crossref in April 2018. Before that, he was with one of our members, a geoscience society in Oklahoma (USA). As a Crossref member, like all of our members, he received the resolution reports to his inbox during the first week of each month. And like many of you, he had questions.

What exactly is this report?
What are all these numbers?
Now, what about those 10 top DOIs is making them so popular?
Why are some of these DOIs failing?
And, what’s with this filtering of “known search engine crawlers?”

Now that Isaac is the Crossref Technical Support Manager, instead of asking these questions, he answers many of them.

Whoa…too fast…what exactly are resolution reports?

The resolution report provides an overview of DOI resolution traffic, and can identify problems with your DOI links. The failed DOI.csv linked to your resolution report email contains a list of all DOIs with failed resolution attempts (more on this later). If a user clicks on a DOI with your DOI prefix and the DOI is not registered, it won’t resolve to a web page, and thus will appear on your report.

What are those numbers?

This is always a good starting point for wrangling statistical information. Resolution statistics are based on the number of DOI resolutions made through the DOI proxy server on a month-by-month basis. These statistics give an indication of the traffic generated by users - both human and machine - clicking (or, resolving) DOIs. CNRI (the organisation that manages the DOI proxy server) sends us resolution logs at the end of every month and we pass the data on to you.

Resolution reports are sent by default to the business contact on your account, and we can always add or change the recipient(s) as needed. We send a separate report for each DOI prefix you’re responsible for.

Historically we have done our best to filter out obvious crawlers and machine activity - thus valuing human-driven traffic to traffic generated by machines. That sentence above about those obvious crawlers is the real reason we are here today blogging.

Why are some of those DOIs failing?

The ideal failure rate is 0%. A failure rate of 0% would mean that every DOI you owned that was clicked in the previous month successfully resolved to the resolution URL you registered with us. But, in reality, a 0% failure rate is rare, because any string of characters that is combined with your prefix (e.g., 10.5555/ThisIsNOTARealDOI) and attempted to be resolved will go through the resolver and result in another single failed count toward your monthly resolution report. If you are new to Crossref, or have only deposited metadata for a small number of content items, you may have a high failure percentage (for example, 2 failures and 8 successes = 20% failure rate).

Before 2019, the overall resolution failure rate across all publishers held fairly steady each month between 2 and 4%. You may have noticed that that number has been climbing this year. And, as a result, we think a new normal is closer to 10%.

Given this new norm, if your overall resolution failure rate is higher than 8 to 12%, we advise you to look closely at the failed DOI.csv file that we include in the monthly report we email you. The first step in your analysis of this portion of the report is to make sure the DOIs listed have been registered. Very often failures of legitimate DOIs are the result of content registration errors or workflow inefficiencies (i.e., DOIs are shared with the editorial team and/or contributors before being registered with us, leading to premature clicks). If during your investigation, you find invalid DOIs (like the example above: 10.5555/ThisIsNOTARealDOI) - and you will find invalid DOIs because we all make mistakes when resolving DOIs - you may simply ignore those DOIs within the report.

What’s with this filtering of “known search engine crawlers?”

You may have recently noticed that we made a few changes to the resolution reports. We merged, rearranged, and in some cases completely rewrote the report you receive to your inboxes, because, well, it needed it. It was confusing. Parts of the report still are. Most specifically, those “known search engine crawlers.” To that point, you may have also noticed that the reports that arrived to your inboxes in early November 2019 were scrubbed of nearly 150 million resolutions across all members.

Based on Jon’s analysis of these 150 million filtered resolutions, they were from bots. In the past, it was important to filter out bots, as we found our community was most focused on human readers. But should we be filtering out resolutions from bots any more? We live in a time where most of our work (at least in the Crossref community) requires both human and machine interaction; thus, aren’t at least some of these resolutions from machines legitimate?

Our internal analysis shows that we cannot reliably determine which usage is from:

Individual humans;
Machines acting as intermediaries between researchers and DOIs;
Internet service providers with real human users behind them; or,
Bots that do not result in actual human usage.

As a result, it is our thinking that we may serve you better by not filtering any traffic, as we cannot guarantee that we’re removing the right things. We feel that it may be better for us to just give you everything we know. And invite you to make your own judgments.

How’d we get here?

Jon joined Crossref in 2004. He wrote the original version of the resolution report in late 2009 in an effort to provide you, our members, with information about the usage of registered Crossref DOIs. At that time, most members were creating DOIs, but then had no real feedback about the traffic that was getting to their content (via the DOI proxy server lookups of their DOIs). These reports filled that gap. The other benefit of the report was the information it provided about failed resolutions. As suggested above, the list of failed resolutions helped members identify potential problems with the content registration process.

A DOI that appeared on the report as a failed resolution could be cause of concern for the member. But, then again, humans and machines make mistakes when attempting to resolve DOIs (e.g., typos). Thus, not much has changed in the last ten years - the DOIs that appear in the failed resolution reports must be evaluated. Care should especially be taken when a DOI that should have been registered has not and appears as a failed resolution (e.g., data problem, agent behind on deposits, etc.) within this report.

Like we said, mistakes happen. Users may enter a DOI incorrectly when looking it up. Or, it could be a bot throwing randomly generated traffic that looks like a DOI, but is not. And, sometimes bots are scraping through PDFs for DOIs and simply extract them incorrectly. These are all user errors, and not necessarily a concern for our members. That’s why we provide that list of what failed.

At the start, there were a few well known crawlers that were resolving large numbers of DOIs regularly. It was our opinion at the time that it would be helpful to filter that usage since we assumed members only cared about human-driven traffic. As the next decade passed, it became clear that the internet had and would continue to change. With bots popping up every day and IP addresses moving or spanning broad address ranges (and IPs we had already filtered with the potential of being repurposed), it was obvious that we would always miss as much as we caught.

Between the constantly changing landscape and the fact that real usage can be hidden behind IP addresses that appear like bot traffic, we no longer have confidence in our filtering process. It may be best for our users to just get the data as the data exists and know that our metadata world covers a vast range of usages - many as valid and valuable today as that human-driven traffic we prioritized ten years ago. Perhaps there is some other metric we can provide that might be useful for understanding the traffic in better ways, but filtering some of this traffic seems no longer useful.

Your help with next steps

There you have it. Our thinking: we’ve been filtering these resolution reports the best we can for ten years. Today, our confidence in the filtering process has waned. We’re proposing a change: we want to give you the raw resolution numbers, for machines and humans alike. We want to make this change soon, but we also want to hear from you.

How are you using the resolution reports?
What you do you think of this proposed change?
Will our removal of all filters from monthly resolution reports affect how you use the information within?

We want to hear from you, and we’re inviting you to help us determine our next steps. We are going to give you until Friday, 31 January to tell us what you think of this proposed change. Then, Isaac and Jon will be back in early February to share with you what you have helped us decide. Thanks in advance!

A Journey of a Crossref Ambassador in Latin America

Arley Soto — Wed, 11 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

English version –– Información en español

In this post, Arley Soto shares some experiences about his work as a Crossref ambassador in Latin America.

When I joined as a volunteer Crossref ambassador in 2018, I never imagined that in less than two years, I would have the opportunity to travel to three Latin American cities, visit Toronto, organize the first Crossref LIVE in Spanish and hold webinars in Spanish about Crossref’s services. After almost two years of continuous learning, I think it is worth sharing my experience with the Crossref community for a better understanding of the ambassadors’ role in Latin America and to inspire ambassadors from other parts of the world to write and post their experiences.

Before becoming a Crossref ambassador, I had already been working with Crossref since 2011, when we started to coordinate DOI registration for the Biomédica Journal of the National Health Institute, one of the first journals to implement the DOI in Colombia. During these first years of relations with Crossref, I acquired basic knowledge on membership and the technical aspects of the services the agency offers, including Reference Linking, Content Registration and Crossmark. This close relationship with Crossref enabled us to hold the PKP-Crossref workshop in 2018 with Juan Pablo Alperín and Susan Collins at the Third International Congress of Redalyc Editors at Universidad César Vallejo, city of Trujillo.

In the same year, thanks to the invitation by the State University System (SUE, for the Spanish original) (Bogotá chapter), I had the opportunity to give a presentation on Crossref during the 2018 International Open Access Week held at Universidad Militar Nueva Granada. Around 50 people participated, including members and non-members of Crossref. There, I emphasized the nature of Crossref as a non-profit organisation, based on affiliations and the importance of new members participating in the annual elections organized by Crossref and running to be representatives in the Crossref Board of Directors.

In November 2018, I had the pleasure of participating in the Crossref Meeting in Toronto, thanks to an invitation from the organizers. There, I talked to the representatives of other organisations who are members of Crossref around the world and I also met some of the members of the Crossref team in person. This event was essential for me as an ambassador, because I learned about Crossref’s vision and different projects firsthand, which increased my capacity to explain Crossref’s scope and role in the area of scientific communications. I remember that the booth Crossref provided to answer technical questions was particularly useful. There, Isaac, Shayn and other members of the technical team were always available to resolve specific queries that I had not been able to resolve before myself.

In my second year as an ambassador, I represented Crossref at the Universidad Central del Ecuador (Quito, Ecuador), in a talk with an average of 40 people from different parts of Ecuador. There, I emphasized the technical aspects of the DOI and good practices for its use in academic publications. This talk was held on April 21, 2019, in collaboration with Crossref and BITECA S.A.S., a sponsoring member of Crossref.

In May 2019, with Susan Collins and Vanessa Fairhurst, we organized Crossref LIVE Bogotá, which was not only successful because of the number of attendees from different parts of Colombia and other countries in the region, but also due to the meeting of Latin American ambassadors, where we worked the full morning discussing the priorities and issues of the region with ambassadors from Brazil, Mexico, Chile and Peru. Apart from other issues, at this meeting, it became clear the need to have better resources and support in Spanish for Spanish-speaking members.

Additionally, we helped to review the Spanish translation of the “You are Crossref” booklet, which we printed and distributed at Crossref LIVE Bogotá.

During 2019, I participated in the Introduction to Crossref and Content Registration and Introduction to Reference Linking and Cited-by webinar webinars and held the first webinar in Spanish about the new Metadata Manager tool, always with the ongoing support and assistance of the Crossref team.

And to end the year with a bang, together with Rachael Lammey, we organized the presentation: Open infrastructure and open data for the global metrics community: what can you build? I presented this at the 2Latmetrics: Altmetrics and Open Science in Latin America colloquium on November 4 in the city of Cusco (Peru).

This account of activities is a demonstration of the commitment of Crossref’s ambassadors to transmit the message of the importance of ethically and responsibly sharing, citing and making science visible on the web.

Spanish version

Cuando me vinculé como embajador voluntario de Crossref en 2018, no imaginaba que en menos de dos años tendría la oportunidad de viajar a 3 ciudades en Latinoamérica, conocer Toronto, organizar el primer Crossref LIVE en español y realizar webinars en español sobre los servicios de Crossref. Después de casi dos años de continuo aprendizaje, creo que vale la pena compartir mi experiencia a la comunidad de Crossref para entender mejor el rol de los embajadores en Latinoamérica y para inspirar embajadores de otras regiones del mundo a que escriban y publiquen sus experiencias.

Antes de convertirme en embajador de Crossref ya había trabajado con Crossref desde el año 2011, año en el que empezamos a gestionar DOI para la revista Biomédica del Instituto Nacional de Salud, una de las primeras revistas en implementar DOI en Colombia. Durante esos primeros años de relaciones con Crossref, adquirí un conocimiento básico sobre las membresías y los aspectos técnicos de los servicios que la agencia ofrece, incluyendo el Reference Linking, Content Registration y Crossmark, entre otros. Esta relación estrecha con Crossref favoreció para que en 2018 realizáramos el taller de PKP - Crossref entre Juan Pablo Alperín y Susan Collins en el 3er Congreso Internacional de Editores Redalyc, en la Universidad César Vallejo, ciudad de Trujillo

En ese mismo año, gracias a la invitación realizada por el Sistema Universitario Estatal, SUE (capítulo Bogotá) tuve la oportunidad de hacer una presentación de Crossref en la Semana Internacional de Acceso Abierto 2018, realizado en Universidad Militar Nueva Granada 2018, allí participaron alrededor de 50 personas entre miembros y no miembros de Crossref, aquí hice énfasis en la naturaleza de Crossref como organización sin ánimo de lucro, basada en afiliaciones y la importancia de que los nuevos miembros participen en las votaciones anuales que organiza Crossref y que se postulen para ser representantes en la junta directiva de Crossref.

En noviembre de 2018 tuve el placer de participar en el Crossref Meeting en la ciudad de Toronto, gracias a una invitación de los organizadores. Allí conversé con representantes de otras organizaciones afiliadas a Crossref alrededor del mundo y también conocí en persona a algunos de los integrantes del equipo de Crossref. Este evento fue de vital importancia para mí como embajador ya que conocí de primera mano la visión y los diferentes proyectos que realiza Crossref, lo que aumentó mi capacidad para explicar en mi contexto el alcance y el papel de Crossref en el entorno de la comunicación científica. Recuerdo que fue particularmente útil el kiosco que dispuso Crossref para atender inquietudes técnicas en donde Isaac, Shane y otros miembros del equipo técnico siempre estuvieron dispuestos a solucionar dudas específicas que no había podido resolver antes por mi mismo.

En el segundo año como embajador representé a Crossref en la Universidad Central del Ecuador (Quito, Ecuador), charla a la que asistieron en promedio 40 personas de diversos lugares del Ecuador, allí hice énfasis en los aspectos técnicos del DOI y buenas prácticas de su utilización en publicaciones académicas.. Esta charla tuvo lugar el 21 de abril de 2019 y la realizamos en colaboración con Crossref y BITECA SAS miembro patrocinador en Crossref.

En mayo de 2019 organizamos junto con Susan Collins y Vanessa Fairshuit el Crossref LIVE Bogotá, que no solamente fue exitoso por la cantidad de asistentes de diferentes partes de Colombia y de otros países de la región, sino por la reunión de embajadores de Latinoamérica, donde trabajamos una mañana completa para discutir acerca de las prioridades y temáticas propias de la región con embajadores de Brasil, México, Chile y Perú. Entre otros asuntos, en esta reunión se hizo evidente la necesidad de tener mayores recursos y soporte en Español para los miembros hispanohablantes.

Así mismo contribuimos con la revisión de la traducción al español de la cartilla “Usted es Crossref” que imprimimos y repartimos durante el Crossref LIVE Bogotá.

Durante 2019 participé en los webinars Introduction to Crossref and Content Registration y Introduction to Reference Linking and Cited-by webinar y llevé a cabo el primer Webinar en español sobre la nueva herramienta Metadata Manager, siempre con el acompañamiento y el soporte permanente del equipo de Crossref.

Y para terminar el año de la mejor manera, preparamos junto con Rachael Lammey la ponencia Open infrastructure and open data for the global metrics community: what can you build? Que presenté en el congreso 2Latmetrics: métricas alternativas y ciencia abierta en américa latina el 04 de noviembre en la ciudad de Cusco (Perú).

Este recuento de actividades es una muestra del compromiso de los embajadores de Crossref en transmitir el mensaje de la importancia de compartir, citar y hacer visible la ciencia en la web, de una manera ética y responsable.

Introducing our new Director of Finance & Operations

Ed Pentz — Mon, 09 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’m happy to announce that Lucy Ofiesh has joined Crossref as our new Director of Finance and Operations. Lucy has experience supporting the sustainability and governance of not-for-profit organisations having held roles such as Executive Vice President of the Brooklyn Children’s Museum and for the last few years as Chief Operating Officer at Center for Open Science, a Crossref member.

At Center for Open Science, Lucy built her knowledge of the research communications community; she is knowledgeable about how diverse this community has become and the challenges of planning and scale that this comes with. She knows how to manage the complexities of an expanding global operation, where members, users––and staff––in several locations need fair, timely, and accurate information, whether it’s about how invoices relate to their use of our services or information about our approach to health benefits.

Finance underpins all that Crossref does and is crucial to long term sustainability while ‘Operations’ is a varied function and it is only becoming more so as Crossref grows. The role encompasses human resources, organisation culture, governance (including serving as secretary of the organisation), and working as part of the senior leadership team. Lucy will bring community focus to our operations, putting member experience first so that it becomes easier to work with us, from implementing systems and processes that work for multiple languages and currencies to providing personable billing support.

She will also play a vital role on the Crossref leadership team, working with me and the other directors Bryan, Ginny, and Geoffrey to hone the strategies, goals, and metrics that will allow us to track progress and meet our ambitious goals.

A word from Lucy…

I am excited to be joining Crossref as its next Director of Finance and Operations. I previously worked for an organisation that was a Crossref member and two qualities stood out to me: first, the focus with which Crossref has provided solutions to shared challenges across scholarly publishing; and second, the ways Crossref operates transparently and from a values-driven perspective.

My past experience has been in helping organisations run as effectively as they can, navigate change and growth, and build and support high functioning teams. Specifically, my work has focused on strategic and sustainability planning, financial forecasting, organisational governance, and staff management. My goal in finance and operations is to ensure that the working experience at Crossref––both for external partners and members and internal staff––is as frictionless as possible so we can have the greatest impact on our community.

I am only the second person to step into this role. Lisa Hart Martin has led finance and operations for the first twenty years of Crossref’s existence. I am fortunate to be overlapping with her for a couple of weeks and grateful for the trust of the Crossref team to help guide us into our third decade. I really want to hear from our members so please reach out to me with your thoughts on Crossref’s finance and operations.

Please join us in welcoming Lucy to the Crossref community!

Proposed schema changes - have your say

Patricia Feeney — Wed, 04 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The first version of our metadata input schema (a DTD, to be specific) was created in 1999 to capture basic bibliographic information and facilitate matching DOIs to citations. Over the past 20 years the bibliographic metadata we collect has deepened, and we’ve expanded our schema to include funding information, license, updates, relations, and other metadata. Our schema isn’t as venerable as a MARC record or as comprehensive as JATS, but it’s served us well. It’s not currently positioned to fully support everything we want to do long term - we’d like to support assertions, map cleanly to JATS and schema.org magically at the same time, and maybe even move beyond XML - but for now it’s something we can work with to empower member metadata to help find, cite, and connect scholarly content.

We’ve maintained backwards compatibility for most things since 2007 but this update will require some moderate changes to how contributors are modeled. The balance between supporting established tagging and addressing the evolution of what we collect and how it is expressed can be tricky. We want to collect good metadata without significantly disrupting the workflow of our membership, who are the source of the metadata. Even so, this is a fairly pragmatic update that will position us well for the future. I look forward to supporting new types of content and metadata in the future, but for now take a look at what I’m proposing.

Leave feedback, ask questions, and make suggestions in the feedback document or via email to feedback@crossref.org.

