2022 on Crossref

Introducing our new Global Equitable Membership (GEM) program

Susan Collins — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

When Crossref began over 20 years ago, our members were primarily from the United States and Western Europe, but for several years our membership has been more global and diverse, growing to almost 18,000 organisations around the world, representing 148 countries.

As we continue to grow, finding ways to help organisations participate in Crossref is an important part of our mission and approach. Our goal of creating the Research Nexus—a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organisations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society—can only be achieved by ensuring that participation in Crossref is accessible to all. Building a network for the global community must include input from all of the global community.

Although Crossref membership is open to all organisations that produce scholarly and professional materials, cost and technical challenges can be barriers to joining for many organisations. To address some of these challenges, we created our Sponsors Program, which provides technical, financial and local language support. We also collaborate with the Public Knowledge Project on the Open Journals Platform to develop plugins for OJS users.

Additionally, we had a limited ‘fee assistance’ program to waive the content registration fees for members working under specific Sponsor arrangements, including INASP, and African Journals Online (AJOL). Learning from the experiences of such successful partnerships, starting in January 2023, we are expanding this program to provide greater membership equitability and accessibility to organisations located in the least economically-advantaged countries in the world through our Global Equitable Membership (GEM) Program. This new scheme now encompasses the annual fee as well as the content registration fees.

Eligibility for the program is based on a member’s country. We have curated the list, predominantly based on the International Development Association (IDA) list and excluding anywhere we are bound by international sanctions. From January 2023, organisations based in countries listed in our GEM program will be eligible to join Crossref and contribute with their metadata to a robust scholarly record at no cost. This also applies to 187 existing members in eligible countries who will no longer be charged for Crossref membership or content registration.

Existing Crossref members in GEM-eligible countries

Bangladesh (54)	Burundi (1)	Kiribati (0)
Kyrgyz Republic (20)	Central African Republic (1)	Lesotho (0)
Nepal (19)	Democratic Republic of the Congo (1)	Liberia (0)
Ghana (15)	Guyana (1)	Marshall Islands (0)
Yemen (10)	Haiti (1)	Mauritania (0)
Sudan (7)	Honduras (1)	Micronesia (0)
Tanzania (7)	Laos (1)	Mozambique (0)
Afghanistan (6)	Madagascar (1)	Nicaragua (0)
Ethiopia (5)	Malawi (1)	Niger (0)
Zambia (5)	Maldives (1)	Samoa (0)
Bhutan (4)	Myanmar (1)	Sao Tome and Principe (0)
Rwanda (4)	Cambodia (1)	Sierra Leone (0)
Tajikistan (4)	Chad (1)	Solomon Islands (0)
Kosovo (3)	Comoros (1)	South Sudan (0)
Senegal (3)	Cote d’Ivoire (1)	Togo (0)
Uganda (3)	Djibouti (1)	Tonga (0)
Burkina Faso (2)	Eritrea (1)	Tuvalu (0)
Mali (2)	Gambia (1)	Vanuatu (0)
Somalia (2)	Guinea (1)
Benin (1)	Guinea-Bissau (1)

The list of countries will undergo an annual review, to follow the latest guidance from IDA, which uses the somewhat simplistic World Bank income classifications but applies a more granular blend of criteria for economic health, thereby allowing for greater nuance, such as indicating countries where the gap between rich and poor is very wide.

The program results from our experience working with and knowing the communities through Sponsors and working with past members who have struggled to pay. It aims to bring us closer to our vision of building an inclusive, rich and open network of relationships underpinning the scholarly record. With the support of the Membership and Fees Committee, the launch of the program was confirmed with the recent unanimous vote of our Board to evolve our fee assistance program into a more expansive scheme. GEM presents a more comprehensive and equitable solution than our former arrangements. It involves an opportunity to join Crossref and contribute scholarly metadata to our global community on a zero-fee basis for membership and content registration. This offering will be applied by default to organisations based in all eligible countries, irrespective of joining through any specific Sponsor, or independently.

While the GEM Program will alleviate financial barriers, and we hope to see the numbers above grow significantly, the GEM program will not necessarily help ease technical or administrative burdens. We still need our valued Sponsors for that and we seek new Sponsors in the above locations. We would love to hear from organisations based in GEM countries who might consider becoming a Sponsor or otherwise support local colleagues in building experience of metadata and working with global open scholarly infrastructure systems like Crossref. Please reach out to me to discuss ideas or with any other questions or comments.

How funding agencies can meet OSTP (and Open Science) guidance using existing open infrastructure

Ed Pentz — Thu, 17 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In August 2022, the United States Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memo (PDF) on ensuring free, immediate, and equitable access to federally funded research (a.k.a. the “Nelson memo”). Crossref is particularly interested in and relevant for the areas of this guidance that cover metadata and persistent identifiers—and the infrastructure and services that make them useful.

Funding bodies worldwide are increasingly involved in research infrastructure for dissemination and discovery. While this post does respond to the OSTP guidelines point-by-point, the information here applies to all funding bodies in all countries. It will be equally useful for publishers and other systems that operate in the scholarly research ecosystem.

In response to calls from our community for more specifics, this post:

Provides an overview of the specific ways that Crossref (along with organisations and initiatives like DataCite, ORCID, and ROR) helps U.S. federal agencies—and indeed any other funder—meet critical aspects of the recommendations.
Restates our intent to collaborate with all stakeholders in the scholarly research ecosystem, including the OSTP, the US federal agencies, our existing funder, publisher, and university members, to support the recommendation as plans develop.
References the work and adoption of Crossref Grant DOIs, including analyses of existing metadata matching funding to outputs.
Highlights that what’s outlined in the memo aligns with our longstanding mission to capture and maintain the scholarly record and our vision of the Research Nexus, as we describe in our current blog series, regarding our role in preserving the integrity of the scholarly record (ISR).

Infrastructure already exists to support funder goals; it just needs more adoption

Ensuring free, immediate, and equitable access to metadata that captures the scholarly record is an essential part of meeting the aims of the memo but also supporting Open Science globally.

In September, Crossref ORCID, DataCite, and ROR participated in the 2022 Forum on Global Grants Management run by Altum and the summary provides a good example of the importance of open infrastructure and open metadata to the goals of Open Science:

Open Science begins with open infrastructure: Attendees agreed that Open Science relies on many other ‘opens’ – most notably, open metadata, open infrastructure, and open governance. Metadata and DOIs (digital object identifiers) for publications, grants, and research outputs, are essential to illuminate the connections that exist between funding and outcomes. That metadata runs on infrastructure powered by organisations such as Crossref, ORCID, ROR, and DataCite.

As a foundational scholarly infrastructure committed to meeting the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) of governance, insurance, and sustainability, Crossref plays an essential role in implementing and supporting key aspects of the guidance. For many years, we have been focused on the integrity of the scholarly record (ISR), and the shared vision to collectively achieve what we call the Research Nexus, which is described as

A rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organisations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society.

Metadata—including persistent identifiers and relationships between different research objects—is the foundation of the Research Nexus and is critical to openly and sustainably fulfilling the OSTP memo’s recommendations.

This topic of open metadata and identifiers isn’t just an issue for research resulting from US federal funding. We are working to implement open scholarly infrastructure globally, bringing significant benefits to the whole scholarly research ecosystem.

The current situation brings to mind the William Gibson quote, “The future is already here - it’s just not evenly distributed yet”. Much of the open infrastructure to support the identifier, metadata and reporting requirements of the OSTP memo already exists, but it is unevenly implemented. Increased collaboration and effort will be needed to bring this all to fruition.

We set out below some steps that all stakeholders can take to meet not just the OSTP guidelines, but Open Science goals more broadly, and globally.

What does ‘adoption’ look like? How exactly do funders and other stakeholders work with this infrastructure?

The OSTP memo calls for specific actions concerning metadata and identifiers where, fortunately, open and global solutions already exist.

For example, item 4 a) says, “Collect and make publicly available appropriate metadata associated with scholarly publications and data resulting from federally funded research.” Crossref and DataCite make metadata, including persistent identifiers (DOIs to be specific), openly available for a broad range of research objects from publications to data. Item 4 b) reads, “Assign unique digital persistent identifiers to all scientific research and development awards and intramural research protocols”. Again, federal agencies and other funders are already joining to register awards and grants and distribute these records openly through Crossref. However, this is an example of uneven adoption as registering awards and grants with DOIs is only being done by a few funders so far, which needs to increase.