Next update

I’m proposing some updates and additions to the metadata we collect, and would like your feedback. To fully and elegantly support affiliation identifiers and multiple author roles, we need to break backwards compatibility. Specifically, we want to:

Add support for CRediT

The CASRAI CRediT taxonomy is increasingly used to represent roles common to contributors to research outputs. Our members are applying CRediT to contributors, so we want to capture them as well. Supporting CRediT allows Crossref and our membership to identify and credit contributors beyond authors and editors.

As most of you know, a contributor often does more than one thing - they write, they edit, they curate. We currently only allow one contributor role as an attribute, but, to realistically support CRediT and accurately capture evidence about the work, we need to allow multiple contributor roles. This will break backwards compatibility. We can potentially support the old way and the new way, but I’m trying to avoid awkward compromises wherever possible.

Supporting CRediT doesn’t mean you need to adopt CRediT. We’ll continue to support existing author roles, but they’ll be marked up differently. Details are in our request for feedback document.

Expand support for author and organisation identifiers

We collect ORCID iDs in our metadata but do not currently support other types of contributor identifiers. We also don’t support affiliation or organisation identifiers beyond those assigned within our funder and clinical trial registries. We’ve had increasing demands from both metadata suppliers and users to expand support for affiliation identifiers because…identifiers are useful. We also want to expand author identifier support as ORCID IDs may only be registered by researchers who are able to curate their own ORCID record. Adding support for ISNI and Wikidata IDs is a common request, but we anticipate there’s a need for other identifiers as well.

Our plan is to accept identifiers registered with identifiers.org as well as other identifiers upon request. We prefer to remain consistent with the identifiers.org registry as much as possible.

We’re particularly keen to support open community-led identifiers like ORCID and ROR and will continue to do so, but also want to support the metadata our members want to distribute. organisation identifiers will be particularly useful as they’ll help us populate records with ROR IDs in the future, leading to better quality affiliation metadata.

Expand support for a range of contributor names

We currently require a surname for all contributors, and don’t provide comprehensive support for contributors whose names are represented by multiple alphabets, or who have nicknames or aliases, or who don’t have a surname. To begin with, we’ll replace surname with the more widely used ‘family name’ and remove the fixed surname requirement, allowing only a given name to be provided where appropriate. We’ll also allow a variety of names to be provided for each contributor.

Expand affiliation support

We currently collect affiliation as a single string - we’re going to break that up to support affiliation names, and add in support for organisational identifiers like ROR.

Expand support for data citation

For those of you who send us references, we’re adding a few fields to better support data citation. We’re also going to allow you to (optionally) supply a specific publication type for references.

Other updates

We’re making some other small updates as well. If you have a small request, we may be able to accommodate it in our next update. Larger changes or additions will probably have to wait for future updates, but we’d love to start collecting suggestions now.

We need your feedback!

I’ll be giving a webinar on December 19 at 02:00 and 15:00 UTC to go over these changes in detail - please visit our webinars page to register.

Again, please leave feedback, ask questions, and make suggestions in the feedback document, or if you prefer send feedback via email to feedback@crossref.org. We’ll be taking feedback through January 15, 2020.

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!

What's your (citations') style?

Dominika Tkaczyk — Tue, 29 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Bibliographic references in scientific papers are the end result of a process typically composed of: finding the right document to cite, obtaining its metadata, and formatting the metadata using a specific citation style. This end result, however, does not preserve the information about the citation style used to generate it. Can the citation style be somehow guessed from the reference string only?

TL;DR

I built an automatic citation style classifier. It classifies a given bibliographic reference string into one of 17 citation styles or “unknown”.
The classifier is based on supervised machine learning. It uses TF-IDF feature representation and a simple Logistic Regression model.
For training and testing, I used datasets generated automatically from Crossref metadata.
The accuracy of the classifier estimated on the test set is 94.7%.
The classifier is open source and can be used as a Python library or REST API.

Introduction

Threadgill-Sowder, J. (1983). Question Placement in Mathematical Word Problems. School Science and Mathematics, 83(2), 107-111

This reference is the end result of a process that typically includes: finding the right document, obtaining its metadata, and formatting the metadata using a specific citation style. Sadly, the intermediate reference forms or the details of this process are not preserved in the end result. In general, just by looking at the reference string we cannot be sure which document it originates from, what its metadata is, or which citation style was used.

Global multi-billion dollar fashion industry proves without a doubt that people care about their fashion style. But why should we care about the citation style used to generate a specific reference? This might seem like an insignificant piece of information, but it can be a powerful clue when we try to solve tasks like:

Reference parsing, i.e., extracting metadata from the reference string. If the style is known, we also know where to expect metadata fields in the string, and it is typically enough to use simple regular expressions instead of complicated (and slow) machine learning-based parsers.
Discipline/topic classification. Citation styles used in documents correlate with their discipline. As a result, knowing the citation style used in the document could provide a useful clue for a discipline classifier.
Extracting references from documents. Conforming to a specific style might suggest that the reference string was correctly located within a larger document.

Even though the style is not directly mentioned in the reference string, the string contains useful clues. Some styles will abbreviate the authors’ first names, and others won’t. Some will place the year in parentheses, others separate it with commas. The presence of such fragments in the reference string can be used as the input for the style classifier.

I used these clues to build an automatic style classifier. It takes a single reference string on the input and classifies it into one of 17 styles or “unknown”. You can use it as a Python library or via REST API. The source code is also available. If you find this project useful, I would love to hear about it!

And if you are interested in more details about the classifier and how it was built, read on.

Data

The data for the experiments was generated automatically. The training and the test set were generated in the same way but from two different samples. The process was the following:

5,000 documents were randomly chosen from Crossref collection.
Each document was formatted into 17 citation styles. This resulted in 85,000 pairs (reference string, citation style).
Very short reference strings were removed. A short reference string typically results from very incomplete metadata of the document.
From a number of randomly selected references, I removed fragments like the name of the month. These fragments appear in the automatically generated reference strings because sometimes months are included in the metadata records in Crossref collection. However, they rarely appear in the real-life reference strings, so removing them made the dataset more reliable.
5,000 strings labelled as “unknown” were also added. These were generated by randomly swapping the words in the “real” reference strings.

This process resulted in two sets: training set containing 87,808 data points and test set containing 87,625 data points. The training set was used to choose various classification parameters and to train the final model. The test set was used to obtain the final estimation of the classifier’s accuracy.

Styles

The classifier was trained on the following 17 citation styles (+ “unknown”):

acm-sig-proceedings
american-chemical-society
american-chemical-society-with-titles
american-institute-of-physics
american-sociological-association
apa
bmc-bioinformatics
chicago-author-date
elsevier-without-titles
elsevier-with-titles
harvard3
ieee
iso690-author-date-en
modern-language-association
springer-basic-author-date
springer-lecture-notes-in-computer-science
vancouver

These 17 styles were chosen to cover a vast majority of references that we see in the real-life data, without including too many variants of very similar styles.

If you need a different style set, fear not. You can use the library to train your own model based on exactly the styles you need.

Features

Our learning algorithm cannot work directly with the raw text on the input. It needs numerical features. In the case of text classification (and reference strings are text), one very common feature representation is bag-of-words. In the simplest variant, each feature represents a single word, and the value of the feature is binary: 1 if the word is present in the text, 0 otherwise.

There are many variants of this representation, for example:

The input text typically undergoes normalization before the features are extracted. Depending on the use case, this might include lowercasing, removing punctuation, bringing the words to their canonical form by stemming, etc.
We do not have to use single words as features. In some use cases, it is beneficial to use n-grams, which correspond to fixed-length sequences of words.
Instead of binary values, we might want to use some other feature weight schemes, such as the famous TF-IDF representation.

Our use case is not a typical case of text classification. We cannot use raw words as features, as words do not carry the information about the citation style. Imagine the same document formatted in different styles –– those reference strings will contain the same words, and the learning algorithm won’t be able to distinguish between them.

As a side note, in some cases, some specific words might be important. For example, if the reference contains the word “algorithm”, chances are the document is from computer science. If so, then perhaps the citing paper is from computer science as well. And in computer science, some styles are more popular than others. Machine learning algorithms are pretty good at detecting such correlations in the data. In the first version of our classifier, however, we do not take this into account. This keeps things simpler.

If not words, then what matters in our case? It seems that the information about the style is present in punctuation, capitalization and abbreviations.

To capture these clues, before extracting the features we first map our reference string into a sequence of “word types” (or “character types”). The types are the following: lowercase-word, lowercase-letter, uppercase-word, uppercase-letter, capitalized-word, other-word, year, number, dot, comma, left-parenthesis, right-parenthesis, left-bracket, right-bracket, colon, semicolon, slash, dash, quote, other.

In addition, we mark the beginning and the end of the reference string with special types start and end.

So for example this string:

Eberlein, T. J. Yearbook of Surgery 2006, 322–324.

is mapped into this sequence:

start capitalized-word comma uppercase-letter dot uppercase-letter dot capitalized-word lowercase-word capitalized-word year comma number dash number dot end

This transformation effectively brings together different words, as long as their form is the same.

After transforming the reference string we extract 2-grams, 3-grams and 4-grams. The values of the features are TF-IDF weights.

Some example features in our representation include:

lowercase-word lowercase-word lowercase-word lowercase-word - a sequence of four lowercase words. It is most likely the part of the article title and won’t have a huge impact on the decision about the citation style.
capitalized-word comma uppercase-letter dot - typical representation of an author in some styles, where the first name is given as an initial only and follows the last name.
left-parenthesis year right-parenthesis - typical for styles that enclose the year in parentheses.
number dash number - this sequence is most likely pages range.

Learning algorithm

I tested four learning algorithms (naive Bayes, logistic regression, linear support vector classification and random forest) in a 5-fold cross validation on the training set. The plot shows the distribution of accuracies obtained by each algorithm:

Based on these results, logistic regression was chosen as the algorithm with the best mean accuracy and the lowest variance of the results.

Final accuracy estimation

The final model was trained on the entire training set and evaluated on the test set. As evaluation metric accuracy was used. In this case, accuracy is simply the fraction of the references in the test set correctly classified by the classifier.

The accuracy on the test set was 94.7%. The confusion matrix shows which styles were most often confused with each other:

The most often confused styles are chicago-author-date and american-sociological-association. Let’s see some example strings from these two styles:

Legros, F. 2003. "Can Dispersive Pressure Cause Inverse Grading in Grain Flows?: Reply." Journal of Sedimentary Research 73(2):335–335
Legros, F. 2003. "Can Dispersive Pressure Cause Inverse Grading in Grain Flows?: Reply." Journal of Sedimentary Research 73 (2) : 335–335

Clarke, Jennie T. 2011. "Recognizing and Managing Reticular Erythematous Mucinosis." Archives of Dermatology 147(6):715
Clarke, Jennie T. 2011. "Recognizing and Managing Reticular Erythematous Mucinosis." Archives of Dermatology 147 (6) : 715

Chalmers, Alan, and Richard Nicholas. 1983. "Galileo on the Dissipative Effect of a Rotating Earth." Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 14(4):315–40
Chalmers, Alan, and Richard Nicholas. 1983. "Galileo on the Dissipative Effect of a Rotating Earth." Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 14 (4) : 315–340

It seems that the styles are indeed very similar. The strings look almost identical, apart from spacing, which is not included in any way in our feature representation. No wonder that the classifier confuses these two styles a lot.

A more detailed analysis of the classifier can be found here.

Accidental release of internal passwords, & API tokens for the Crossref system

Geoffrey Bilder — Fri, 04 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR

On Wednesday, October 2nd, 2019 we discovered that we had accidentally pushed the main Crossref system as part of a docker image into a developer’s account on Docker Hub. The binaries and configuration files that made up the docker image included embedded passwords and API tokens that could have been used to compromise our systems and infrastructure. When we discovered this, we immediately secured the repo, changed all the passwords and secrets, and redeployed the system code. We have since been scanning all of our logs and systems to see if there has been any unusual activity that could be related to the exposure of the container.

Please note that no external data e.g. member passwords or personal information were exposed; our source code contains only internal passwords and ‘secrets’ such as API tokens.

Thankfully, the way in which these secrets were exposed (in compressed, binary files which were, in turn, in a Docker image) means that they were probably overlooked by the automated exploitation tools which focus on scanning source code. And, so far, we have seen nothing that would indicate that these passwords and secrets have been exploited. We will, of course, inform our members directly (and update this blog) if that changes.

More than you probably want to know

If you are continuing to read this, my guess is that you might have questions like:

Why are you doing something as silly as embedding secrets and passwords in your code?
And wait a minute… I thought Crossref code was open source?
And why is the director of strategic initiatives announcing this?

Let me answer these questions in random order.

In March 2019 I took over Crossref’s technical teams when Chuck Koscher announced that he would be retiring at the end of the year. I’m now the director of technology & research.

A few months earlier we had already concluded that a major portion of the Crossref system had accumulated 20 years of technical debt and that we were going to spend a significant portion of 2019 and 2020 paying down that debt.

Specifically, a lot of the code that runs Crossref was inherited from a third party who developed it back in the early 2000s. This means that, even though any new systems that we’ve developed since 2007 have been open-source, the code for the oldest parts of the system has remained closed because it contained potentially proprietary code as well as a lot of deprecated coding practices. Also - the architecture, the tooling, and the development processes behind the Crossref system had not changed much in those twenty years. It was fantastic architecture, tooling, and code for its time. But architectures that scale to millions of records need to change to handle hundreds of millions of records. Processes that work for configuring one service need to change when you are managing dozens of services. And support tools that work for a few hundred members break down when you are dealing with tens of thousands of members.

These parts of the Crossref system were decidedly not 12 factor. We were not using DevOps or SRE working practices to run them. And the bulk of that part of the system is still being run in a traditional data center.

But since March we have been slowly fixing that. In incremental steps. Some of which are visible as a side effect of the security incident that precipitated this blog post. For example, one of our first moves was to move our development to Gitlab. Even though a big chunk of the base Crossref code is still closed source, we saw moving to Gitlab as a priority because Gitlab offers a fantastic suite of tools to help automate and manage our deployments. Similarly, we have been Dockerizing the Crossref system so that it is easier to scale and run in different environments. And as part of this effort, we have spent a lot of time on the issue of how to best handle secrets. We knew our secrets management in this part of the codebase was horrible. We have been developing some experiments and infrastructure for handling these secrets securely. But we haven’t finished this work yet. And so the system slipped out into a public repo too early. Ironically, this too illustrates a fundamental change in the way we develop things. Our default is to be open and transparent. This case is currently an exception. An exception we want to eliminate, but one we are not ready to do yet. We have to audit and scrub the code first.

Yes, this incident has been embarrassing. But not nearly as embarrassing as the fact that Crossref has succumbed to a technology industry cliche. That we spent so much time growing and focusing on new features for our members, that we neglected some of the creaking infrastructure of our infrastructure.

And I should be clear about two things:

First, not all of our code is like this. We have, for a long time, been building open source software and using modern best practices for secrets management in our newer subsystems and services. The problems described above are confined to twenty-year-old-code that we didn’t write in the first place and that we had been avoiding refactoring.

And second, the technology team has been marvelous at responding to the challenge we face. They have adopted new processes and tools. They are learning new techniques. We are steadily chipping away at these problems.

It is generally considered bad practice to praise or reward technology teams for fire-fighting instead of fire prevention, but this may be the exception that proves the rule.

I was blown away by how the technology, product, and support teams worked together. When we discovered this problem, I sat at my desk in rural France and watched as staff from the UK, and all three US time zones shut down this problem in just a couple of hours. Obviously, I wish we hadn’t had the problem in the first place, but seeing their response did a great deal to encourage me that we are on the right track.

In any case, it looks like we’ve been lucky. And we’ll be working even harder to refactor our code, tools, and processes so that this kind of thing doesn’t happen again.

Request for feedback: Conference ID implementation

Patricia Feeney — Fri, 13 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve all been subject to floods of conference invitations, it can be difficult to sort the relevant from the not-relevant or (even worse) sketchy conferences competing for our attention. In 2017, DataCite and Crossref started a working group to investigate creating identifiers for conferences and projects. Identifiers describe and disambiguate, and applying identifiers to conference events will help build clear durable connections between scholarly events and scholarly literature.

Chaired by Aliaksandr Birukou, the Executive Editor for Computer Science at Springer Nature, the group has met regularly over the past two years, collaborating to create use cases and define metadata to identify and describe conference series and events. We first asked for input on metadata specifications in April 2018. Technical implementation kicked off in February with a workshop at CERN to discuss the mechanics of making PIDs for conferences a reality.

We’ve reached another milestone and want your feedback

Crossref has supported a number of conference publication-related PIDs for years - members can currently register PIDs for conference series publications, conference proceedings, and of course individual conference papers - and that won’t change, but we will also be supporting DOI registration for conferences. A crucial step towards this is of course integrating the new identifier into our metadata input schema.

The details

We currently collect some limited metadata describing the conference itself such as theme, location, and dates as part of the conference series or proceeding metadata, but do not apply a DOI to that information. The new Conference ID records will include expanded metadata as defined by the working group. You’ll be able to register a distinct metadata record for a single conference. You’ll also be able to register a record for a conference series, and connect Conference IDs to conference proceeding metadata records and DOIs.

Changes to the conference-specific metadata are backwards compatible. Members will be able to register event metadata per usual, or can instead use the new event metadata to register an identifier for their conference event and/or series. This means a member can:

Register conference, conference series, proceedings series, proceedings, and papers in one submission
Register proceedings or proceedings series and papers without a Conference ID included
Register Conference IDs only
Update an existing conference record with a Conference PID

I’ve written up our proposal in this google doc and we want your feedback before we proceed with implementation. Please comment directly in the Google doc, open a Gitlab issue, or feedback@crossref.org. We’ll keep the document open for comments until September 30.

Speaking, Traveling, Listening, Learning

Vanessa Fairhurst — Thu, 29 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

2019 has been busy for the Community Outreach Team; our small sub-team travels far and wide, talking to members around the world to learn how we can better support the work they do. We run one-day LIVE local events alongside multi-language webinars, with the addition of a new Community Forum, to better support and communicate with our global membership.

This year we held a publisher workshop in London in collaboration with the British Library in February to talk about all things metadata and Open Access, before heading over to speak to members in Kyiv in March at the National Technical University of Ukraine. June saw our first ever non-English LIVE local event in Bogota held in collaboration with Biteca, and in an action-packed week in July, Rachael Lammey and myself jetted across to Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok where we collaborated with Malaysian Ministry of Education, USIM, Chulalongkorn University, iGroup, and ORCID to run two events for our South-East Asian members.

Despite the varied locations, speakers and audiences at these events, some common themes emerged…

Language Matters

We currently work with member organisations in over 125 countries around the world, spanning an even greater number of languages. Whilst, at the moment at least, it is not possible to provide support across all these languages, we are improving support for non-native English speakers. We now have service videos, factsheets, and brochures available in 8 languages including: French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Bahasa Indonesia. As well as expanding our webinars to include a series in Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Arabic, Spanish and Turkish so far.