Here is an ideal workflow that funders and publishers can already follow

Funders join Crossref to register grants and awards (or indeed any other object such as reports). They apply on our website, accept our terms, and provide key information such as contact details. An annual membership fee ranges from $200-$1200 USD.
Funders and publishers collect ROR IDs and authenticated ORCID iDs for all authors/awardees and their affiliations.
Funders register a Crossref DOI for the award/grant, including awardees’ ORCID iDs and ROR IDs. They send us XML information about the grant (note that we will imminently release an online form to make it easier for the less technical funders). Many funder members register the metadata through a third party, such as Altum (if they use ProposalCentral) or Europe PMC.
At the same time, funders update the awardees’ ORCID record directly with the Crossref Grant DOI and metadata.
Grantees produce research objects and outputs such as data, protocols, code, preprints, articles, conference papers, book chapters, etc.
These objects are registered with Crossref or DataCite, and DOIs are created by the publisher or repository members who include ORCID iDs, Crossref Grant DOIs (gathered from the author), ROR IDs for affiliations for all contributors, and other key metadata such as licensing information, and in the case of publications - references and abstracts. Note that the publisher works its magic (actually, publishers do a lot of editorial and production work, such as including data citations in the references using DataCite DOIs for the data in data repositories).
On the Crossref side, we do a bunch of processing and matching and are planning to refine this and do more. Sometimes relationships are notified and added, such as data citation, preprints related to articles or funding acknowledgements converted from free text to Open Funder Registry IDs and names.
Grant records with Crossref DOIs are now part of the scholarly record. All stakeholders may retrieve the open metadata and relationships through our public APIs. Crossref and DataCite will always provide open metadata, as safeguarded by our respective commitments to POSI.

Anyone can use the open metadata registered with Crossref, DataCite and ORCID as connections have been established between (ideally all) research objects and entities through open metadata and identifiers. This means that:

Funding agencies can monitor compliance with their policies
Publishers can identify the funder and meet their requirements
Funding agencies can assess and report on the reach and return of their funding programs
The provenance and integrity of the scholarly record is preserved and discoverable, benefitting all stakeholders.