Our global team of 24 Ambassadors have been key in helping us to provide translated documentation, to run multi-lingual webinars and in-person events, and to answer questions from our members across languages and timezones. Our LIVE local event in Bogota, saw us run our first ever Spanish event with support from our Latin American ambassador team.

I know first hand how daunting public speaking can be, particularly in a second language. As a non-native Spanish speaker, the fear of being misunderstood or mis-pronouncing a word can be paralysing. Members come along to our events with a whole host of questions, sometimes preferring to come and speak to us one-on-one at the break or follow up with us after the event. Everyone has their own preferences, however, being able to communicate in the local language helps to break down barriers and boosts audience participation by taking away these added pressures.

Additionally after running a number of these events, one of the key things we have learnt is how much content to cover in a day. Our LIVE locals are free to attend and open to the whole community. This however can mean that we have a very varied audience in terms of technical know-how and experience of working with our systems. At first we attempted to cover all we could, addressing as many needs, questions and uses of Crossref metadata that we could. However, creating content to please everyone is often a recipe for disaster and information overload. If you start to see your attendee’s eyes glaze over or they start answering emails on their smartphones, you’ve lost them.

Instead we are now going to tailor our events a little more, asking registrants questions in advance, and selecting specific topics to cover. Having a good range of distinct topics and presenters, including local guest speakers, also helps to maintain momentum and avoid audience fatigue. Wider information and conversations will then continue on our Community Forum as well as events being supplemented by webinars in local languages and timezones.

Relationship status: It’s complicated

A question we are often asked when talking to members is how to link distinct content items in the metadata - whether this be a data-set to the published results, a preprint with the version of record, or a translated version of an article with the original. Linking these related research outputs is extremely important; researchers need to be able to cite the correct version of the work they have used in their research. Creating a network of these linkages between scholarly outputs also helps ourselves, our members, and the wider community better track how research is used and developed.

English is by far the most common language used in international academic journals and often is required for publication, however the article can be published in two or more languages, enabling greater discovery and use of the research. A frequent question we get asked is how to register the two versions, whether they use the same DOI or whether each should be assigned its own identifier. Our advice is that each version of the article should have it’s own DOI for citation reasons, but should be linked in the metadata of the translated version as in the xml example below:

However, our schema covers far more relationship types than purely translations. Another interesting area of discussion which has become increasingly prevalent in the last couple of years is around preprints. We began supporting the registration of preprints in November 2016, using their specific record type and enabling linking in the metadata to the version of record, providing a clear publication history for accurate citation. Today we have almost 150k registered in our system.

In Kyiv, we had a request to talk more about data citation; the importance of making data available and persistently linked to. Although data is often shared, it is not routinely referenced in the same way as journal articles or other publications, and this is something we want to encourage. When data is cited it provides clarity and context about the research underpinning the published article, as well as enabling greater discovery and re-use of that data in future research and publications. You can do this in two ways at Crossref, either by including data citations your reference lists, or, again, by using the relations section of the schema. If you want to learn more about the ‘how’ of data citation, we have some useful guidance you can take a look at.

As we are always saying Crossref is all about making connections. Linking research objects by capturing and declaring relationships within your metadata helps to map the evolution of research. Making the distinct parts of the research and publication process accessible by both readers and machines, enables wider discovery, re-use, transparency, accuracy of citations and provides greater acknowledgment of contributors.

Finding Solutions to Resolutions

Reports are rarely the things that get pulses racing (you should probably take a long, hard look at yourself if so) but they are important and can be very useful to make sure your content and the associated metadata is being registered correctly.

We often get questions from members who want to better understand their resolution reports. These are reports generated on a monthly basis for each DOI prefix, sent to the business contact for your organisation, which provide statistics on the resolution rates of your content. So what do we mean by a resolution? Well simply, when a reader clicks on a DOI link for an article, that counts as one DOI resolution. No information is captured about the user or where they are coming from. Although we work to filter out computer-generated usage, the numbers are not a precise measure of human click-throughs to a publishers website - cached articles, search engine crawlers, and traffic directed through a library link resolver can be included in these numbers. However, the reports still provide a good idea of traffic to your publications via the DOI.

Often the part of the report which is of particular interest is the resolution failure rate. Although in an ideal world this would be 0%, realistically 2-3% is the norm. Publishers who are new to Crossref or who have created a small number of DOIs may have a higher failure percentage and this isn’t necessarily a problem (for example, a publisher with 1 failure and 9 successes will have a 10% failure rate). A .csv file containing a list of all failed DOI resolution attempts for the month is attached to each report so that you can review any significant number of failures or any dramatic changes which may indicate a problem that needs to be solved.

Possible reasons for DOI failures:

Bad links - check that your DOI is directing readers to the correct location of your full text or landing page.
Undeposited DOIs - any DOIs that have been distributed or published should be deposited immediately. Simply adding a DOI to your content page will not automatically register this link.
Similarly, if your DOI was deposited mid-month and distributed earlier, any attempts prior to this date will appear as failures on your report.
User error - sometimes users can make mistakes when typing or copy-and-pasting DOIs. To minimize the risk of this keep your DOIs simple and short.

It is also important to make sure you keep the contact details we have on file for your organisation up to date. Otherwise you might miss out on receiving important information about your account. Where it is possible we ask members to submit at least three separate contacts and review this regularly as people often move within and between organisations. We want to keep in touch to give you helpful, essential and interesting information (no spam!)

Get involved

Our next LIVE local event will be held in Oakland, California on 19 September, registration is open and spaces are still available. Alternatively you might want to sign up to one of our interactive Metadata Manager webinars to learn how to use our new content registration tool. Our plans for 2020 are still in the inception phase and we welcome any interest in collaboration, you can contact us at feedback@crossref.org or send us a message on the Community Forum, where you can also keep up to date with our plans as well as giving us your feedback and suggestions. Speaking of feedback and, we have a survey which is trying to collect just that. Please let us know what you value about Crossref (and what you don’t) - we’d love to hear your thoughts.

2019 election slate

Lisa Hart Martin — Fri, 23 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

2019 Board Election

The annual board election is a very important event for Crossref and its members. The board of directors, comprising 16 member organisations, governs Crossref, sets its strategic direction and makes sure that we fulfill our mission. Our members elect the board - its “one member one vote” - and we like to see as many members as possible voting. We are very pleased to announce the 2019 election slate - we have a great set of candidates and an update to the ByLaws addressing the composition of the slate to ensure that the board continues to be representative of our membership.

2019 Election Slate

Crossref received 52 expressions of interest this year through the link that was sent out via our blog, and over 100 emails from members interested in serving on our Board. It is very exciting to see that our members want to be involved.

In March of this year, the Board made a motion per the recommendation of an adhoc Governance Committee. It was resolves to “provide the following guidance to the Nominating Committee: To achieve balance between revenue tiers by proposing a 2019 slate consisting of one Revenue Tier 1 seat and four Revenue tier 2 seats, and a 2020 slate consisting of four Revenue Tier 1 seats and two Revenue Tier 2 seats; thereby resulting in, as nearly as practicable, an equal balance between board members representing Revenue Tier 1 and Revenue Tier 2 (as those terms are defined in Crossref’s ByLaws below).”

Section 2. Nominating Committee. The Board shall appoint a Nominating Committee of five (5) members, each of whom shall be either a Director or the designated representative of a member that is not represented on the Board, whose duty it shall be to nominate candidates for Directors to be elected at the next annual election. The Nominating Committee shall designate a slate of candidates for each election that is at least equal in number to the number of Directors to be elected at such election. Each such slate will be comprised such that, as nearly as practicable, one-half of the resulting Board shall be comprised of Directors designated by Members then representing Revenue Tier 1; and one-half of the resulting Board shall be comprised of Directors designated by Members then representing Revenue Tier 2. “Revenue Tier 1” means all consecutive membership dues categories, starting with the lowest dues category, that, when taken together, aggregate, as nearly as possible, to fifty percent (50%) of Crossref’s annual revenue. “Revenue Tier 2” means all membership dues categories above Revenue Tier 1. The Nominating Committee shall notify the Secretary in writing, at least twenty (20) days before the date of the annual meeting, of the names of such candidates, and the Secretary, except as herein otherwise provided, shall transmit a copy thereof to the last recorded address of each member of record simultaneously with the notice of the meeting.

The Committee and the Board has worked very hard to balance the Board, so you will see two categories on the ballot, large and small.

The 2019 slate includes: seven candidates for five available seats

Candidate organisations, in alphabetical order, for the Small category (1 seat available):

eLife, Melissa Harrison
The Royal Society, Stuart Taylor

Candidate organisations, in alphabetical order, for the Large category (4 seats available):

Clarivate Analytics, Nandita Quaderi
Elsevier, Chris Shillum
IOP, Graham McCann
Springer Nature, Reshma Shaikh
Wiley, Todd Toler

Take a look at the candidates’ organisational and personal statements

You can be part of this important process, by voting in the election

If your organisation is a voting member in good standing of Crossref as of September 13, 2019, you are eligible to vote when voting opens on September 27, 2019.

How can you vote?

On September 27, 2019, your organisation’s designated voting contact will receive an email with the Formal Notice of Meeting and Proxy Form with concise instructions on how to vote. You will also receive a user name and password with a link to our voting platform.

The election results will be announced at LIVE19 Amsterdam on November 13, 2019.

Building better metadata with schema releases

Patricia Feeney — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This month we have officially released a new version of our input metadata schema. As well as walking through the latest additions, I’ll also describe here how we’re starting to develop a new streamlined and open approach to schema development, using GitLab and some of the ideas under discussion going forward.

What’s included in version 4.4.2

The latest schema as of August 2019 is version 4.4.2 and this release now includes:

Support for “pending publication”
Support for JATS 1.2 abstracts
Abstract support to dissertations, reports, and allow multiple abstracts wherever available
Support for multiple dissertation authors
A new acceptance_date element added to journal article, book, book chapter, and conference paper record types

“Pending publication” is the term we’ve coined for the phase where a manuscript has been accepted for publication but where the publisher needs to communicate a DOI much earlier than most article metadata is available. Some members asked for the ability to register and assign DOIs prior to online publication, even without a title, so this allows members to register a DOI with minimal metadata, temporarily, before online publication. There is of course no obligation to use this feature.

It’s worth calling out the addition of acceptance_date too. This is a key attribute that is heavily requested by downstream metadata users like universities. Acceptance dates allow people to report on outputs much more accurately, so we do encourage all members to start including acceptance dates in their metadata. It’s highly appreciated!

Schema files public on GitLab

I’ve added our latest schema to a new GitLab repository, There you’ll find the schema files, some documentation, and the opportunity to suggest enhancements. The schema has been released as bundle 0.1.1 and also includes our new Grant metadata schema for members that fund research.

The schema has been available in some form for months but at this point we consider it ‘officially’ released to kick off our new but necessary practice of formal schema releases. Any forthcoming updates will be added to the next version.

Schema management process

We’ve been adding sets of metadata and new record types over the years, but also need to have a defined process for small but vital pieces of metadata that you need to provide and retrieve from our metadata records. If you’re wondering what our procedure for updating our schema is, you are not alone! We have not had a formal process, instead relying on ad-hoc requests from our membership and working groups. Our release management and schema numbering has also not been consistent.

Going forward, I will ensure that all forthcoming versions of our metadata schema are be posted as a draft on GitLab for review and comment, and the final version will be officially released via GitLab as well.

It’s important to note that when we talk about “the schema”, we generally mean the input schema specifically i.e. what members of Crossref can register about the content they produce. As always, the output for retrieving that metadata is subject to separate development plans for our Metadata APIs. I’m working with our technical team so we can develop and introduce an ’end-to-end’ approach that doesn’t in future treat the input and the output as such separate considerations.

What’s next

Many of the updates in this latest release have been in the works for some time. Changes to our metadata both large and small are considered carefully, but I’d like to do this in a transparent and cooperative way with our community.

I recently set up the “Metadata Practitioners Interest Group” and we’ve just had our second call. A big topic was how to best manage the ideas and requests from the community. The ability for public comments on GitLab is a first step.

This most recent update contains a mix of long term projects and updates to keep our metadata current and useful. Other changes that are under discussion will require more development on our end. But stay tuned for more information about forthcoming changes, as well information about how you can contribute.

Introducing our new Director of Product

Ed Pentz — Mon, 19 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’m happy to announce that Bryan Vickery has joined Crossref today as our new Director of Product. Bryan has extensive experience developing products and services at publishers such as Taylor & Francis, where he led the creation of the open-access platform Cogent OA. Most recently he was Managing Director of Research Services at T&F, including Wizdom.ai after it was acquired.

He previously held a range of roles from Publisher to Chief Operations Officer at BioMedCentral, as well as online community and technology leadership roles at Elsevier.

Bryan is a great addition to Crossref and we are lucky to have him. The product team is keen to progress the long list of wishes from our community with his guidance. Bryan will bring focus and clarity to our roadmap and our development processes, making it easier for people to adopt and participate in our services, and ensuring that we are working on the issues that are most important to our members.

He will also be a vital part of the leadership team, working with me and the other directors Geoffrey, Ginny, and Lisa to help us take the organisation forward in a transparent way that serves our mission and empowers our excellent staff.

And now a few words from Bryan…

I’m thrilled to be joining Crossref as Director of Product at a time of considerable change in scholarly communication. I’ve worked in, and around, scholarly publishing for more than 20 years.

This is a challenging role. We have many exciting services and collaborations to progress, and also technical debt to address (like everyone else) to upgrade our existing services - it’s essential we balance these. My priority is to stay on top of the issues of the highest value to the scholarly community, now and in the future, and ensure we deliver services that are both useful and usable.

I will be attending Crossref LIVE19 “The strategy one” along with other staff and look forward to meeting many of our members then. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts on where we’ve been (what it’s like working with us and using our services) and where we’re going (what you’d like to see from us). You can reach me via our feedback email.

Please join us in welcoming Bryan to the Crossref community.

We'll be rocking your world again at PIDapalooza 2020

Ginny Hendricks — Sun, 18 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The official countdown to PIDapalooza 2020 begins here! It’s 163 days to go till our flame-lighting opening ceremony at the fabulous Belem Cultural Center in Lisbon, Portugal. Your friendly neighborhood PIDapalooza Planning Committee—Helena Cousijn (DataCite), Maria Gould (CDL), Stephanie Harley (ORCID), Alice Meadows (ORCID), and I—are already hard at work making sure it’s the best one so far!

We have a shiny [new website](https://pidapalooza.org), with loads more information than before, including spotify playlists (please add your PID songs to [the 2020 one](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1oJtbpTzF9I3MewQ1Yasml?si=D0TKdR8BTJSL-GA3X_LwVQ)!), an instagram photo gallery, and of course registration information. Look out for updates there and on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/pidapalooza).

And, led by Helena, the Program Committee is starting its search for sessions that meet PIDapalooza’s goals of being PID-focused, fun, informative, and interactive. If you’ve a PID story to share, a PID practice to recommend, or a PID technology to launch, the Committee wants to hear from you. Please send them your ideas, using this form, by September 27. We aim to finalize the program by late October/early November.

Don’t forget to tie your proposal into one of the six festival themes:

Theme 1: Putting Principles into Practice

FAIR, Plan S, the 4 Cs; principles are everywhere. Do you have examples of how PIDs helped you put principles into practice? We’d love to hear your story!

Theme 2: PID Communities

We believe PIDs don’t work without community around them. We would like to hear from you about best practice among PID communities so we can learn from each other and spread the word even further!

Theme 3: PID Success Stories

We already know PIDs are great, but which strategies worked? Share your victories! Which strategies failed? Let’s turn these into success stories together!

Theme 4: Achieving Persistence through Sustainability

Persistence is a key part of PIDs, but there can’t be persistence without sustainability. Do you want to share how you sustain your PIDs or how PIDs help you with sustainability?

What would make heterogeneous PID systems ‘interoperate’ optimally? Would standardized metadata and APIs across PID types solve many of the problems, and if so, how would that be achieved? And what about the social aspects? How do we bridge the gaps between different stakeholder groups and communities?

Theme 6: PID Party!

You don’t just learn about PIDs through powerpoints. What about games? Interpretive dance? Get creative and let us know what kind of activity you’d like to organize at PIDapalooza this year!

PIDapalooza: the essentials

What? PIDapalooza 2020 - the open festival of persistent identifiers
When? 29-30 January 2020 (kickoff party the evening of January 28)
Where? Belem Cultural Center, Lisbon, Portugal (map)
Why? To think, talk, live persistent identifiers for two whole days with your fellow PID people, experts, and newcomers alike!

We hope you’re as excited about PIDapalooza 2020 as we are and we look forward to seeing you in Lisbon.

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.

Funders and infrastructure: let’s get building

Josh Brown — Mon, 29 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Human intelligence and curiosity are the lifeblood of the scholarly world, but not many people can afford to pursue research out of their own pocket. We all have bills to pay. Also, compute time, buildings, lab equipment, administration, and giant underground thingumatrons do not come cheap. In 2017, according to statistics from UNESCO, $1.7 trillion dollars were invested globally in Research and Development. A lot of this money comes from the public - 22c in every dollar spent on R&D in the USA comes from government funds, for example. Funders really do support a LOT of research.

For that research to count, it needs to be communicated. For us to interpret those research communications critically, we need to understand how the research was done and who paid for it.

At Crossref, we’ve been working with funders for many years. The Open Funder Registry was launched (with donated support from Elsevier) in 2012, and provides a taxonomy of funders, each uniquely identified, which has grown to cover 20,000 funders around the world. This resource has helped to connect the organisations that provide research funds to resources, projects, and publications. Some are also members and have been registering content with us. This is a growing trend as more funders start to launch their own open platforms. Funders also consume metadata from Crossref members, using it to track and report on the published outputs of the researchers they support.

More recently, we have been exploring the ways that we can do more in partnership with the funding community. As our board concluded in 2017,

Crossref requires increased emphasis on funders, understanding their needs and requirements and increasingly including funders in the scholarly communication dialogue.

In response, we have explored new services and practical enhancements to our existing portfolio, such as the new grants registration system, which will also power search and lookup tools.

This new initiative will link structured information about grants with DOIs, and enable us to provide open tools to help institutions, publishers, and research supporting organisations to re-use that data and make long-lasting connections between specific funding (and other kinds of research support) and research activities and outcomes. The value of this was beautifully explained by our friends at Wellcome (now members) in this blog post, and was reinforced by a recent survey undertaken by ORCID in which linking grants to outputs was cited as one of the major challenges facing funders. The Crossref Grant Linking System launched this July with a group of early adopter funders, ably supported by the team at Europe PMC.

We’re not stopping there though: we are lucky to have a dedicated and engaged funder advisory group, and we will continue to work with them to understand how our interactions with funders can benefit the wider ecosystem that we support, and help funders to achieve their goals.