Suggestions for meeting OSTP and Open Science guidance, point by point

OSTP Recommendation	Publishers should…	Funding agencies should…
4 a) Collect and make publicly available appropriate metadata associated with scholarly publications and data resulting from federally funded research	For scholarly publications: register comprehensive metadata & DOIs with Crossref. For scholarly data: register comprehensive metadata and DOIs with DataCite.	Use Crossref’s API to retrieve publication and other metadata. Use DataCite’s API to retrieve data/repository metadata.
i) all author and co-author names, affiliations, and sources of funding, referencing digital persistent identifiers, as appropriate;	Collect and validate the following from authors at manuscript submission: ROR & ORCiD IDs, Crossref Grant DOIs. Include data citations in reference lists, preferably with DataCite DOIs.	Register awards and grants with Crossref and create DOI records for them. Use ORCID’s API to retrieve validated contributor metadata. Update contributors’ ORCID records with Crossref Grant DOIs and metadata. Use ROR API to retrieve and verify affiliation metadata. Recommend data citations be included in published outputs.
ii) the date of publication; and,	Include acceptance and publication dates in Crossref metadata.	Use Crossref’s API to retrieve publication dates.
iii) a unique digital persistent identifier for the research output;	For scholarly publications and research outputs: register full metadata & DOIs with Crossref. For scholarly data: register full metadata and DOIs with DataCite.	Use Crossref and DataCite APIs to retrieve DOIs for research outputs.
4 b) Instruct federally funded researchers to obtain a digital persistent identifier that meets the common/core standards of a digital persistent identifier service defined in the NSPM-33 Implementation Guidance, include it in published research outputs when available, and provide federal agencies with the metadata associated with all published research outputs they produce, consistent with the law, privacy, and security considerations.	Collect ORCID iDs on manuscript submission for all authors. Register Crossref and DataCite DOIs and metadata for research outputs, including data.	Recommend that researchers applying for funding obtain an ORCID iD and collect them upon grant application for all applicants. Prepopulate grant applications with CV and publication information from applicants’ ORCID records. ORCID iDs should be included in the grants registered by the agencies with Crossref. Agencies can use our open APIs to retrieve the metadata on publications and data rather than ask researchers to do it, saving time and effort.
4 c) Assign unique digital persistent identifiers to all scientific research and development awards and intramural research protocols that have appropriate metadata linking the funding agency and their awardees through their digital persistent identifiers.		Join Crossref to register Crossref Grant DOIs, including ROR IDs and ORCID iDs Ensure grant proposal and assessment systems integrate with Crossref, ROR for affiliations and with ORCID for applicants/awardees.
5 a) coordinate between federal science agencies to enhance efficiency and reduce redundancy in public access plans and policies, including as it relates to digital repository access;	Work with agencies to ensure a smooth, automated workflow.	Using and supporting existing open scholarly infrastructure and using open identifiers will avoid duplication of effort and make the overall ecosystem more efficient .
5 b) improve awareness of federally funded research results by all potential users and communities;	Collect Crossref Grant DOIs from authors and use them to link from publications to grant information.	Communicate your Crossref Grant DOIs and open grant metadata widely via human and machine interfaces. Inclusion in the Crossref API will enhance dissemination and discoverability Update contributors’ ORCID records with Crossref Grant DOIs and metadata
5 c) consider measures to reduce inequities in the publishing of, and access to, federally funded research and data, especially among individuals from underserved backgrounds and those who are early in their careers;		Registering grants and sharing metadata through Crossref means it’s part of the world’s largest open community-governed metadata exchange and makes it available to the entire world without restriction.
5 d) develop procedures and practices to reduce the burden on federally funded researchers in complying with public access requirements;	Ensure your systems and those you work with make it as easy as possible for authors to provide the necessary metadata and persistent identifiers - work towards as much automation as possible and pulling from other systems rather than asking for data to be re-keyed.	Ensure the platforms you work with, such as grant proposal or assessment systems, retrieve and prepopulate ROR IDs, ORCID iDs, and Crossref and DataCite DOIs and associated metadata whenever possible so that the researchers don’t have to manually rekey or reformat data.
5 e) recommend standard consistent benchmarks and metrics to monitor and assess implementation and iterative improvement of public access policies over time;		Ensure that platforms and systems integrate with ROR, ORCID, Crossref, and DataCite so that this open metadata can lead to the creation of benchmarks and metrics.
5 f) improve monitoring and encourage compliance with public access policies and plans;	Use open infrastructure to help authors easily comply with public access and funder/institution policies. Automate systems as much as possible.	Using the open infrastructure, metadata, and identifiers outlined in this post will make monitoring more straightforward and compliance easier for all stakeholders. The community can build services on open infrastructure and metadata.
5 g) coordinate engagement with stakeholders, including but not limited to publishers, libraries, museums, professional societies, researchers, and other interested non-governmental parties on federal agency public access efforts;	Work with the global open infrastructure organisations (Crossref, DataCite and ORCID) whose members include funding agencies, societies, publishers, universities, libraries, repositories, museums, NGOs, and many other stakeholders - all looking to improve the efficiency of the research ecosystem.	Work with the global open infrastructure organisations (Crossref, DataCite and ORCID) whose members include funding agencies, societies, publishers, universities, libraries, repositories, museums, NGOs, and many other stakeholders - all looking to improve the efficiency of the research ecosystem.
5 h) develop guidance on desirable characteristics of—and best practices for sharing in—online digital publication repositories;	Support automated systems that use metadata and identifiers to populate repositories automatically.	Collaborate with publishers, Crossref and others to develop automated systems to populate repositories.
5 j) develop strategies to make federally funded publications, data, and other such research outputs and their metadata are findable, accessible, interoperable, and re-useable, to the American public and the scientific community in an equitable and secure manner.	Provide and support a range of discovery services based on open infrastructure.	Encourage discovery services - and develop services - that use the open infrastructure, metadata and persistent identifiers to enable.

Everybody needs to play their part

A lot of the work on making the above happen is already underway, and there is widespread adoption of open identifiers and metadata, but as noted above, funders are still early in the adoption journey, and implementation among all stakeholders is patchy.

Critical parts of the infrastructure rely on third-party platforms that supply tools and systems to authors, funders, and publishers - so coordinating the support for the appropriate metadata and identifiers in these systems and tools is very important.

We are emphasising how our existing open scholarly infrastructure systems are helping. But we also know that it’s not all perfect yet. Infrastructure is always evolving, metadata is never complete, refactoring workflows and systems can be costly, and integration can always be smoother. But our existing open infrastructure has already delivered significant benefits, and broader adoption will bring additional benefits to the whole scholarly research and communications ecosystem and help achieve the promise of Open Science in advancing human knowledge.

While working on this coordination and integration, we all try to remember that it should minimise work for researchers, and processes should be as automated as possible.

Collaboration is key to making this all work.

We already work with many funders through our Advisory Group, our 30 funder members, 25 of whom have so far collectively registered around 40,000 Crossref Grant DOIs, retrievable from our open API. Some grants are even matched to resulting outputs already, and some funders have recently dug into Crossref metadata to analyse outcomes from their investments, such as the Dutch Research Council (NWO) which presents findings and makes a case for greater emphasis on Crossref funding metadata.

We also work closely with partners Europe PMC and Altum, and we engage in community research and discussion, for example, through the Open Research Funders Group.