There are many platforms providing vital intelligence to funders, from Dimensions to OpenAIRE, which rely on Crossref data. Last month, I was at the OAI11 workshop in Geneva, and it was striking how many presentations included a slide that mentioned using Crossref data. There were 200 people from the open science community there, and they clearly rely on Crossref as a foundational infrastructure to build their ecosystem. That community is also just a subset of the more than 2,500 registered consumers of Crossref metadata. We need to keep asking how this metadata can improve the information available to funders, to their partners and to service providers. Adding grants to the mix will help all of these parties provide an even richer picture of research.

As we move forward with our engagement with the global funding community, new opportunities are becoming visible, and not just for funders. Better experiences for authors, reduced overhead for publishers and easier benchmarking for institutions are a selection of benefits that this work can help us realize.

When we really start to get to grips with opening up information about the inputs to research in the way we already have with its outputs, truly exciting things can happen. The really great thing about this is that, quite literally, everyone benefits: from Crossref members to everyone touched by advances in our understanding of the world. Let’s get building!

Big things have small beginnings: the growth of the Open Funder Registry

Kirsty Meddings — Sun, 21 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The Open Funder Registry plays a critical role in making sure that our members correctly identify the funding sources behind the research that they are publishing. It addresses a similar problem to the one that led to the creation of ORCID: researchers’ names are hard to disambiguate and are rarely unique; they get abbreviated, have spelling variations and change over time.

The same is true of organisations. You don’t have to read all that many papers to see authors acknowledge funding from the US National Institutes of Health as NIH, National Institutes for Health, National Institute of Health, etc. And wait, are you sure they didn’t mean National Institute for Health Research? (An entirely separate UK-based funder).

And a lot of countries have a National Science Foundation…

If each funder has a unique identifier, our members can include it in the metadata that they register with us, giving a clear and accurate link between the funder of the research and the published outcomes. And we can make that information available to everyone via our API, and build human interfaces so that you can look it up.

Many types of funding bodies are represented in the Funder Registry, from government agencies and large international foundations to small single-mission charities, and everything in between. As well as a unique DOI for each institution, the Registry contains additional metadata that can help to identify the funder such as country, abbreviated or alternate names, translated names, and so on.

The Registry also supports relationships between different funders. These can be hierarchical parent/child relationships for larger organisations, or connections between archival and current entries in instances where a funder has changed its name or become part of another body (to tell us about these kinds of changes you just need to get in touch).

The Registry was donated to Crossref by Elsevier when we first introduced funding information as part of our Content Registration schema back in 2012. We started out with a list of just over 4000 funders. Through an ongoing partnership the list has been - and continues to be - updated on a monthly basis by Elsevier, and sent to Crossref as a formatted XML file that we process and release.

In return, Crossref sends Elsevier a feed of funder names that our members have registered with us that are not present in the Registry, which a team at Elsevier validates and adds to their databases, and then puts those newly-identified funders in to the next iteration of the list they send to us. It’s nice and circular and benefits both parties.

We released v1.27 of the Funder Registry last week, and it contains entries for an impressive 21,356 funders.

I’ve been involved in this project since its inception, and have enjoyed a productive and cooperative working relationship with the team at Elsevier, headed by Peter Berkvens (Senior Product Manager) and Paul Mostert (Director Product Management). I asked them to explain a little about the process from their side:

“Our team maintains a workflow in which Acknowledgement and Funding sections from articles are scanned for appearances of funding organisations using Natural Language Processing techniques. External Elsevier vendors then edit the data and add the validated names of the funders to what is called the Funding Bodies Taxonomy. The latter feeds Crossref’s Open Funder Registry.

Currently, the Taxonomy is nearing 22,000 Funders. It is expected it will grow to 25,000 Funders eventually. When this stage is reached, Elsevier believes that all existing Funders will be covered in the Funder Registry. Elsevier will continue to maintain the list adding new Funders as soon as they appear in scientific papers.

Elsevier’s Primary Articles production workflow for ScienceDirect uses the Funder Registry during the copyediting process, validating and tagging the Funders that appear in the accepted articles for Elsevier journals hosted by ScienceDirect. We then send the funder names and IDs to Crossref as part of our metadata.”

Thanks to everyone involved for getting us ever-closer to a truly comprehensive list of funders.

And if you’re a member who’s not already registering funding information, why not look into getting started? It all leads to richer metadata which means more people can find, cite and re-use research – and we all know that’s a good thing…

What if I told you that bibliographic references can be structured?

Dominika Tkaczyk — Mon, 08 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Last year I spent several weeks studying how to automatically match unstructured references to DOIs (you can read about these experiments in my previous blog posts). But what about references that are not in the form of an unstructured string, but rather a structured collection of metadata fields? Are we matching them, and how? Let’s find out.

TL;DR

43% of open/limited references deposited with Crossref have no publisher-asserted DOI and no unstructured string. This means they need a matching approach suitable for structured references. [EDIT 6th June 2022 - all references are now open by default].
I adapted our new matching algorithms: Search-Based Matching (SBM) and Search-Based Matching with Validation (SMBV) to work with both structured and unstructured references.
I compared three matching algorithms: Crossref’s current (legacy) algorithm, SBM and SBMV, using a dataset of 2,000 structured references randomly chosen from Crossref’s references.
SBMV and the legacy algorithm performed almost the same. SBMV’s F1 was slightly better (0.9660 vs. 0.9593).
Similarly as in the case of unstructured references, SBMV achieved slightly lower precision and better recall than the legacy algorithm.

Introduction

Those of you who often read scientific papers are probably used to bibliographic references in the form of unstructured strings, as they appear in the bibliography, for example:

[5] Elizabeth Lundberg, “Humanism on Gallifrey,” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 40, no. 2, p. 382, 2013.

This form, however, is not the only way we can store the information about the referenced paper. An alternative is a structured, more machine-readable form, for example using BibTeX format:

@article{Elizabeth_Lundberg_2013,
year = 2013,
publisher = {{SF}-{TH}, Inc.},
volume = {40},
number = {2},
pages = {382},
author = {Elizabeth Lundberg},
title = {Humanism on Gallifrey},
journal = {Science Fiction Studies}
}

Probably the most concise way to provide the information about the referenced document is to use its identifier, for example (🥁drum roll…) the DOI:

<https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.5621/sciefictstud.40.2.0382>

It is important to understand that these three representations (DOI, structured reference and unstructured reference) are not equivalent. The amount of information they carry varies:

The DOI, by definition, provides the full information about the referenced document, because it identifies it without a doubt. Even though the metadata and content are not directly present in the DOI string, they can be easily and deterministically accessed. It is by far the preferred representation of the referenced document.
The structured reference contains the metadata of the referenced object, but it doesn’t identify the referenced object without a doubt. In our example, we know that the paper was published in 2013 by Elizabeth Lundberg, but we might not know exactly which paper it is, especially if there are more than one document with the same or similar metadata.
The unstructured reference contains the metadata field values, but without the names of the fields. This also doesn’t identify the referenced document, and even its metadata is not known without a doubt. In our example, we know that the word “Science” appears somewhere in the metadata, but we don’t know for sure whether it is a part of the title, journal title, or maybe the author’s (very cool) name.

The diagram presents the relationships between all these three forms:

The arrows show actions that Crossref has to perform to transform one form to another.

Green transformations are in general easy and can be done without introducing any errors. The reason is that green arrows go from more information to less information. We all know how easy it is to forget important stuff!

Green transformations are typically performed when the publication is being created. At the beginning the author can access the DOI of the referenced document, because they know exactly which document it is. Then, they can extract the bibliographic metadata (the structured form) of the document based on the DOI, for example by following the DOI to the document’s webpage or retrieving the metadata from Crossref’s REST API. Finally, the structured form can be formatted into an unstructured string using, for example, the CiteProc tool.

We’ve also automated it further and these two green transformation (getting the document’s metadata based on the DOI and formatting it into a string) can be done in one go using Crossref’s content negotiation.

Red transformations are often done in systems that store bibliographic metadata (like our own metadata collection), often at a large scale. In these systems, we typically want to have DOIs (or other unique identifiers) of the referenced documents, but in practise we often have only structured and/or unstructured form. To fix this, we match references. Some systems also perform reference parsing (thankfully, we discovered we do not need to do this in our case).

In general, red transformations are difficult, because we have to go from less information to more information, effectively recreating the information that has been lost during paper writing. This requires a bit of reasoning, educated guessing, and juggling probabilities. Data errors, noise, and sparsity make the situation even more dire. As a result, we do not expect any matching or parsing algorithm to be always correct. Instead, we perform evaluations (like in this blog post) to capture how well they perform on average.

My previous blog post focused on matching unstructured references to DOIs (long red “matching” arrow). In this one, I analyse how well we can match structured references to DOIs (short red “matching” arrow).

References in Crossref

You might be asking yourself how important it is to have the matching algorithm working for both structured and unstructured references. Let’s look more closely at the references our matching algorithm has to deal with.

29% of open/limited references deposited with Crossref already have the DOI provided by the publisher member. At Crossref, when we come across those references, we start dancing on a rainbow to the tunes of Linkin Park, while the references holding their DOIs sprinkle from the sky. Some of us sing along. We live for those moments, so if you care about us, please provide as many DOIs in your references as possible!

You might be wondering how we are sure these publisher-provided DOIs are correct. The short answer is that we are not. After all, the publisher might have used an automated matcher to insert the DOIs before depositing the metadata. Nevertheless, our current workflow assumes these publisher-provided DOIs are correct and we simply accept them as they are.

Unfortunately, the remaining 71% of references are deposited without a DOI. Those are the references we try to match ourselves.

Here is the distribution of all the open/limited references:

17% of the references are deposited with no DOI and both structured and unstructured form. 11% have no DOI and only an unstructured form, and 43% have no DOI and only a structured form. These 43% cannot be directly processed by the unstructured matching algorithm.

This distribution clearly shows that we need a matching algorithm able to process both structured and unstructured references. If our algorithm worked only with one type, we would miss a large percentage of the input references, and the quality of our citation metadata would be questionable.

The analysis

Let’s get to the point. I evaluated and compared three matching algorithms, focusing on the structured references.

The first algorithm is one of the legacy algorithms currently used in Crossref. It uses fuzzy querying in a relational database to find the best matching DOI for the given structured reference. It can be accessed through a Crossref OpenURL query.

The second algorithm is an adaptation of the Search-Based Matching (SBM) algorithm for structured references. In this algorithm, we concatenate all metadata fields of the reference and use it to search in the Crossref’s REST API. The first hit is returned as the target DOI if its relevance score exceeds the predefined threshold.

The third algorithm is an adaptation of the Search-Based Matching with Validation (SBMV) for structured references. Similarly as in the case of SBM, we also concatenate all metadata fields of the input reference and use it to search in the Crossref’s REST API. Next, a number of top hits are considered as candidates and their similarity score with the input reference is calculated. The candidate with the highest similarity score is returned as the target DOI if its score exceeds the predefined threshold. The similarity score is based on fuzzy comparison of the metadata field values between the candidate and the input reference.

I compared these three algorithms on a test set composed of 2,000 structured bibliographic references randomly chosen from Crossref’s metadata. For each reference, I manually checked the output of all matching algorithms, and in some cases performed additional manual searching. This resulted in the true target DOI (or null) assigned to each reference.

The metrics are the same as in the previous evaluations: precision, recall and F1 calculated over the set of input references.

The thresholds for SBM and SBMV algorithms were chosen on a separate validation dataset. The validation dataset also contains 2,000 structured references with manually-verified target DOIs.

The results

The plot shows the results of the evaluation of all three algorithms:

The vertical black lines on top of the bars represent the confidence intervals.

As we can see, SBMV and the legacy approach achieved very similar results. SBMV slightly outperforms the legacy approach in F1: 0.9660 vs. 0.9593.

SBMV is slightly worse that the legacy approach in precision (0.9831 vs. 0.9929) and better in recall (0.9495 vs. 0.9280).

The SBM algorithm performs the worst, especially in precision. Why is there such a huge difference between SBM and SBMV? The algorithms differ in the post-processing validation stage. SBM relies on the ability of the search engine to select the best target DOI, while SBMV re-scores a number of candidates obtained from the search engine using custom similarity. The results here suggest that in the case of structured references, the right target DOI is usually somewhere close to the top of the search results, but often it is not in the first position. One of the reasons might be missing titles in 76% of the structured references, which can confuse the search engine.

Let’s look more closely at a few interesting cases in our test set:

first-page = 1000
article-title = Sequence capture using PCR-generated probes: a cost-effective method of targeted high-throughput sequencing for nonmodel organisms
volume = 14
author = Peñalba
year = 2014
journal-title = Molecular Ecology Resources

The reference above was successfully matched by SBMV to https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.1111/1755-0998.12249, even though the document’s volume and pages are missing from Crossref’s metadata.

issue = 2
first-page = 101
volume = 6
author = Abraham
year = 1987
journal-title = Promoter: An Automated Promotion Evaluation System

Here the structure incorrectly labels article title as journal title. Despite this, the reference was correctly matched by our brave SBMV to https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.1287/mksc.6.2.101.

author = Marshall Day C.
volume = 39
first-page = 572
year = 1949
journal-title = India. J. A. D. A.

Above we have most likely a parsing error. A part of the article title appears in the journal name, and the main journal name is abbreviated. ‘I see what you did there, my old friend Parsing Algorithm! Only a minor obstacle!’ said SBMV, and matched the reference to https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.14219/jada.archive.1949.0114.

volume = 5
year = 2015
article-title = A retrospective analysis of the effect of discussion in teleconference and face-to-face scientific peer-review panels
journal-title = BMJ Open

Here the the page number and author are not in the structure, but our invincible SBMV jumped over the holes left by the missing metadata and gracefully grabbed the right DOI https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.1136/bmjopen-2015-009138.

issue = 2
first-page = 533
volume = 30
author = Uthman BM
year = 1989
journal-title = Epilepsia

In this case we have a mismatch in the page number (“533” vs. “S33”). But did SBMV give up and burst into tears? I think we already know the answer! Of course, it conquered the nasty typo with the sword made of fuzzy comparisons (yes, it’s a thing!) and brought us back the correct DOI https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.1111/j.1528-1157.1989.tb05823.x.

Structured vs. unstructured

How does matching structured references compare to matching unstructured references?

The general trends are the same. For both structured and unstructured references, SBMV outperforms the legacy approach in F1, achieving worse precision and better recall. This tells us that our legacy algorithms are more strict and as a result they miss some links.

Structured reference matching seems easier than unstructured reference matching. The reason is that when we have the structure, we can compare the input reference to the candidate field by field, which is more precise than using the unstructured string.

Structured matching, however, in practise brings new challenges. One big problem is data sparsity. 15% of structured references without DOIs have fewer than four metadata fields. This is not always enough to identify the DOI. Also, 76% of the structured references without DOIs do not contain the article title, which poses a problem for candidate selection using the search engine.

What’s next?

So far, I have focused on evaluating SBMV for unstructured and structured references separately. 17% of the open/limited references at Crossref, however, have both unstructured and structured form. In those cases, it might be beneficial to use the information from both forms. I plan to perform some experiments on this soon.

The data and code for this evaluation can be found at https://github.com/CrossRef/reference-matching-evaluation. The Java version of SBMV (for both structured and unstructured references) can be found at https://gitlab.com/crossref/search-based-reference-matcher.

License metadata FTW

Rachael Lammey — Fri, 28 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

More and better license information is at the top of a lot of Christmas lists from a lot of research institutions and others who regularly use Crossref metadata. I know, I normally just ask for socks too. To help explain what we mean by this, we’ve collaborated with Jisc to set out some guidance for publishers on registering this license metadata with us.

At the most basic level, complete and accurate license metadata helps anyone interested in using a research work out how they can do so. Making the information machine-readable helps this to be done easily and at scale by all kinds of tools and services.

In this best practice guide, we’re specifically focusing on a use case for license metadata that comes from research institutions. They need to know which version of an article (or other content item) may be exposed in an open repository, and from what date, and tell anyone who comes across the piece of content in the repository what they can do with it once they find it there.

Without this being stated simply and clearly in the Crossref metadata, the institution won’t know which works they can make available and which they cannot, even if you as the publisher know that the item is open access, or is open access after a certain date. This can impact the research community’s capacity to find and use the research you publish.

The guidance offers advice on:

the kind of license information it’s useful to link out to from the Crossref metadata
what the Crossref metadata might look like for:

gold open access content
green open access content with a Creative Commons License
green open access content with a publisher-defined post-embargo license

how to add this metadata to existing or new Crossref deposits

Take a look at the full guidelines here.

Maybe there’s more to the story than this, or more information that you need as a publisher or as a research institution - if so, let us know and we can adapt this document based on your feedback. Requests for socks may be declined.

Rest in peace Christine Hone

Crossref — Sun, 09 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Our friend and colleague Christine Hone (née Buske) passed away in May from a short but brutal illness. Here is our attempt at ‘some words’, which we wrote for her funeral book and are posting here with her husband Dave’s permission.

We are devastated to lose Christine as a colleague and friend. It’s hard to put into words the effect she had on our small organisation in such a short time, and how much we’re already missing her. But here it goes.

It was 2015 when some of us first met Chris, and we immediately saw how much of an asset she could be to our organisation. She was very active in the community and well-known in many academic and publishing circles around the world. And she had an enviable combination of technical skills, a scientific mind, and a natural ability to engage people.

We tried to recruit her back then but she was in demand by others and it wasn’t until early 2018 that we succeeded. We finally got her! She became the Product Manager for a very advanced and complex system but she took to it perfectly, with real excitement and a complete understanding of how we (and therefore she) could help the research community all over the world see and make connections.

Christine’s official Crossref headshot 😊

With colleagues spread around the world, she joined an organisation that had exciting opportunities and its share of challenges. Chris engaged with all of this head-on. She handled a constant stream of queries from people spread across time zones, whilst at the same time getting to grips with a service that was difficult to pin down. She balanced these tasks which were at very opposite ends of the spectrum. She added so much and with such energy and intelligence to everything she got involved in, always bringing human attention and creativity.

Chris was also on the winning team at 2018’s UKSG quiz!

Ed, Amanda, and Chris: the Crossref contingent of the winning quiz team

In her talk at the 5:AM altmetrics conference she brought together technical detail, big-picture ideas, and her own particular passion. Her opening words were “My name is Christine and I’m a recovering fish scientist”. Never afraid to bring her personal brand of humour into the workplace, her opening slide was a photograph of her covered in rats. That presentation was the first time that much of the audience really understood our service. Having cracked the messaging for us, she was due to give the same talk at our annual meeting in Toronto a few months later…

Chris’s opening slide at her 5:AM talk

Chris giving her now legendary talk at 5:AM on Event Data

Many of us were in Toronto for that meeting; it was two weeks after we’d heard the news of her diagnosis. Some of us were able to visit her in the hospital where she told us of her and Dave’s decision to bring forward their wedding plans. It was a bittersweet announcement but, clearly, they adored each other and were determined to be happy together despite the challenging times ahead.