Alongside our fellow infrastructures and open identifier registries ORCID, DataCite, and ROR, we integrate with and support each other operationally and out in the community.

We will continue focusing our resources and efforts on engaging with funders, including US federal agencies responding by the OSTP guidelines, and all stakeholders to support the entire global scholarly research ecosystem.

Everyone has a part to play, and we must all pull together to prioritize this work.

Who’s in?

Please get in touch with Ed, Ginny, or Jennifer (or indeed DataCite or ORCID or ROR) if you’d like to have a discussion about the workflows described here, or just to make sure you’re up to date on the latest developments and opportunities we describe. We look forward to working with all funding agencies to support them as they develop their plans.

Better preprint metadata through community participation

Martyn Rittman — Wed, 09 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Preprints have become an important tool for rapidly communicating and iterating on research outputs. There is now a range of preprint servers, some subject-specific, some based on a particular geographical area, and others linked to publishers or individual journals in addition to generalist platforms. In 2016 the Crossref schema started to support preprints and since then the number of metadata records has grown to around 16,000 new preprint DOIs per month.

Preprints aren’t the same as journal articles, books, or conference papers. They have unique features, and how they are viewed and integrated into the publishing process has evolved over the past six years. For this reason, we have been revisiting the preprint metadata schema and decided that the best approach would be to form an advisory group (AG) of preprint practitioners and experts to help us.

The AG has identified a number of areas in which preprint metadata could be improved. Four of these were considered to have the highest priority:

Withdrawal and removal of preprints.
Preprints as an article type (not a subtype of posted content) in the schema.
Relationships between preprints and other outputs.
Versioning of preprints.

The members of the AG set to work with great enthusiasm, sharing perspectives and expertise. This led to a first tranche of recommendations shared for feedback earlier this year, and we’re grateful for engagement and feedback from the community over the last few months.

What did the community say?

Some of the points raised in the feedback were:

Could the origin of a withdrawal be included in the metadata, in particular whether it was requested by an author or another party?
Can the metadata represent when a preprint has been submitted to a journal and what stage it is in the editorial process?
Crossref is not alone in looking at preprint metadata, and several NISO groups are also engaged in related work.
Interoperability and the ability to create relationships with identifiers beyond DOIs is important to maintain an accurate and comprehensive record of research outputs.

These will form the basis for ongoing discussions.

What happens next?

There are three next steps that we will be taking.

The recommendations outline only the outcomes of discussions in a relatively brief format. We have been working on a more detailed paper to communicate more about what was discussed and provide some extra justification and alternatives.
The AG will continue to meet and discuss the points raised during consultation on the recommendations, along with topics that were considered a lower priority at an earlier stage.
We will draw up a set of proposals for specific changes to the metadata schema that will reflect the outcomes of the recommendations and discussions.

Although the initial period for feedback on preprint metadata has ended, we welcome feedback at any time. If you would like to get in touch, please contact me or any member of the advisory group.

Forming new relationships: contributing to open source

Patrick Vale — Wed, 19 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR

One of the things that makes me glad to work at Crossref is the principles to which we hold ourselves, and the most public and measurable of those must be the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure, or POSI, for short. These ambitions lay out how we want to operate - to be open in our governance, in our membership and also in our source code and data. And it’s that openness of source code that’s the reason for my post today - on 26th September 2022, our first collaboration with the JSON Forms open-source project was released into the wild.

Like most organisations, we depend heavily on open-source software for our operations - the software is universally available, generally high quality and ‘free’. And it’s easy to take that dependency, and the associated dependency on free time and effort on the part of the maintainers, for granted - but that’s not very sustainable. In fact, we believe relying on open-source software without helping to sustain it is an anti-pattern, and this project marks the start of our efforts to make funding open-source software a standard part of our technology budget.

This isn’t the first time we’ve supported or released open-source software. Indeed for the past few years, all our new software is open source, and we’re in the process of replacing old closed code with new, so that eventually all our code will be open source. But this is the first time we’ve contributed extensively to something that isn’t focussed primarily on us, and our services. This is a project that we will find very useful, but it is a general purpose tool, and it’s already gaining traction in the community.

Background and motivations

A while back, I was tasked to do a quick spike of work on testing the theory that we could use automated form generation tools to bring new interfaces to our users more quickly, and make them easier for “people who aren’t devs” to adapt and manage. We wanted to build a new user interface for registering content, and especially we wanted to make it easier for funders to register the grants they were awarding. As well as being more approachable by a less-technical audience, we also wanted these forms to be accessible (in terms of a11y and users of assistive technology) and localisable - we wanted a solution that would cater to the needs of our rapidly diversifying membership.