Over the last few months, even when she had little energy to spare, Chris popped in (virtually) to chat and update us, share pictures and, selflessly, to see how we were doing. Even people who never met or worked closely with her started to follow her vlog and exchange notes and news directly.

Always checking in with us, an update from Chris shortly before she passed

We have all been rocked by the news and there is a lot of sadness and grief among the Crossref staff and community. Even in the last moments we shared together Chris always asked about how her projects were going. Her passion for her products was a big part of what animated her when she first joined. Throughout her late-stage illness, this remained constant. She yearned to return to work. This zeal will forever be an inspiration to us all at Crossref.

Christine taught us a lot, through her work, with her attitude to life, and in the manner that she dealt with this terrible illness. We thank her for giving us so many great memories and we will never forget her.

A Crossref photoshoot; our Christine ❤️

Similarity Check is changing

Jennifer Lin — Thu, 30 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Tl;dr

Crossref is taking over the service management of Similarity Check from Turnitin. That means we’re your first port of call for questions and your agreement will be direct with us. This is a very good thing because we have agreed and will continue to agree the best possible set-up for our collective membership. Similarity Check participants need to take action to confirm the new terms with us as soon as possible and before 31st August 2019. Instructions will be circulated early June via email.

Background

Many of our members use Similarity Check which gives their editors reduced-rate access to Turnitin’s iThenticate system for plagiarism checking. Some use Similarity Check directly and some as part of a submission system.

The service launched in 2008 when we announced our initial partnership with Turnitin. Since then it’s gone from strength to strength and now has over 60 million full-text documents (from over 87 thousand titles) available for text comparison and almost 1500 members using the service.

The way that the Similarity Check arrangement works is changing, and it’s important that users know what’s happening. We have worked with Turnitin to set up a process that will transition participants easily and swiftly into the upgraded service with no access interruptions to iThenticate access.

So, what is changing and why?

We know that Similarity Check is a critical service for our members, and we want to improve people’s experience of using it. So, in consultation with members, we’ve strengthened the service by updating our relationship with Turnitin to consolidate all the components of the service under our care and stewardship. From next week, Similarity Check participants will move from having an agreement with Turnitin to one with Crossref. And at Crossref, we have a new agreement with Turnitin as the technology provider for the service.

The new arrangement puts us in a strong position to improve support and drive future improvements of the system. Representing our collective membership, we’ve agreed better terms than what people have today and what members would get acting individually.

There are five key changes specifically:

Members’ Similarity Check service agreement will be with us and not Turnitin.
Per-document checking fees will be invoiced by us, and not Turnitin. They’ll be included in members’ regular invoices, reducing international transfer fees for many.
The first 100 documents checked each year will be free of charge.
Turnitin will operate as a vendor for Crossref. We’ve already agreed a range of additions to their technology roadmap. Turnitin will remain responsible for fixing any bugs or technical issues with the system, but we’re in a stronger position to ensure these are fixed quickly.
Users will get training and on-boarding support from Crossref. This will cover both how to use the interface and how to interpret the results.

What’s staying the same?

The system itself and how it’s accessed - people’s logins will stay exactly the same and nothing will change about how participants have their systems set up.
The fees - the annual Similarity Check fee and the per-document checking fees will remain at the same level (although under the new arrangement users will get the first 100 documents each year for free - see “what’s changing” above!)
Your service obligations - members still need to make at least 90% of all their journal article content available for Turnitin to index. This is achieved through the dedicated full-text URLs that members register in their metadata.
Licensing and privacy - there are no changes to the licensing of members’ content or the privacy requirements for Turnitin’s use of member content.

For existing users

We’ve worked closely with Turnitin to ensure an easy transition to the new Crossref terms. You can transition to the new terms at any stage from next week through to 31st August, and Turnitin will end your contract with them in the month you take that action.

Next week, we’ll email your main Crossref membership contact with a link to a form asking them to click-through accept the new terms. This will confirm and commence the transition process.

You’ll then need to:

Pay your final Turnitin invoice, which will be sent at the end of the month you complete the form. This will cover your per-document checking fees up to the 25th of that month.
Continue to use iThenticate as usual.

Your service agreement will officially move from the Turnitin agreement to the Crossref agreement on the 25th of the month that you complete the transition form. The next Similarity Check invoices you receive will be from Crossref in January 2020 and will include your Similarity Check annual fee and your per-document checking fees for the remainder of 2019.

If you haven’t transitioned to the new agreement by 31st August, you risk losing access to the iThenticate system as Turnitin will not be able to automatically renew your direct contract.

If you have any questions about these changes, do contact our membership specialist. We’ll be in touch next week with a link to a new form where you’ll be able to check your details and accept the new agreement directly with us.

For prospective users

When you apply to participate in Similarity Check you will be accepting terms directly with Crossref and not Turnitin. Eligible members can apply any time from next week.

Any questions?

There are many benefits to this new set-up, but we understand these things can be a bit of a hassle. We’ve welcomed a new colleague (say hello to Kathleen!) to help people transition and get the best from their use of Similarity Check. Please contact her via Support with any questions.

[Update June 5th: we’ve added a new FAQ page for members who signed up for Similarity Check prior to June 2019]

Putting content in context

Kirsty Meddings — Mon, 13 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

You can’t go far on this blog without reading about the importance of registering rich metadata. Over the past year we’ve been encouraging all of our members to review the metadata they are sending us and find out which gaps need filling by looking at their Participation Report.

The metadata elements that are tracked in Participation Reports are mostly beyond the standard bibliographic information that is used to identify a work. They are important because they provide context: they tell the reader how the research was funded, what license it’s published under, and more about its authors via links to their ORCID profiles. And while this metadata is all available through our APIs, we also display much of it to readers through our Crossmark service.

Crossmark is also about providing context. It is a button placed on content, which when clicked on brings up a pop-up box that tells the reader about significant updates such as corrections and retractions, together with other information about the publishing and editorial processes that have been applied to the content ahead of publication.

The Crossmark box can display information about authors, funders and licenses. In addition, our members can add “More information” and often do in the form of publication history, links to supporting materials, and peer review information. All of this supporting information helps the reader assess how well the content has been - and continues to be - curated by the publisher.

Who’s in?

250 Crossref members have signed up to use Crossmark (it’s an add-on service with its own fees). Though optional, some star pupils have even added Crossmark to their back-year content and as a result have Crossmark coverage on 99% of their content (kudos to PLOS, Rockefeller University Press and the societies represented by KAMJE, to name a few).

At the other extreme, some have applied Crossmark to less than 10% - these tend to be members with back-year records going back many decades, who are just implementing Crossmark for their more recent research outputs. Crossmark coverage is one of the things tracked in Participation Reports - pop over and take a look if you want to see what your organisation is doing.

So what additional metadata has been registered by members using Crossmark? (data snapshot from our REST API April 2019):

8,711,500 content items have some Crossmark metadata
104,650 updates to content have been registered. Of these
55,000 are corrections and 28,000 errata
16,000 are new versions or new editions
2,700 are retractions and 1,280 are withdrawals
4,830,510 content items have some custom metadata, which appears in the More Information section of the Crossmark box. The most common metadata provided here is publication history, followed by copyright statements, the peer review method used, and whether the item has been checked for originality using Similarity Check.

Some news on clicks and views

We’ve been collecting usage statistics more or less since the Crossmark service launched in 2012, but have lacked a suitable way to share them. This will change later this year! In preparation, I’ve been digging around in the data and uncovered some interesting things.

I was able to do a degree of comparison between Crossmark usage against overall article views using PLOS articles as they make their usage data openly available. I spot-checked fifteen articles and found that most of them had a monthly number of clicks on the Crossmark button in the low-twenties, regardless of the number of total page views the article had received.

The highly viewed paper above shows relatively very few clicks on the Crossmark button, whereas on the paper with fewer views, below, clicks on the button follow the overall pattern of usage.

It’s not unreasonable to suppose that a paper with very high usage has a higher proportion of lay readers visiting it, whereas a more niche paper is being visited by those with a research interest. This is encouraging, as it suggests researchers are interested in checking the status of the content and the additional “trust signals” that the Crossmark box can provide.

Web pages vs PDFs

We track the number of clicks on the Crossmark button in PDFs separately to those that come from web pages. (There are some that we can’t determine, usually because the link behind the button has been incorrectly formatted, but for most members these are minimal.)

I looked at the 30 members with most Crossmark coverage, and averaged the number of clicks over a six month period in 2018. For two thirds of these members, clicks on the Crossmark button on their web pages exceed those in their PDFs, but there are also definite outliers.

Some are easily explained: member #6 hasn’t put the Crossmark button in any of their PDFs, while member #21 has only put it in their PDFs. Member 10 has the button on its article landing pages hidden in a “more information” section that the reader has to click to expand.

That said, member #20 has the button displayed prominently next to the article title but gets 85% of Crossmark clicks from PDFs. There’s no obvious subject bias - four of the members above are physics publishers - two have many more PDF clicks, two have more HTML.

None of the findings above contain nearly enough data to draw any definitive conclusions, but I hope they pique your interest to find out more when we make Crossmark usage statistics available to all members later this year. In the meantime if you have any suggestions/questions, or would be interested in helping us when we come to testing the statistics interface, please let me know.

A simpler text query form

Isaac Farley — Tue, 30 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The Simple Text Query form (STQ) allows users to retrieve existing DOIs for journal articles, books, and chapters by cutting and pasting a reference or reference list into a simple query box. For years the service has been heavily used by students, editors, researchers, and publishers eager to match and link references.

We had changes to the service planned for the first half of this year - an upgraded reference matching algorithm, a more modern interface, etc. In the spirit of openness and transparency, part of our project plan was to communicate these pending changes to STQ users well in advance of our 30 April completion date. What would users think? Could they help us improve upon our plans?

About a month ago, I reached out to the 21,000 plus users we had on record of using STQ since January 2018. We received nearly 85 responses from the messages we sent. Questions ranged from: if we were making changes, would PubMed ID matching be supported? To: What about the reliability of the returned reference links? And: Could we better accommodate larger reference lists?

Many of the users we heard from told us how STQ was critical to their work. I read all these messages. The concerns raised by users were legitimate and much appreciated. We reassessed our project timeline and plans, and decided to shift course. So, what are we doing?

What’s changing?

The previous hurdle of having to register your email address simply to return reference links was confusing and unnecessary. We removed it.
We previously limited the number of monthly reference links to 5,000 per email address. Most didn’t reach the limit, but those who did were frustrated by it and/or found ways around it. We want you to match and register as many references as possible, so we removed the monthly limit too.
Many of you with long reference lists found that you were occasionally reaching our limit of 30,000 characters per submission. Once again, we want you to match and register as many references as possible so we removed the character limit altogether and instead are just looking at the number of references per submission. We now provide space for 1,000 references per submission (We checked. The most references we have ever received via the STQ form in one submission was around 750. Thus, we rounded up.).
We did make a change to the backend of the service. We updated the algorithm we use to return reference links. We think it’s an improvement. Let us know how you find it.

What’s remaining the same?

Core functionality. It’s all in the name. Retrieve DOIs for journal articles, books, and chapters by cutting and pasting a reference or reference list into a simple query box.
PubMed ID matching. You use it. You need it. We’re keeping it.
Deposits. You’ll still need an email address for this, but we won’t ask for it until you’re at the deposit screen.
The interface. We’re still eager to give the user interface a much-needed refresh, but, as many users pointed out to us, there’s still some core functionality that’s important that we need to retain with any interface update. For instance, you need to be able to easily copy and paste reference links into your reference list. That functionality isn’t going anywhere.
Resetting reference links. Submit references, match, reset, and repeat. Many users like the reset button. It’s not going anywhere either.

XML queries

The change to the backend of the service that I mentioned above is not confined to reference matching and depositing for STQ users. XML queries for reference matching are also now powered by that new backend. We think it’s a seamless transition, but if you find it is not, please let us know.

I’m excited for these changes and hope you are too. I invite you to try the simpler and improved STQ form, and let us know what you think.

Express your interest in serving on the Crossref board

Lisa Hart Martin — Wed, 24 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The Crossref Nominating Committee is inviting expressions of interest to serve on the Board as it begins its consideration of a slate for the November 2019 election.

The board’s purpose is to provide strategic and financial oversight and counsel to the Executive Director and the staff leadership team, with the key responsibilities being:

Setting the strategic direction for the organisation;
Providing financial oversight; and
Approving new policies and services.

The Board tends to review the strategic direction every few years, taking a landscape view of the scholarly communications community and trends that may affect Crossref’s mission. In July 2017, the board and staff came up with four strategic themes and these have been developed into an organisation-wide roadmap.

The board votes on any new policy or service that staff and committees propose if it is a departure from normal practice for Crossref.Some of the recent things the board has approved include:

Approval of all the new terms of membership; broadening of the membership eligibility criteria to include non-publishers.
Involvement in the ROR.org initiative including community outreach, technical prototyping, and helping to explore governance options.
Approval of a proposal for funders to join at a reduced annual fee; the registration of DOIs for research grants.
Allocating $50,000 USD of the operating budget to research the community’s level of interest in a distributed usage service.
Specifying the Board makeup to include equal numbers of small and large members; reframing the election processes.

What is expected of a Crossref Board member?

Board members should be able to attend all board meetings, which occur three times a year in different parts of the world. If you are unable to attend in person you may send your named alternate as your proxy or be able to attend via telephone.

Board members must:

be familiar with the three key responsibilities listed above;
actively participate and contribute towards discussions; and
read the board documents and materials provided, prior to attending meetings.

How to submit an expression of interest to serve on the Board

We are seeking people who know about scholarly communications and would like to be part of our future. If you have experience on a governing board (as opposed to an operational board) and have a vision for the international Crossref community, we are interested in hearing from you.

If you are a Crossref member, are eligible to vote, and would like to be considered, you can complete and submit the expression of interest form with both your organisation’s statement and your personal statement before 21 May 2019.

It is important to note it is your organisation who is the Crossref member—and therefore the seat will belong to your organisation.

About the election and our Board

We have a principle of “one member, one vote”; our board comprises a cross-section of members and it doesn’t matter how big or small you are, every member gets a single vote. Board terms are three years, and one third of the Board is eligible for election every year. There are five seats up for election in 2019, 4 large and 1 small.

The board meets in a variety of international locations in March, July, and November each year. View a list of the current Crossref Board members and a history of the decisions they’ve made (motions).

The slate will be decided by the Nominating Committee and interested parties will be informed if they have made the slate by July 15, 2019.

The election opens online in September 2019 and voting is done by proxy online, results will be announced at the annual business meeting during ‘Crossref LIVE19’ on 13th November 2019 in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Election materials and instructions for voting will be available online to all Crossref members in September 2019.

The role of the Nominating Committee

The Nominating Committee meets to discuss change, process, criteria, and potential candidates, ensuring a fair representation of membership. The Nominating Committee is charged with selecting a slate of candidates for election from those who have expressed an interest.

The selection of the slate (which might exceed the number of open seats) is based on the quality of the expressions of interest and the nominating committee’s review of the candidates in light of the board’s directive of maintaining an appropriately balanced and representative board. The nominating committee will prioritize maintaining representation of members having both commercial and non-commercial business models, in addition to continuing to seek balance across factors such as gender, ethnic and racial background, geography, and sector.

The Board voted in March 2019 that balance according to size (based on revenue tier) will be achieved by a 2019 slate consisting of one revenue tier 1 seat (small) and 4 revenue 2 seats (large), and a 2020 slate consisting of 4 revenue tier 1 seats and 2 revenue tier 2 seats (see Crossref’s amended Bylaws on the Crossref website).

The Committee is made up of three board members not up for election, and two non-board members. The current Nominating Committee members are:

Jasper Simons, APA (Chair);
Scott Delman ACM;
Catherine Mitchell, CDL;
Vincent Cassidy, The Institution of Engineering & Technology (IET); and
Claire Moulton, The Company of Biologists.

Please submit your expression of interest or reply to me with any questions at lhart@crossref.org. This is your opportunity to help guide our wonderful organisation!

Quarterly deposit invoices: avoiding surprises

Isaac Farley — Wed, 10 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Whenever we send out our quarterly deposit invoices, we receive queries from members who have registered a lot of backlist content, but have been charged at the current year’s rate. As the invoices for the first quarter of 2019 have recently hit your inboxes, I thought I’d provide a timely reminder about this in case you spot this problem on your invoice.

This problem is usually the result of metadata being registered that makes it look as though the content was current, despite the fact that it was backlist. This post will show you what to do if you spot this problem in your latest invoice - and more importantly, how you can avoid this situation in the future.

About current and backlist Content Registration fees

There are different fees for registering content depending on whether it’s current (this year and the previous two years - 2017, ‘18, and ‘19) or backlist (older than that). As an example, it’s $1 each for a current journal article, and $0.15 for each backlist article. So, if you’ve incorrectly registered your content as published in 2019 when actually it was published in 2012, your quarterly invoice will overcharge you based on the metadata discrepancy.

We send you the quarterly deposit invoice at the end of each quarter. This example is an invoice for all deposits of the first quarter of 2018 for username ‘test’ - months January, February, and March.
The BY code represents backlist (or, back year) content (journal article, in this example). Backlist content is charged at $0.15 per content item.
The CY code represents current year content (journal article, in this example, although you can see that this invoice has charges for other content items as well). Current year content is charged at $1 per content item.

Determining whether content is current or backlist

A record is determined to be either a backlist or current year deposit based on the metadata that you deposit with us. If you use our helper tools - Metadata Manager or the web deposit form - the system looks at the information you’ve entered into the “publication date” field. If you deposit XML with us, it looks at the date in the <publication_date> element. And we look at each individual item separately—so even if you’ve put a publication date at journal level, you still need to put it at the journal article level too.

Additionally, sometimes we find that deposits mistakenly include the deposit date in place of the publication date. These two dates - the deposit date and the publication date - are not necessarily one and the same, especially if you are depositing backlist content. Please take care to double check this before you submit your deposit(s).

What to do if you think you’ve registered the wrong publication date

As you can only update a publication date by running a full redeposit, it’s important to get it right the first time. If you’ve registered the wrong publication date and have received an invoice for the wrong amount, please redeposit your content and then get in contact with us. If you do this as soon as you spot the error, we’ll be able to send a new invoice for the correct amount.

Here’s to year one!

Vanessa Fairhurst — Fri, 22 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Our Ambassador Program is now one year old, and we are thrilled at how the first 12 months have gone. In 2018 we welcomed 16 ambassadors to the team, based in Australia, Brazil, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, UAE, Ukraine, USA, and Venezuela.

Our ambassadors are volunteers with a good knowledge of Crossref and the wider scholarly community, they are well connected and passionate about the work that we do. Participating in the ambassador program is complementary to people’s existing roles and enables those who already work with Crossref to have a mechanism to feed back to us and to provide support for their communities.

We reflected on the successes and challenges of the first 12 months and discovered quite a lot has been achieved so far.

The Ambassador Program better equips me to support researchers to conduct outreach and collaborate in multidisciplinary discovery!

– Woei Fuh Wong, Research 123, Singapore

Within the framework of the Ambassador Crossref program, I ran a seminar, webinar, and held several meetings in Ukrainian scientific organisations.

– Andrii Zolkover, Internauka, Ukraine

In my role as ambassador, I am able to provide a greater level of support in Russian. Alongside translated materials, we have also received over 400 tickets to our Russian electronic support system and made over 300 consultations by phone.

– Maxim Mitrofanov, NEICON, Russia

Being an ambassador has enabled me to increase knowledge of Crossref within my community.

– Edilson Damasio, Department of Mathematics Library of State University of Maringá-UEM, Brazil

The ambassador program has helped in vastly raising the awareness of Crossref and its services all over the world. Based in the Middle East, I see the need in the Arab region to know more about Crossref in their mother tongue (Arabic). The program has proven success and its positive impact is tangible.

– Mohamad Mostafa, Knowledge E, UAE

Highlights

Over the course of 2018, there were a number of big achievements which would not have been possible without the help of our ambassadors.

Due to your feedback, we’re very keen to expand the level of multi-language support we offer our diversifying community. In addition to translating key messages, slide decks, and other educational materials, our ambassadors (and some members - thanks also!) helped us in the production of a series of short videos. We now have videos available for each of the Crossref services in nine languages including English, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, and Bahasa Indonesia. You can see in the chart below, that although our English videos have the most views (this is the default language), others have also experienced a lot of visitors, particularly notable are the Chinese and Spanish language videos. This underscores the importance of further support in non-English languages, as our series of multi-lingual webinars also demonstrated.

In 2018 we ran webinars in Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish and Arabic. Several ambassadors have taken a lead in running these webinars in their local languages with assistance from Crossref staff on producing materials and answering questions on the day. Spanish language webinars saw record numbers of attendees from a range of different countries, and our Russian webinar recordings have been viewed over 200 times. We will be continuing to offer more webinars in different time zones and languages, and the recordings are always available for anyone who can’t attend on the day.

Our ambassadors have also been helping us improve and expand our LIVE local events. Last year we held events in Japan, South Africa, Russia, Germany, Brazil and India. Ambassadors help by providing recommendations on venues, accommodation, guest speakers, or even attending and speaking at the event themselves. Some run their own Crossref events which we can help provide materials and also represent Crossref at related industry events in their region. You may have had the chance to meet some of our ambassadors at our annual event in Toronto last November as well.

As our ambassadors are our representatives, acting as our eyes and ears in the wider community, it is important that they are kept up to date with new developments and have good opportunities to report back to us. The ambassador team has participated in beta-testing of a number of new initiatives including our new Metadata Manager and Participation Reports and our upcoming Community Forum. By providing feedback from their own user perspective and from how they anticipate those in their communities will view and use these tools, it enables us get better insights into how an initiative might work before launching it more widely.

Future Plans

Initial feedback on the program has been overwhelmingly positive, both from the ambassadors themselves and the wider Crossref community, so we’re looking at what we can do to hone the program over time. In 2019 we will be welcoming some more ambassadors to the team to further support our global community. We want to support our ambassadors, so we don’t foresee the group growing to the point where there are too many ambassadors for us to be able to engage with. You can read about the team and where they are based, as well as all about the new ambassadors we have welcomed so far this year, on Our Ambassadors page.

This year our ambassadors will be involved when we launch our online community forum (more to come on that soon). They’re already helping with the task-force that is advising on our new documentation, and we’ll be providing them with further training on Crossref tools and services. We also have more webinars and LIVE locals in the pipeline. Keep an eye on our webinars and events pages for more details as they come.

So a final thank you to our ambassador team - it has been great to work with you over the last year, and we look forward to how we can continue to work together!

Before, during, and after - a journey through title transfers

Isaac Farley — Mon, 25 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In January, I wrote about how we’ve simplified the journal title transfer process using our new Metadata Manager tool. For those disposing publishers looking for an easy, do-it-yourself option for transferring ownership of your journal, I suggest you review that blog post. But, whether you choose to process the transfer yourself via Metadata Manager or need some help from Paul, Shayn, or myself, there’s more to a transfer than just the click of a transfer button or the submission of an email to support@crossref.org, as I’m sure those of you who have been through a title transfer can attest.

Prepping your title transfer

Sometimes members get on the other side of a title transfer and find you’re encountering problems even if you followed the process for transferring titles. You might find you can register new content for the new title against your own prefix without any issues. But you are not able to update the metadata for back-year records after we’ve made the transfer.

When we investigate, the problem is usually that the DOIs you’re trying to update don’t exist in our system yet. This means the deposit isn’t considered an update to the content, it’s considered a new deposit. And you don’t have permission to do that, since you’re effectively attempting to register new content to a prefix that is not your own.

This problem is because the former publisher didn’t ever register the DOIs with us - even though they’ve been displaying them on their website. This is bad practice and isn’t in keeping with our membership terms, but it does sometimes happen.

Before you request a title transfer, do check with the former publisher that they’ve definitely registered all the DOIs that they’ve been displaying and distributing to their readership. You can spot check this yourself by following a few of the DOI links and checking that they resolve to the right place. If you want a full list of DOIs registered to a journal title, our depositor reports are the place to start. Depositor Reports list all DOIs deposited for a title on a publisher-by-publisher basis. Or, alternatively, if you know the journal cite ID, the unique internal, Crossref identifier for the journal, you can bypass the publisher-by-publisher title list (in my example you’d need to replace my fictional 123456 journal ID with your journal’s cite ID):

`http://data.crossref.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/depositorreport?pubid=J123456`

Top tips for a pain-free title transfer

If your organisation has gained new titles, you’ve checked the depositor report for your new journal and are happy that all the existing DOIs have been registered, then you’re ready to process the transfer. Here are three key steps to ensure a pain-free transfer.

If you are not acquiring all existing journal articles as part of this transfer, you’ll need to contact us at support@crossref.org to confirm the details. Once we have those details sorted, we’ll transfer ownership for the select, specified articles.
Carefully check the existing metadata associated with your new titles - some metadata provided for text and data mining or Similarity Check are publisher-specific and must be updated or removed when content is acquired by another member.
If the metadata supplied is fine, you just need to update the URLs to direct DOIs to your content. You can do this by sending us a URL update file or by redepositing the metadata with the correct URLs.

If you need to update more than the URLs, you should redeposit the metadata with the correct information plus the correct URLs.

Note: If you, as the disposing publisher, are prepared to transfer your journal to an acquiring publisher, and would like to transfer ownership of the journal and all existing journal articles, please try your new title transfer via Metadata Manager.

On the other side

If you follow the steps I’ve outlined above, you should get to the other side of your title transfer with few problems and are likely to encounter smooth metadata seas ahead. That said, some of our members follow these steps to a tee and still are faced with occasional transfer-related problems.

Perhaps the previous journal owner used a different scheme to assign timestamps and now you’re receiving mysterious timestamp errors when you deposit. Or, that same previous owner made a mistake with a previous deposit and accidentally submitted more than one journal title record. Or, you encounter a strange, new error in Metadata Manager when working with your new titles (yes, we’re still in beta!). If so, please reach out to us at support@crossref.org and we’ll help solve what are surely confounding problems, since you’ve undoubtedly read this post in its entirety and taken heed of the above advice.

As always, if you have questions, need guidance as you’re working through this process, or have recommendations on how we can improve title transfers, please contact us at support@crossref.org.

Work through your PID problems on the PID Forum

Rachael Lammey — Thu, 21 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

As self-confessed PID nerds, we’re big fans of a persistent identifier. However, we’re also conscious that the uptake and use of PIDs isn’t a done deal, and there are things that challenge how broadly these are adopted by the community.

At PIDapalooza (an annual festival of PIDs) in January, ORCID, DataCite and Crossref ran an interactive session to chat about the cool things that PIDs allow us to do, what’s working well and, just as importantly, what isn’t, so that we can find ways to improve and approaches that work.

We titled the session the Yin & Yang of PIDs and challenged attendees to put down on paper (post-its) their thoughts about what’s good about PIDs (the Yin) and what’s not so good (the Yang). Attendees could also upvote other’s comments by adding a smiley face sticker to the concept(s) they supported.

So what came out of the session? Lots of things!

Limits to PID uptake are often more cultural than technical
Yay for auto-update!
Slow adoption of new PID types
Trust issues (I don’t want my information in another system)
“I’m the only Erik, I don’t need an ORCID”
User stories work!

We know we only scratched the surface in the session, but fortunately PIDapalooza also brought a good way to continue the conversation: pidforum.org! The PIDforum was launched at PIDapalooza and is a global discussion platform for all things PID-related. Many PID providers and PID users are already on there, so help us understand more about the yin and yang of PIDs by sharing your own PID problems!

ROR announces the first Org ID prototype

Maria Gould — Sun, 10 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

What has hundreds of heads, 91,000 affiliations, and roars like a lion? If you guessed the Research Organization Registry community, you’d be absolutely right!

Last month was a big and busy one for the ROR project team: we released a working API and search interface for the registry, we held our first ROR community meeting, and we showcased the initial prototypes at PIDapalooza in Dublin.

We’re energized by the positive reception and response we’ve received and we wanted to take a moment to share information with the community. Here are the links to our latest work, a recap of everything that happened in Dublin, some of the next steps for the project, and how the community can continue to be involved.

🎉 Ta da! The first ROR prototype

The Research Organization Registry (ROR) is finally here! We’re thrilled to officially announce the launch of our ROR MVR (minimum viable registry). The MVR consists of the following components, which are ready for anyone to use right now.

ROR IDs: Starting with seed data from GRID, ROR has begun assigning unique identifiers to approximately 91,000 organisations in its registry. ROR IDs include a random, unique, and opaque 9-character string and are expressed as URLs that resolve to the organisation’s record. For instance, here is the ROR ID for California Digital Library: https://ror.org/03yrm5c26
Search: We also built a search interface to look up organisations in the registry: https://ror.org/search.

ROR records: ROR IDs are stored with additional metadata about the organisation, such as alternate names/abbreviations, external URLs (e.g., an organisation’s official website), and other identifiers, such as Wikidata, ISNI, and the Open Funder Registry. This metadata will allow ROR to be interoperable with other identifiers and across different systems. The current schema is based on GRID’s dataset and we plan to incorporate other metadata fields over time and according to community needs.

API: The ROR API is now public. You can access the JSON files at https://api.ror.org/organisations.
OpenRefine reconciler: We’ve released an OpenRefine reconciler that can map your internal identifiers to ROR identifiers: https://github.com/ror-community/ror-reconciler.
Documentation: We have begun storing documentation on Github and will be adding more as we go along. Please feel free to follow and contribute: https://github.com/ror-community.

Community meeting recap

On January 22, 60+ representatives from across the research and publishing community gathered in Dublin to see what the ROR project team has been up to, demo the first prototypes in action, and discuss where we want to go next - and, of course, to practice ROR-ing together.

In the second half of the meeting, attendees split into discussion groups to identify specific aspirations for ROR and brainstorm concrete actions needed to achieve these goals, focusing on the main use case of exposing and capturing all research outputs of a given institution. The proposed ideas covered a spectrum of possibilities for ROR, highlighting the following themes:

ROR as seamlessly-integrated and sometimes invisible infrastructure

Integration between and within existing systems (and in new ones!)
Auto-detection of ROR IDs for example in manuscript tracking and funding application platforms
As such, researchers don’t ever have to be responsible for knowing what a ROR is and using it appropriately - the systems they use will do this for them.

ROR as a critical piece of funder workflows and infrastructure

Demonstrate to funders how ROR can help them analyze impact of research they fund
Conduct outreach with key international funders, especially those interested in open infrastructure
Make funders aware of ROR and encourage them to adopt and mandate use of ROR IDs - involve funders at the beginning to collaborate on technology
Integrate ROR with existing systems and identifiers already in use by funders and other stakeholders

ROR as a trusted registry, collaborative partner, and responsible steward

Culturally sensitive, inclusive, and respectful of what countries are already doing with regard to organisational identifiers, partnering with national bodies working on this and mapping ROR IDs to locally used identifiers.
Involve the institutions listed in the registry early on as well as CRIS systems
Interoperability with existing communities and governance bodies
Workflows to support trust and responsible management of organisational metadata, with policies and procedures for long-term curation and maintenance of records

What we’re hearing

Now that the ROR MVR is here, we’re hearing some really good questions about the data we’re capturing, how it can be used, and how we’ll be maintaining the registry going forward. We wanted to take a moment to respond to some of these questions.

What is the criteria for being listed in ROR? What is a “research organisation”?

We define the notion of “research organisation” quite broadly as any organisation that conducts, produces, manages, or touches research. This is in line with ROR’s stated scope, which is to address the affiliation use case and be able to identify which organisations are associated with which research outputs. We use “affiliation” to describe any formal relationship between a researcher and an organisation associated with researchers, including but not limited to their employer, educator, funder, or scholarly society.

Will ROR map organisational hierarchies?

No - ROR is focused on being a top-level registry of organisations so we can address the fundamental affiliation use case, and provide a critical source of metadata that can interoperate with other institutional identifiers.

ROR IDs are cool - what can I do with them?

Now that we have built our MVR, we will be working to incorporate ROR IDs into relevant pieces of the scholarly communication infrastructure. If you are a publisher, funder, metadata provider, research office, or anyone else interested in capturing affiliations, please get in touch with us to discuss how we might coordinate. If you are a developer, you are welcome to start playing around with the API: https://api.ror.org/organisations.

There’s an error in my organisation’s ROR record — can you fix it?

For the time being, please email info@ror.org to request an update to an existing record in ROR or request that a new record be added. We will formalize our data management policies and procedures in the next stage of the project.

What is ROR’s relationship to other organisational identifiers?

For ROR to be useful, it needs to augment the current offerings in a way that is open, trusted, complementary, and collaborative, and not intentionally competitive. We are committed to providing a service that the community finds helpful and not duplicative, and enables as many connections as possible between organisation records across systems.

I have my own dataset of institutional affiliations — can I give it to ROR?

We are always happy to hear about other efforts to capture affiliation data. Please get in touch with us to discuss how we might coordinate.

Can ROR support multiple languages and character sets?

GRID already supports multiple languages and character sets, so by extension ROR will have this enabled as well. Here is one example: https://ror.org/01k4yrm29.

How will ROR handle curation, i.e., updating records if an organisation changes its name or ceases to exist?

The curation and long-term management of records will be a cornerstone of our efforts in 2019 and we hope to release a working set of policies and procedures soon.

What’s next for ROR

Now that we have our MVR, what happens next for ROR? We’re eager to sustain the momentum from January’s stakeholder meeting at the same time we know there are some longer-term plans to put in place, and so we’re looking at both some immediate tasks as well as bigger-picture questions.

Product development

We have a few to-do items on our list following the launch of the MVR to keep everything running smoothly while we develop a comprehensive long-term product roadmap.

Rewrite some of the code for both the API and the OpenRefine reconciler
Address a few bugs in our repos
Provide guidance for troubleshooting issues
Communicate our processes for users to request changes, report bugs, and suggest features

As a reminder, you can access the existing code in Github: https://github.com/ror-community

Policy development

We’ve been emphasizing here and in community conversations that our primary focus now turns to formulating policies and procedures to ensure the successful management of ROR data over the long term. This is something we can’t (and shouldn’t) do on our own — we want to work with community stakeholders to develop the right solutions and establish the right frameworks. We understand the urgency of firming up these policies, but we are also aware that something this important can take time to complete and is not something to rush into lightly.

Community development

To help guide the next stages of the project, we are putting out an open call for participation in the ROR community advisory group. Advisory group members will be involved in giving input on data management, testing out new features, giving feedback on the product roadmap, and discussing ideas for events and outreach. We plan to convene this advisory group through bimonthly calls and asynchronous communication channels through the end of the year. We hope you will consider joining us! Please email info@ror.org if you are interested.

For those who want to stay informed about the project but not necessarily be part of the advisory group, you have other options!

Sign up for our mailing list (via the footer at ror.org)
Join our community on Slack (www.tinyurl.com/ror-community),
Follow us on Twitter (@ResearchOrgs).

You can also always drop us a line at info@ror.org, and let us know if you’d ever like to set up a meeting or conference call to talk about the project in more detail.

Final thoughts

Community engagement has been vital to ROR’s beginnings and will likewise be critically important for the next steps that we take. As both a registry of identifiers and a community of stakeholders involved in building open scholarly infrastructure, ROR depends on guidance and involvement at multiple levels. Thank you for being part of the journey thus far, and for joining us on the road that lies ahead. 🦁

Request for feedback on grant identifier metadata

Patricia Feeney — Thu, 07 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

We first announced plans to investigate identifiers for grants in 2017 and are almost ready to violate the first rule of grant identifiers which is “they probably should not be called grant identifiers”. Research support extends beyond monetary grants and awards, but our end goal is to make grants easy to cite, track, and identify, and ‘Grant ID’ resonates in a way other terms do not. The truth is in the metadata, and we intend to collect (and our funder friends are prepared to provide) information about a number of funding types. Hopefully we encompass all of them.

Our technical & metadata working group (a subset of the broader Funder Advisory Group) includes folks from Children’s Tumor Foundation, Europe PMC, European Research Council, JST, OSTI (DOE), Smithsonian, Swiss National Science Foundation, UKRI, Wellcome, as well as colleagues at DataCite and ORCID.

They have provided a wealth of funding data and feedback, and together we’ve come up with a metadata schema that works for us. Just as important - does this set of metadata meet your needs? Did we miss something? Let us know.

The details

For those of you familiar with Crossref Content Registration, Grant IDs will have their own dedicated schema that differs from our publication schema. The Grant ID schema will follow some of the same conventions as we’ll be using the same system to process the files (which will be XML) but since we are collecting metadata for a new community and moving beyond published content, this is an opportunity to rethink how we handle some basics like person names and dates.

Each Grant ID can be assigned to multiple projects. The metadata within each project includes basics like titles, descriptions, and investigator information (including affiliations) as well as funding information. Funders will supply funder information (including funder identifiers from the Crossref Funder Registry) as well as information about funding types and amounts.

A major accomplishment of the group was to develop a simple taxonomy of types of funding. Supported types are:

award
contract
grant
salary-award
endowment
secondment
loan
facilities
equipment
seed-funding
fellowship
training-grant
other

Funding involves more than monetary grants or awards and we’ve attempted to capture the broad categories of funding types. This list is taken from types of funding as defined by our participating funder organisations. We anticipate this list will evolve over time.