Enter JSON Schema

We were clear about one side of the puzzle - we knew that we had to look beyond the XML ecosystem upon which much of our existing system is built - and landed on JSON Schema. JSON Schema is a ‘vocabulary that allows you to annotate and validate JSON documents’. This means you can describe the shape you expect your data to take, and apply constraints-based validation to that. Which means, in terms of a form library, that you can infer the structure of the form and test that the data entered into it matches what you expect. More than that, you can use that built-in validation to provide error messages to help people get the data right, first time.

Working backwards from the outcome, the argument for adopting JSON Schema is compelling. It provides a mechanism for checking that data you are handling (for example, receiving input from a form) conforms to the constraints that you declare, but also allows you to tell people up-front, in a human and machine-readable way, what structure and format you will accept. This closed-loop of data annotation and validation gets more appealing when you look at the wide adoption of JSON Schema across languages and libraries. You can pretty much guarantee that for whatever client or server -side technology you are using, there will be a JSON Schema validator for it. Being able to share schemas across your systems (and equally importantly, with third parties) moves JSON schema from ‘just’ being about data validation, to a key supportive technology.

Building a form derived from a JSON Schema is an equally attractive prospect. JSON Schema was conceived during the AjaxWorld conference in 2007 as a ‘JSON-based format for defining the structure of JSON data’, and its use as a form-generation tool is relatively new, but there is growing community interest. There is even a discussion about how to best create a JSON Schema vocabulary, specifically geared towards addressing some of the needs of form generation users. However, even in its current form, a JSON Schema can be passed to a library, and a very serviceable user interface appears. The devil is always in the detail, and the client-side libraries differ in their abilities to customise areas such as layout (you may not always want your form fields to appear in exactly the same order as they do in your JSON Schema), custom elements (you might want something that wasn’t a form input, or that changes based on user input) and localisation. The ability to flexibly customise the appearance and behaviour of the interface was a key factor in our selection of a client-side form generation library.

Choosing a library

The other side of the puzzle was less clear - choosing a UI library that would take this JSON Schema, and turn it into a useful, and usable, form. I made the prototype using the venerable React JSON Schema form. This worked well as a proof of concept, but veered dramatically off our chosen Frontend stack of VueJS and Vuetify, and had some architectural constraints that would limit the scope of customisations we could make to our forms. So I went off looking for libraries that would work with our stack and came up with Vuetify JSON Schema Form, and JSON Forms.

Vuetify JSON Schema Form matched our stack perfectly, but made some interesting decisions about the layout of data within the form, and that wouldn’t suit our purposes without dramatic modification.

JSON Forms was an abstracted library, with a core handling the JSON Schema transformation and validation, and separate rendering libraries to handle the form generation. This was great - they had renderers for Angular, React, and even some support for VueJS. But not Vuetify.

Clearly, we were going to have to make something.

We made contact with the maintainers of both short-listed libraries to see how we could collaborate in creating a tool that would meet all of our (and hopefully, much of the wider community’s) requirements. Both maintainers were very helpful, and we had constructive discussions in both cases. In the end, we decided that the abstracted nature of the JSON Forms project was a better fit for our needs, providing a flexible platform on which we - and others - could extend. We were fortunate to receive funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (Grant Agreement #10485) in order to accelerate this work, so we could provide a Grant Registration UI more quickly. We paid a large portion of that funding to the library maintainers, and Crossref contributed a portion of my time on the project. This allowed us to enter into an agreement with EclipseSource, the maintainers of JSON Forms, to collaboratively develop the new VueJS and Vuetify renderer library. Stefan Dirix, the lead maintainer, worked with me to build it.

We didn’t forget about Vuetify JSON Schema Form though, and by way of appreciation for their help in the early stages, Crossref made a contribution towards the continued development of that library.

JSON Forms - now with Vuetify

Work started on the JSON Forms Vuetify renderer set in September 2021 - Stefan quickly created the first early prototypes of the new form renderers - but then we had a stroke of luck. Our repository received more input from the community. The one that made us sit up and take real notice was the news that someone else had already ported the JSON Forms React renderer set to Vue/Vuetify - and was offering this as a contribution. Krasimir Chobantonov’s fantastic first contribution got merged in at the end of the month. This propelled the project forward massively, and was an early validation of the value of working in the open. Needless to say, we were very grateful. Another example of the open source value chain was that Stefan - as the maintainer - could take the time to carefully review and tidy up the incoming code, so what was merged was the product of two great developers.

Having this great head start meant we could turn our attention to one of the other big areas we wanted to get right - localisation. Traditionally, JSON Schema -generated forms have handled localisation (translation of text and adjustment of date and numerical formats) by wholesale duplication and translation of the schema. This is cumbersome, and doesn’t integrate very well with custom error messages, nor external sources of interface messages (think form labels, descriptions, placeholders). So Stefan came up with a proposal, which we accepted, to add complete i18n support to the library. We now have a mechanism by which you can hook up a translation engine of your choice, and JSON forms will use that to lookup messages, before falling back to the validator (also localised!) and finally, the JSON Schema’s defaults. This gives much stronger integration and allows the community to plug in their existing localisation methods - no wasted effort.

Since the localisation addition, we’ve been working on fine-tuning the layout engine, making bug fixes, and integrating more closely with the underlying Vuetify library. This allows developers to more easily use the existing Vuetify parameters to change the style and behaviour of their form widgets. Again, no wasted effort.

We’re lucky to have an active community - @kchobantonov continues to make great contributions and push the library forward in unexpected ways - and the library is gaining popularity, with an average of a few hundred downloads per day.

Some of our funder members have already seen this work in action, and given their feedback on early iterations of the user interface that supports registering grant records. We’ll be releasing this publicly very soon to get feedback from members - and then using that feedback to iterate on the grants registration form, and look towards extending it to other record types.

Open source POSItivity

A continuous theme throughout this project has been the willingness of people working on these open source projects to be generous with their time and experience. Whether it has been form generation libraries, the JSON Schema project or maintainers of localisation plug-ins - help, advice and encouragement have never been far away. And that’s appreciated. But it’s not something that we, or any other organisation who relies on the software they produce, should take for granted. Open source software helps everyone who uses it, and there’s a real opportunity within our community to make meaningful steps towards supporting its sustainability. Ironically, it’s often the most-used general purpose tools that get the least attention. We can change that.

Look out for more

Look out for more posts from the engineering team, coming soon!

References

JSON Binpack: A space-efficient schema-driven and schema-less binary serialization specification based on JSON Schema (Chapter 3.2.1 History and Relevance)

https://web.archive.org/web/20071026190426/http://www.json.com/2007/09/27/json-schema-proposal-collaboration/

ISR part three: Where does Crossref have the most impact on helping the community to assess the trustworthiness of the scholarly record?

Rachael Lammey — Mon, 17 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Ans: metadata and services are all underpinned by POSI.

Leading into a blog post with a question always makes my brain jump ahead to answer that question with the simplest answer possible. I was a nightmare English Literature student. ‘Was Macbeth purely a villain?’ ‘No’. *leaves exam*

Just like not giving one-word answers to exam questions, playing our role in the integrity of the scholarly record and helping our members enhance theirs takes thought, explanation, transparency, and work.

Some of the elements Amanda outlines in the previous posts in this series (Part 1, Part 2) really resonated from a product perspective:

We must be cautious that our best practices for demonstrating legitimacy and identifying deceptive behaviour do not raise already-high barriers for emerging publications or organisations that present themselves in ways that some may not recognize as professional standards. Disruption is different from deception. Crossref has an opportunity to think about how to identify deceptive actions and pair that with our efforts to bring more people on board and support their full participation in our ecosystem.

We don’t have the means or desire to be the arbiter of research quality (whatever that means). However, we operate neutrally, at the center of scholarly communications, and we can help develop a shared consensus or framework. Our metadata elements and tools can be positioned to signal or detect trustworthiness. An important distinction is that we can play a role in assessing legitimacy (activities of the actors) but not in quality (calibre of the content itself).

Crossref has lots of plans (and lots to do) to improve our role in ISR

Rather than a long list of things we want to do in terms of tools, services, and functionality, it feels more manageable to break this work into three key areas.

1. Collecting better information in better ways

We think many elements of the metadata our members record with us help expose important information about the research, e.g., authors, publication dates, and abstracts. We also help our members assess submissions for originality via our Similarity Check service, and the ongoing migration to iThenticate V2 aims to better support this aspect of the publication process.

Beyond this, as Amanda points out, ‘once members start registering their content, their metadata speaks about their practices’. Seeing who published a work along with the metadata they provide; validated ORCID IDs to identify the authors, reference lists and links to related research and data, and important updates to the work via Crossmark, all contribute to showing not just the ‘what’ but the ‘how’ so that the community can use that information to support their decision-making.