Ready to dig in? The schema and documentation are available on GitHub. We will actively take feedback until the end of February 2019. We hope to begin implementation soon after that. Please let us know what you think through GitHub, or feel free to contact me via feedback@crossref.org.

Underreporting of matched references in Crossref metadata

Geoffrey Bilder — Tue, 05 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR

About 11% of available references in records in our OAI-PMH & REST API don’t have DOIs when they should. We have deployed a fix, but it is running on billions of records, and so we don’t expect it to be complete until mid-April.

Note that the Cited-by API that our members use appears to be unaffected by this problem.

The gory details

When a Crossref member registers metadata for a publication, they often include references. Sometimes the member will also include DOIs in the references, but often they don’t. When they don’t include a DOI in the reference, Crossref tries to match the reference to metadata in the Crossref system. If we succeed, we add the DOI of the matched record to the reference metadata. If we fail, we append the reference to an ever-growing list which we re-process on an ongoing basis.

You may have seen that the R&D team has been doing work to improve our reference matching system. We will soon be rolling out a new reference matching process that will increase recall significantly.

But while testing our new reference matching approach, we started to see inconsistent results with our existing legacy reference matching system. When we implemented new regression tests, we noticed that, even when using our legacy system, we were consistently getting better results than were reflected in the metadata we exposed via our APIs. For example, we would pick a random Crossref DOI record that included 3 matched references, and when we tried matching all the references in the record again using our existing technology, we would get more matched references than were reported in the metadata.

At first, we thought this might have something to do with sequencing issues. For example, that article A might cite article B, but somehow article A would get its DOI registered with Crossref prior to article B. In this theoretical case, we would initially fail to match the reference, but it would eventually get matched as we continued to reprocess our unmatched references. But this wasn’t the issue. And the problem was not with the matching technology we are using. Instead, we discovered a problem with the way we process references on deposit.

When a member deposits references with Crossref, each reference has to include a member-defined key that is unique to each reference they are depositing in the DOI record. When we match a reference- we report to the members that we matched the reference with key X to DOI Y. The problem is that sometimes members would deposit references with an empty key. If there was only one such reference, then, technically, it would pass our test for making sure the key was unique within the record. So we would process the reference, and match it, and report it via our Cited-by service, but later in the process, when we went to include the matched DOI in the reference section of our API metadata, we’d skip including DOIs for references that had blank keys. The reference itself would be included in the metadata, it would just appear that we hadn’t matched it to a DOI when we actually had.

Again, we estimate this to have resulted in about 11% of the references in our metadata to be missing matched DOIs. We are processing our references again and inserting the correctly matched DOIs in the metadata. We expect the process to complete in mid-April. We will keep everybody up-to-date on the progress of this fix.

We will also be integrating the new matching system that we’ve developed. As mentioned at the start of this post, this matching system will also increase the recall rate of our reference matching and so, the two changes combined, should result in users seeing a significant increase in the number of matched references included in Crossref metadata.

And finally, as part of the work that we are doing to improve our reference matching, we are putting a comprehensive testing framework that will make it easier for us to detect inconsistencies and/or regressions in our reference matching.

Please contact Crossref support with any questions or concerns.

How Crossref metadata is helping bring migration research in Europe under one roof

Christine Cormack Wood — Tue, 29 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Conflict, instability and economic conditions are just some of the factors driving new migration into Europe—and European policy makers are in dispute about how to manage and cope with the implications. Everyone agrees that in order to respond to the challenges and opportunities of migration, a better understanding is required of what drives migration towards Europe, what trajectories and infrastructures facilitate migration, and what the key characteristics of different migrant flows are, in order to inform and improve policy making.

The abstract above is taken from the successful Horizon 2020[1] project proposal called CrossMigration, an initiative of IMISCOE, Europe’s largest migration research network, in which a consortium of 15 universities, think tanks and international organisations, led by Erasmus University Rotterdam is currently designing a Migration Research Hub. The Hub is a web-based platform aimed at helping researchers and policymakers get a quick and comprehensive overview on research in the field of migration studies. This platform will also feature reports on specific fields, methodological briefing papers and other relevant content produced by the consortium.

The core of this Hub will consist of a database providing access to publications, research projects and datasets on migration drivers, and infrastructures, flows, and policies on current and future migration questions, indicators and scenarios. And that’s where our metadata story starts.

At the tail end of December I had the pleasure of speaking to the four researchers and developers working on this database; Vienna-based researchers Roland Hosner and Meike Palinkas from the International Centre for Migration Policy and Development (ICMPD), Bogdan Taut, CEO of YoungMinds, in Bucharest, Romania, and Nathan Levy, currently studying for his PhD at Erasmus University Rotterdam, Department of Public Administration and Sociology, Netherlands.

There are four of you, can each of you give me a very brief introduction to yourselves and how you fit into project?

Bogdan: I’m from YoungMinds, based in Bucharest in Romania. We were the last to join the consortium as the technical developer on the project. I am the project manager of the team, coordinating the technical development of the database.

Roland: I am a research officer with the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD) in Vienna, and we are leading a part of this research project which deals with the population and implementation of the research database—which is core to the Migration Research Hub, and to the whole project.

Meike: I am also a research officer at ICMPD and work together with Roland. I joined the team in September this year.

Nathan: I’m part of the coordinating team of the overall project of CrossMigration. We are coordinating putting together the Migration Research Hub, the biggest part of which is the migration database. I am based at Erasmus University in Rotterdam and I work for Professor Peter Scholten who is the overall coordinator of the whole project along with Dr. Asya Pisarevskaya.

How long has the project been in progress?

Roland: It’s a two-year project than runs from March 2018 to the end of February 2020.

So it’s a two-year project and you are 10 months in—that makes it nearly at the halfway mark. Have you encountered any stumbling blocks that have held you back?

Bogdan: How to put this in a diplomatic way? We are all working around the clock to meet the deadline that we set ourselves and promised to deliver by. We have made the decision to produce the database in stages—very soon we will have the beta version out, so we have something to present. Then we are going to continue populating it with more items from every record type – journal articles, datasets, books, book chapters, reports etc.. At this point the other partners in the consortium can actually use it and work with it to map the fields and find the most recent and relevant literature on their respective subtopics such as migration drivers or migration infrastructures. In the summer when we are confident that it is a sound and attractive tool to be released, we will make it publicly available.

Nathan: In terms of specific deliverables for the project so far, our team has developed a taxonomy for migration research to give the fields a logical structure, and to structure this research database.

How has Crossref metadata contributed to your project?

Bogdan: We began by discussing all of the sources that need to be in the database and we put together an inventory of publishers, books and book chapters, etc., that would be relevant. Part of the scope of work for YoungMinds was to find ways of extracting information and relevant content from those sources. Once we started to dig into the content we found out that there are relevant aggregators, such as Scopus, Crossref, Web of Science and so on. We actually found Crossref through a recommendation from Scopus, someone there said ‘OK Crossref might be able to help you more’. Then Crossref became one of our main sources for metadata—in terms of basic metadata related to some types of content we gather for our database, such as journals and journal articles.

Roland: The more we moved forward, the more we saw how difficult it was to get in touch with each publisher individually, with each journal individually, to try and secure an agreement with them. So, it became very clear to us very quickly that we would not be able to create a properly inclusive database this way and we knew we had to look for partners and make use of existing resources. As we progressed from one conversation to the next we received a lot of advice, and that’s how we found out about Crossref. It soon became clear that Crossref was the ideal source for us because everything that has a DOI can be found in there. We knew if we had an agreement with Crossref then our project is half won, our database is halfway built, perhaps even more. And, then we just need to fill the gaps.

Nathan: Yes, this is one of Crossref’s key strengths—rather than having individual researchers or individual projects go to each publisher to try to find the appropriate people to talk to and negotiate—you use Crossref.

Which of the metadata values are important to you, what do you extract?

Roland: We thought about this a lot at the beginning, what we wanted to include. There are certain key things that are indisputably relevant—such as titles, names of the authors, editors, the year, DOI, dataset and so on, because we always link to the original source—the publisher’s website, or the journal article website. Ideally we would include keywords and abstracts (where they are available) because the richer the information the better. We also wanted to classify the items we have according to the taxonomy the CrossMigration project has established.

Nathan: In addition, abstracts and keywords have value for us. We want to apply a logical structure into the taxonomy on migration research, but we need content in order to do that. We need something for the algorithms that YoungMinds have developed to read to in order categorize research accordingly. The body of research on migration is so great and we cannot read through every abstract that’s ever been published on migration. That’s where the value of abstracts and keywords comes in for the Taxonomizer (as we fondly refer to it!).

What else would you like to see in the REST API that isn’t there?

Roland: More abstracts! We love abstracts!

Bogdan: Our data schema contains more fields, so we need more metadata than we can find from Crossref and other sources. Basically, the publisher’s website would produce the richest data, but it is the hardest to read. We are on a quest to find more sources because our algorithm works better if it has more information.

Once it’s complete, what are your plans to roll it out to the wider world?

Bogdan: IMISCOE is the leading organisation of this consortium and it is in touch with most of the migration experts in Europe, so we already have all the contacts of the relevant people in the field.

Meike: It’s a tool for helping the community, so once we have all the relevant content inside it, we believe that word will spread relatively easily.

Have you all actually met in person?

Roland: Yes! Myself and Nathan met at the project kick-off meeting in Rotterdam in March 2018, then we met at a conference in Florence in June that was partly for the consortium but also had other invited experts and scholars. That was where we met face-to-face for the first time—it was just after we signed with YoungMinds for the IT services. And we recently met at another joint conference of IMISCOE and CrossMigration called 'Towards the IMISCOE Research Infrastructure of the Future'.

[1] Horizon 2020, the biggest EU Research and Innovation programme ever with nearly €80 billion of funding available.

Great speaking to you all and learning a bit about this important project that will help policymakers manage and cope with the implications of migration—and may possibly even help them find ways to influence it.

If you’d like to share how you use our Metadata APIs please contact the Community team.

Zen and the Art of Platform Migration

Amanda Bartell — Mon, 28 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Nowadays we’re all trying to eat healthier, get fitter, be more mindful and stay in the now. You think you’re doing a good job — perhaps you’ve started a yoga class or got a book on mindfulness. And then, wham! Someone in your organisation casually mentions they’re planning a platform migration. I can sense the panic from here.

While the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale doesn’t include platform migration as one of the top ten most stressful life events, we hear from our members that it should probably be in there somewhere. There’s so much to think about and plan for - how do you know you’re choosing the right platform partners for the future? How can you be sure that your understanding of what they offer really matches what you need? Will it make it easier for your readers to access your content? What about delays? What if it all breaks on changeover day?

Gaaaaah!

With all that to think about, worrying about whether your DOIs will resolve and what the migration will mean for the quality of your Crossref metadata just seems like an unnecessary layer of stress. It is, however, very important to consider this - even before you start thinking about who your platform partners will be. The process of working through these things up front could help you make better decisions, and set you up for success with the project and into the future.

So, to help you plan ahead, we’ve created a platform migration guide that offers guidance on things like:

What to consider even before you start selecting a new service provider
Planning the change over process
The change over itself (and what that means for your URLs)
What you should do after the migration is complete

The guide gives advice on how to plan for what you really need right now, and what you’re going to need in the future. For example, what metadata are you going to want to register with us and share with the thousands of industry organisations that make use of the data? What other Crossref services might benefit you in the future? What different record types are in your publishing plans?

The guide also has a handy checklist which you can include in your Request For Proposal documentation, to ensure that you’re asking the right questions of potential suppliers.

Once you’ve read the platform migration guide, let us know if there’s anything else you think we should add to it - we’re sure many of you have platform migration stories, and it’s good to share!

What can often change, but always stays the same?

Isaac Farley — Thu, 24 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Hello. Isaac here again to talk about what you can tell just by looking at the prefix of a DOI. Also, as we get a lot of title transfers at this time of year, I thought I’d clarify the difference between a title transfer and a prefix transfer, and the impact of each.

When you join Crossref, you are provided with a unique prefix, you then add suffixes of your choice to your prefix and this creates the DOIs for your content.

It’s a logical step then to assume you can tell just by looking at a DOI prefix who the current publisher is—but that’s not always the case. Things can (and often do) change. Individual journals get purchased by other publishers, and whole organisations get bought and sold.

What you can tell from looking at a DOI prefix is who originally registered it, but not necessarily who it currently belongs to. That’s because if a journal (or whole organisation) is acquired, DOIs don’t get deleted and re-registered to the new owner. The update will of course be reflected in the relevant metadata, but the prefix itself will stay the same. It never changes—and that’s the whole point, that’s what makes the DOI persistent.

Here’s a breakdown of how this works internally at Crossref:

Title transfers

Member A acquires a single title from member B. We transfer the title (and all relevant reports) over to member A. Member A must then register new content for that journal on their own prefix. The existing (newly acquired) DOIs maintain the ‘old’ prefix but member A can update metadata against these existing DOIs for that journal. Back-year and current DOIs for that journal may, therefore, have different prefixes—and that’s OK!

Organisation transfers

Member C acquires member D. We move the entire prefix (and all relevant reports) over to Member C, and close down Member D’s account with Crossref. Member C can continue to register DOIs on member D’s prefix (the original prefix) if they want to, or they can use their own existing prefix. So again, back-year and current records for that journal may have different prefixes.

And, if Member C uses a service provider to register metadata on their behalf, we will simply enable their username to work with the prefix.

It’s now easier to transfer titles

We’ve recently made the process of transferring journal titles a lot easier with our new Content Registration tool, Metadata Manager.

Myth busting in Mumbai

Vanessa Fairhurst — Tue, 22 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In December, Crossref’s Head of Metadata, Patricia Feeney and I headed to Mumbai for our first ever LIVE local event in India, held in collaboration with Editage.

Crossref membership in India has escalated in recent years, with a fifth of its 500 members joining in 2017 alone. Around 40% of these new members are smaller organisations who joined through one of the eight sponsors we currently have in the country.

With such a large increase in membership numbers, it seemed timely to visit and meet both our new and longer-standing members face-to-face. Our LIVE local events provide a great opportunity for us to learn what challenges our members in the community face, so we can understand how to best meet their needs. It also gives us a chance to explain in detail how to benefit from the services we offer, as well as keep them informed about any future developments. A special thanks goes to Editage for all their help in organizing, promoting, and running this event with us.

The Mumbai event was held at the Sahara Star hotel and attended by participants from a range of organisations, with varying levels of knowledge about Crossref. Patricia talked about how to register your content and the importance of providing us with accurate and comprehensive metadata. She also introduced our new Metadata Manager tool, which many participants were excited to hear more about. I gave an overview of Crossref services, with a specific focus on Crossmark and Similarity Check. The afternoon session was run by Editage, and featured a session on ‘Helping journals and publishers to get closer to authors’, followed by a lively debate on research integrity. The debate brought up a number of interesting talking points, including how to attract more students into a career in research, issues around malpractice and plagiarism, and how to improve India’s research culture.

The Q&A part of the day highlighted a number of myths about Crossref that I thought would be worth detailing here, as other members may benefit from these explanations.

Myth #1: Crossref is a mark of publisher and content quality

We have a membership application process where we ask for different types of information and make it clear what the Crossref member obligations are. Crossref doesn’t assess the quality of its members’ content or verify members’ publication processes and procedures. It’s not our role or part of our mission to do these things. It’s important to remember that content with a Crossref DOI says nothing about the quality of the content, or that it is peer-reviewed or authoritative.

Myth #2: Crossref archives content

We store the metadata our members provide about a piece of content, not the content itself. Our metadata is openly available across our APIs and search interfaces. The same applies for access to the full-text. A DOI will take you to a landing page for a piece of content, but access to the full-text will depend upon the content owner’s publishing model.

Myth #3: Crossref provides impact factors

On publisher websites, you’ll sometimes see the number of times a paper has been cited in Crossref, Google Scholar, Web of Science, etc. The Crossref citation information is made available to publishers through our Cited-by service, but it is not an impact factor. Cited-by counts are based on the subset of Crossref’s members participating in that service, so they’ll probably differ from other sources. Crossref Cited-by counts are meant to complement other services rather than replace them.

Myth #4: Crossref charges to make updates or corrections to the metadata associated with a DOI

Not true - while you have to pay for your initial registration, any subsequent updates, corrections or additions you make to the metadata of a content item is free of charge (apart from Crossmark metadata). If you’re a member, we actively encourage you to update your metadata to ensure that your records are as comprehensive and accurate as possible. This helps the scholarly community find and use the content you publish.

Myth #5: Crossref charges for failed deposits

Only deposits which are successful will be counted. You will receive an error message if your metadata deposit has failed, so you are aware of any errors and can resubmit. If you’re not sure what has gone wrong, you can contact our support team.

Myth #6: You need to have separate prefixes to register different record/resource types

You can register all your record types under one prefix (and you don’t need to tell us if you start to do so).

Myth #7: DOI resolutions are how many DOIs you have registered

No. When someone clicks on a DOI link for an article, we count that as one DOI resolution. This is different than the number of unique DOIs you have registered with us. We’ll send you a resolution report once a month which provides details of your total number of resolutions, as well as DOIs which have been most frequently clicked, and any resolution failures. These failures can be an indication that you need to update your metadata with us for that particular article to ensure your DOI is directing readers to the correct webpage.

Myth #8: Crossref own the plagiarism software used in Similarity Check

The Similarity Check service is provided in collaboration with Turnitin who run the iThenticate text-comparison tool. The iThenticate database is the largest comparison database of full-text academic content in the world. Similarity Check participants enjoy cost-effective use of iThenticate because they contribute their own published content into Turnitin’s database. Turnitin also provides our members with access to additional features in iThenticate, such as enhanced text-matches within the document viewer and access to a dedicated Similarity Check support team in order to discuss any technical or billing queries.

It’s great to have the opportunity to do some myth-busting! You’re bound to have more questions, so we’ll be running more LIVE locals in 2019, as well as virtual events. To keep updated, follow us @CrossrefOrg, or subscribe to our newsletter.

What's that DOI?

Joe Wass — Mon, 21 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This is a long overdue followup to 2016’s “URLs and DOIs: a complicated relationship”. Like that post, this accompanies my talk at PIDapalooza, the festival of open persistent identifiers). I don’t think I need to give a spoiler warning when I tell you that it’s still complicated. But this post presents some vocabulary to describe exactly how complicated it is. Event Data has been up and running and collecting data for a couple of years now, but this post describes changes we made toward the end of 2018.

If Event Data is new to you, you can read about its development in other blog posts and the User Guide. Today I’ll be describing a specific but important part of the machinery: how we match landing pages to DOIs.

Some background

Our Event Data service provides you with a live database of links to DOIs, found from across the web and social media. Data comes from a variety of places, and most of it is produced by Agents operated by Crossref. We have Agents monitoring Twitter, Wikipedia, Reddit, Stack Overflow, blogs and more besides. It is a sad truth that the good news of DOIs has not reached all corners of world, let alone the dustiest vertices of the world wide web. And even within scholarly publishing and academia, not everyone has heard of DOIs and other persistent identifiers.

Of course, this means that when we look for links to content-that-has-DOIs, what we at Crossref call ‘registered content’, we can’t content ourselves with only looking for DOIs. We also have to look for article landing pages. These are the pages you arrive at when you click on a DOI, the page you’re on when you decide to share an article.

Half full or half empty?

So we’re trying to track down links to these landing pages, rather than just DOIs. You could look at this two ways.

The glass-half-empty view would be that it’s a real shame people don’t use DOIs. Don’t they know that their links aren’t future-proof? Don’t they know that DOIs allow you to punch the identifier into other services?

The glass-half-full view is that it’s really exciting that people outside the traditional open identifier crowd are interacting with the literature. We’ve been set a challenge to try and track this usage. By collecting this data and processing it into a form that’s compatible with other services we can add to its value and better help join the dots in and around the community that we serve. Not everyone tweeting about articles counts as ‘scholarly Twitter’, and hopefully we can bridge some divides (the subject of my talk at PIDapalooza last year, 'Bridging Identifiers').

How do we do it?

One of the central tenets of Event Data is transparency. We record as much information as we can about the data we ingest, how we process it, and what we find. Of course, you don’t have to use this data, it’s up to you how much depth you want to go into. But it’s there if you want it.

The resulting data set in Event Data is easy to use, but allows you to peek beneath the surface. We do this by linking every Event that our Agents collect through to an Evidence Record. This in turn links to Artifacts, which describe our working data set.

One such Artifact is the humbly named domain-decision-structure. This is a big tree that records DOI prefixes, domain names, and how they’re connected. It includes information such as “some DOIs with the prefix 10.31139 redirect to the domain polishorthopaedics.pl, and we can confirm that pages on that domain correctly represent their DOI”. We produce this list by visiting a sample of DOIs from every known prefix. We then ask the following questions:

Which webpage does this DOI redirect to, and what domain name does it have?
Does the webpage include its correct DOI in the HTML metadata?

From this we build the Artifact that records prefix → domain relationships, along with a flag to say whether or not the domain correctly represents its DOI in at least one case. You can put this data to a number of uses, but we use it to help inform our URL to DOI matching.

What Agents do

The Agents use the domain list to search for links. For example, the Reddit Agent uses it to query for new discussions about websites on each domain. They then pass this data to the Percolator, which is the machinery that produces Events.

The Percolator takes each input, whether it’s a blog post or a Tweet, and extracts links. If it finds a DOI link, that’s low hanging fruit. It then looks for links to URLs on one of the domains in the list. All of these are considered to be candidate landing page URLs. Once it has found a set of candidate links in the webpage it then has to find which ones correspond to DOIs, and validate that correspondence.

For each candidate URL it follows the link and retrieves the webpage. It looks in the HTML metadata, specifically in the <meta name='dc.identifier' content='10.5555/12345678' >, to see if the article indicates its DOI. It also looks in the webpage to see if it reports its DOI in the body text.

Not so fast

But can you trust the web page to indicate its own DOI? What about sites that say that they have a DOI belonging to another member? What about those pages that have invalid or incorrect DOIs? These situations can, and do, occur.

We have the following methods at our disposal, in order of preference.

doi-literal - This is the most reliable, and it indicates that the URL we found in the webpage was a DOI not a landing page. We didn’t even have to visit the article page.
pii - The input was a PII (Publisher Item Identifier). We used our own metadata to map this into a DOI.
landing-page-url - We thought that the URL was the landing page for an article. Some webpages actually contain the DOI embedded in URL. So we don’t even have to visit the page.
landing-page-meta-tag - We had to visit the article landing page. We found a meta tag, eg. dc.identifier, indicating the DOI.
landing-page-page-text - We visited the webpage but there was no meta tag. We did find a DOI in the body text and we think this is the DOI for this page. This is the least reliable.

On top of this, we have a number of steps of validation. Again, these are listed in order of preference.

literal - We found a DOI literal, so we didn’t have to do any extra work. This is the most reliable.
lookup - We looked up the PII in our own metadata, and we trust that.
checked-url-exact - We visited the landing page and found a DOI. We visited that DOI and confirmed that it does indeed lead back to this landing page. We are therefore confident that this is the correct DOI for the landing page URL.
checked-url-basic - We visited the DOI and it led back to almost the same URL. The protocol (http vs https), query parameters or upper / lower case may be different. This can happen if tracking parameters are automatically added by the website meaning the URLs are no longer identical. We are still quite confident in the match.
confirmed-domain-prefix - We were unable to check the link between the DOI and the landing page URL, so we had to fall back to previously observed data. On previous occasions we have seen that DOIs with the given prefix (e.g. “10.5555”) redirect to webpages with the same domain (e.g. “www.example.com”) and those websites correctly report their DOIs in meta tags. Only the domain and DOI prefix are considered. We therefore believe that the domain reliably reports its own DOIs correctly in at least some cases.
recognised-domain-prefix - On previous occasions we have seen that DOIs with the given prefix (e.g. “10.5555”) redirect to webpages with the same domain (e.g. “www.example.com”). Those websites do not always correctly report their DOIs in meta tags. This is slightly less reliable.
recognised-domain - On previous occasions we have seen that this domain is associated with DOIs in general. This is the least reliable.

We record the method we used to find the DOI, and the way we verified it, right in the Event. Look in the obj.method and obj.verification fields.

Of course, there’s a flowchart.

You can take a closer look in the User Guide.

If you think that’s a bit long-winded, well, you’re right. But it does enable us to capture DOI links without giving a false sense of security.

So, what happens?

If you ask the Event Data Query API for the top ten domains that we matched to DOIs in the first 20 days of January 2019, it would tell you:

Domain	Number of Events captured
`doi.org`	2058433
`dx.doi.org`	242707
`www.nature.com`	170808
`adsabs.harvard.edu`	163387
`www.sciencedirect.com`	96849
`onlinelibrary.wiley.com`	88760
`link.springer.com`	63869
`www.tandfonline.com`	41911
`www.sciencemag.org`	39489
`academic.oup.com`	39267

Here we see a healthy showing for actual DOIs (which you can explain by Wikipedia’s excellent use of DOIs) followed by some of the larger publishers. This demonstrates that we’re capturing a healthy number of Events from Wikipedia pages, tweets, blog posts etc that reference landing pages.

Awkward questions

This is not a perfect process. The whole point of PIDs is to unambiguously identify content. When users don’t use PIDs, there will inevitably be imperfections. But because we collect and make available all the processing along the way, hopefully we can go back to the old data, or allow any researchers to try and squeeze more information out of the data.

Q: Why bother with all of this? Can’t you just use the URLs?

We care about persistent identifiers. They are stable identifiers, which means they don’t change over time. The same DOI will always refer to the same content. In contrast, publishers’ landing pages can and do change their URLs over time. If we didn’t use the DOIs then our data would suffer from link-rot.

DOIs are also compatible across different services. You can use the DOI for an article to look it up in metadata and citation databases, and to make connections with other services.

This is not the only solution to the problem. Other services out there, such as Cobalt Metrics, do record the URLs and store an overlaid data set of identifier mappings. At Crossref we have a specific focus on our members and their content, and we all subscribe to the value of persistent identifiers for their content.

Of course, we don’t throw anything away. The URLs are still included in the Events. Look in the obj.url field.

Q: If DOIs are so amazing why keep URLs?

Event Data is useful to a really wide range of users. Some will need DOIs to work with the data. But others, who may want to research the stuff under the hood, such as the behaviour of social media users, or the processes we employ, may want to know more detail. So we include it all.

Q: Can’t you just decide for me?

In a way, we do. If an Event is included in our data set, we are reasonably confident that it belongs there. All we are doing is providing you with more information.

Q: Why only DOIs?

We specialise in DOIs and believe they are the right solution for unambiguously and persistently identifying content. Furthermore the content registered with Crossref has been done so for the specific benefits that DOIs bring.

Q: What about websites that require cookies and/or JavaScript to execute?

Some sites don’t work unless you allow your browser to accept cookies. Some sites don’t render any content unless you allow their JavaScript to execute. Large crawlers, like Google, emulate web browsers when they scrape content, but it’s resource-intensive and not everyone has the resources of Google!

This is an issue we’ve known about for a while. My talk two years ago was about precisely this topic. We know it’s a hurdle we’ll have to overcome at some point. We do have plans to look into it, but we haven’t found a sufficiently cost-effective and reliable way to do it yet.

Any sites that do do this will be inherently less reliable, so we recommend everyone to put their Dublin Core Identifiers in the HTML, render your HTML server-side (which is the default way of doing things) and don’t require cookies.

Q: What’s the success rate?

This is an interesting question. The results aren’t black and white. At the low end of the confidence spectrum we do have a cut-off point, at which we don’t generate an Event. But when we do create one we qualify it by describing the method we used to match and verify the connection. What level of confidence you want to trust is for you to decide. We just describe the steps we took to verify it.

It’s tricky quantifying false negatives. We have plenty of unmatched links, but not every unmatched link even could be matched to a DOI, for example there are some domains that have some DOI-registered content mixed with non-registered content.

We therefore err on the side of optimism, and let users choose what level of verification they require.

So talking of false positives or false negatives is a complicated question. We’ve not done any analytical work on this yet, but would welcome any input from the community.

Q: Why isn’t the `domain-decision-structure` Artifact more detailed?

We looked into various ways of constructing this, including more detailed statistics. At the end of the day our processes have to be understandable and easy to re-use. The process already takes a flow-chart to understand, and we felt that we got the balance right. Of course, as a user of this data, you are welcome to further refine and verify it.

Improved processes, and more via Metadata Manager

Shayn Smulyan — Thu, 17 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Hi, Crossref blog-readers. I’m Shayn, from Crossref’s support team. I’ve been fielding member questions about how to effectively deposit metadata and register content (among other things) for the past three years. In this post, I’ll take you through some of the improvements that Metadata Manager provides to those who currently use the Web Deposit form.

We recently announced the launch of Metadata Manager, a new tool from Crossref that makes it easier for you to submit robust, accurate, and thorough metadata for the content you register. Metadata Manager already covers journals and articles; more record types will be supported soon. It offers some extra features that will make your experience less stressful, make your metadata better, and ultimately make your content more discoverable.

Metadata Manager has the potential to improve your metadata registration experience in a number of ways:

by correcting one-off errors in previously registered metadata
by directly allowing you to add references, license data, funder information, or any other ancillary metadata to items that have previously been registered
by updating Crossmark data, in the case of a retraction or withdrawal

With the Web Deposit form, you finish entering your metadata for a new issue of your journal, and then get asked for your password, and of course that’s when you realize you’ve forgotten it (it happens a lot!). With Metadata Manager, the very first step is to log in, so you know your login credentials are accurate before you get down to the task of entering your metadata.

Easily import journals, or add new ones

When you switch to Metadata Manager, you can import the journals already associated with your account. Simply go to the search bar on the Home screen, search for your journal by title, then click ’Add’. If you are registering your first article for a journal that you’ve not registered before, you can add the journal information on the Home screen, by clicking “New Publication”.

Adding a Journal DOI

In the Web Deposit form, the Journal DOI is optional, as long as you include a valid ISSN. However, with Metadata Manager, a Journal DOI must be created for each journal you register. So, you need to enter a Journal DOI and a Journal URL for each of your journals before your deposits can be submitted. The Journal DOI won’t become active until you submit your first successful deposit for an article within that journal.

If you’ve never registered a Journal DOI before and are unsure what to use for your Journal DOI’s suffix, take a look at our suggested best practice for constructing DOI suffixes.

Adding new articles

Once your journal is added, the process of adding articles in Metadata Manager should be familiar, as it’s similar to the Web Deposit form process. You type in or paste as plain text (without formatting) all your relevant, accurate, and thorough metadata into the appropriate fields in the form.

Save your work as you go

In Metadata Manager there is no need to complete a full issue’s worth of articles at once. And, you don’t need to worry about losing your progress if you accidentally close your browser window, or your laptop runs out of battery while you’re in the middle of a deposit. You can simply and easily ‘save-as-you-go’, one article at a time, until you’re ready to submit them all. You can even review your saved metadata to make sure there aren’t any errors before the deposit is finalized.

Other metadata fields you didn’t know you needed (but you do!)

Have you ever wanted to add an abstract to your content’s metadata? How about license information, so that other organisations know what they can and can’t do with the work? Does your journal use article ID numbers instead of page numbers? These are all elements that can be added to Metadata Manager that were not available in the Web Deposit form. Additionally, you can add funding data, Similarity Check links, and relationships between your articles and other content. These types of metadata are hugely valuable for building a robust, interconnected web of scholarly communication.

Adding references

Unlike the Web Deposit form, Metadata Manager allows you to easily add references to your article’s metadata—this is an important requirement for participating in our Cited-by service.

To add references to an article’s metadata, you can copy and paste its reference list into the references field on the same screen as the rest of the article metadata (as per the image below).

Metadata Manager will match DOIs to those references (where available), and include the full list in your record. So, if you’ve been putting off participating in Cited-by because the reference deposit requirement was too much of a hassle, we hope this will help ease the way! The more references everyone registers, the more robust our Cited-by counts and Cited-by data become.

Edit mistakes without having to re-enter all your metadata

Mistakes happen. Sometimes you put an author’s first name in the last name field. Sometimes you copy and paste some stray HTML tags into your abstract. You might break a link by leaving a space in the middle of a URL, or enter the first-page number as 3170 instead of 317.

With Metadata Manager you can fix any errors quickly and easily right in the interface, then just click to redeposit the article with its metadata corrected. You won’t need to re-enter all the metadata or worry about editing the XML files directly.

We’ll have another blog post coming soon that will be devoted entirely to updating, correcting, or otherwise editing metadata for already-registered DOIs in Metadata Manager.

Find out immediately if your registration was successful

When you have finished adding the metadata for your articles, navigate to the “To deposit” section and click ‘Deposit’ to submit them. Instead of having to wait for your content to go through our processing queue, you’ll get immediate feedback. The number of Accepted and Failed deposits show immediately. Any articles which have failed are clearly marked with a red triangle icon and an explanation for the error. If you don’t understand an error message or how to correct the metadata, please contact us at support@crossref.org.

To get started with Metadata Manager take a look at our full help documentation.

Resolutions 2019: Journal Title Transfers = Metadata Manager

Isaac Farley — Thu, 03 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

UPDATE, 12 December 2022
Due to the scheduled sunsetting of Metadata Manager, this title transfer process has been deprecated. Please find detailed guidance for transferring titles on our documentation site here.

When you thought about your resolutions for 2019, Crossref probably didn’t cross your mind—but, maybe it should have…

Because we know—with a high level of certainty—that Shayn, Paul and I will be spending the first few weeks of the year transferring the ownership of many journal titles. Last year we processed almost 60 journal transfer requests during this time, and we’re heading toward a similar number for 2019. There’s no objection; it’s a just a fact. We’re happy to do it, but there is another way.

Unlike previous years, we now have a tool that gives you the control to transfer titles without any intervention from the Crossref support team—Metadata Manager. With just a few clicks, you, as the disposing publisher, can transfer your journal to the acquiring publisher yourself. Here’s how:

Transferring your journal in five easy steps using Metadata Manager:

Log into Metadata Manager using your username and password (the same one you use for the Crossref Web Deposit form).

Find the journal you’re transferring on your Metadata Manager workspace using the “search publications” box and click to load the journal’s container (or, dashboard).

Within the journal container, select Transfer Title from the Action drop-down.

On the transfer title screen select the acquiring (destination) publisher’s name and DOI prefix of where ownership will be transferred to. Click Transfer.

(In addition to transferring ownership of the title itself, all existing journal article DOIs previously registered will also be transferred to the new owner using this mechanism. They will persist on their original prefix, but the acquiring publisher will be able to update the metadata associated with these DOIs).

Confirm the title transfer. It may take up to 24 hours for the transfer to be reflected within Metadata Manager, and we’ll send a courtesy email to the acquiring (destination) publisher’s technical contact when the transfer has been completed.

As always, if you have questions, need guidance as you’re working through this process, or have recommendations on how we can improve title transfers—or anything else within Metadata Manager (the tool is in beta)–please let us know at support@crossref.org. There’s also comprehensive support documentation available for Metadata Manager to help and guide you.

2019 on Crossref

Resolution reports: a look inside and ahead

Whoa…too fast…what exactly are resolution reports?

What are those numbers?

Why are some of those DOIs failing?

What’s with this filtering of “known search engine crawlers?”

How’d we get here?

Your help with next steps

A Journey of a Crossref Ambassador in Latin America

Introducing our new Director of Finance & Operations

A word from Lucy…

Proposed schema changes - have your say

Next update

Add support for CRediT

Expand support for author and organisation identifiers

Expand support for a range of contributor names

Expand affiliation support

Expand support for data citation

Other updates

We need your feedback!

A turning point is a time for reflection

Crossref has repeatedly stayed ahead of developments in the community

Considering the value and future of Crossref

What's your (citations') style?

TL;DR

Introduction

Data

Styles

Features

Learning algorithm

Final accuracy estimation

Accidental release of internal passwords, & API tokens for the Crossref system

TL;DR

More than you probably want to know

Request for feedback: Conference ID implementation

We’ve reached another milestone and want your feedback

The details

Speaking, Traveling, Listening, Learning

Language Matters

Relationship status: It’s complicated

Finding Solutions to Resolutions

Get involved

2019 election slate

2019 Board Election

2019 Election Slate

The 2019 slate includes: seven candidates for five available seats

Take a look at the candidates’ organisational and personal statements

You can be part of this important process, by voting in the election

How can you vote?

Building better metadata with schema releases

What’s included in version 4.4.2

Schema files public on GitLab

Schema management process

What’s next

Introducing our new Director of Product

And now a few words from Bryan…

We'll be rocking your world again at PIDapalooza 2020

Don’t forget to tie your proposal into one of the six festival themes:

Theme 1: Putting Principles into Practice

Theme 2: PID Communities

Theme 3: PID Success Stories

Theme 4: Achieving Persistence through Sustainability

Theme 5: Bridging Worlds - Social and Technical

Theme 6: PID Party!

PIDapalooza: the essentials

LIVE19, the strategy one: have your say

Striving for balance

Have your say

At the meeting

Funders and infrastructure: let’s get building

Big things have small beginnings: the growth of the Open Funder Registry

We released v1.27 of the Funder Registry last week, and it contains entries for an impressive 21,356 funders.

What if I told you that bibliographic references can be structured?

TL;DR

Introduction

References in Crossref

The analysis

The results

Structured vs. unstructured

What’s next?