I always want to stress that this work is not just an ‘ask’ for our members. We are moving in the same direction as we improve the things we do to support organisations in registering their records with us, answering their questions, working with partner organisations like PKP, consulting with our community on pain points, and thinking about how we can better enhance and facilitate their work. We’ve been fortunate that our community has taken the time to engage in discussions with Turnitin on iThenticate improvements, do user testing sessions as we build simple user interfaces to record grants, lead calls and conversations on improving grant metadata and supporting the uptake of ROR and data citation, and provide thoughtful feedback on our recent preprint on CRE metadata. This all helps us to explain, structure, and prioritize our product work.

There are also some closely related R&D-led projects that are already informing our thinking:

A more responsive version of participation reports so that it’s easier for members to identify gaps in their metadata and compare against others.
Making it easier to get metadata back in a format where members can easily redeposit it.
Better matching to help us and our members augment the metadata they send us to add value to the work we all do.

We said in the previous blog posts that we’ll pose questions about what kinds of metadata give what kind of levels of trustworthiness, and have previously highlighted the following activities:

Reporting corrections and retractions through Crossmark metadata. We know that our members are collecting this information, but often it isn’t making it through metadata workflows to us. We’re part of the NISO CREC (Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern) working group with many of our members and metadata users, as this feels like something critical to address.
Assessing originality using Similarity Check. On average, we’re seeing 320 new Similarity Check subscribers each year, with over 10 million checks being done each year by our members.
Establishing provenance and stakeholders through ORCID and ROR. At the time of writing, we have over 30,000 ROR IDs in Crossref, and this is growing steadily across different record types. ROR is keen to support adoption and so are we.
Acknowledging funding and other support through the use of the Open Funder Registry and registering grants metadata. This has improved in quality and completeness since we launched the Funder Registry in 2014 and with more comprehensive support for grants in more recent years. But we still have work to do, as this paper by Kramer and de Jonge points out: The availability and completeness of open funder metadata.
Citing data for transparency and reproducibility, including linking to related research data. Scholix, MDC and STM Research Data groups.
Demonstrating open peer review by registering peer review reports. Members have already recorded over 300,000 peer reviews with Crossref, opening up this information on their processes.

In your organisation, what weight do you give these? We know that some of our members register some of these things in more volume than others - is that due to their perceived value, technical limitations, or ‘we’re working on it, give us time?’ Do you think of them in the context of the integrity of the record or are we off the mark? Are there other things we haven’t mentioned in this blog that we could capture, report on and highlight?

2. Disseminating this information and supporting its downstream use

We want to make it as easy as possible for everyone to access and use the metadata our members register with us. Especially as some of the biggest metadata users are our members and, more selfishly, us! But there’s no point collecting metadata to support ISR if it’s unwieldy and difficult to access and use.

We’re working on a project, described in the mid-year community update by a number of my colleagues to break down internal metadata silos and model it in a more flexible way. This will lend itself to better information collection and exchange, and support of the Research Nexus by building a relationships API to let anyone see all of the relationships Crossref can see between a given work and well, anything else related to it (citations, links to preprints, links to data to name but a few).

Part of that work will involve supplementing the metadata our members register with high-quality, curated data from selected sources, making it clear where those assertions have come from.

We want our API to perform consistently and well, to contain all the metadata our members register, handle it appropriately, and be able to keep the information in it up-to-date.

Our API will underpin the reports we provide our members (among other things) so that we can provide simple interfaces for organisations to check how they’re doing along with more functional requests. Do their DOIs resolve? Are they submitting metadata updates when they publish a correction? How much will they be billed in a given quarter? We have a lot of internal reporting and need to build more, and if we want to use these, chances are many others do too, so we should open those up.

3. Trying to live up to POSI to underpin this work

When I see a new project, initiative, tool or service in the research ecosystem the first thing I want to do is find out about the organisation itself so that I can base some decisions on that. Lateral reading in action.

At Crossref, we want to show who we are beyond just our tools, services, and products and be transparent about our values. That’s why we have adopted the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure or POSI for short. Now we need to meet these principles and we’re working towards that. POSI proposes three areas that an Open Infrastructure organisation like Crossref can address to garner the trust of the broader scholarly community: accountability (governance), funding (sustainability), and protection of community interests (insurance). POSI also proposes a set of concrete commitments that an organisation can make to build community trust in each area.

So POSI isn’t just opening code and metadata, it’s telling our community how we handle membership, governance, product development, technical and financial stability and security, holding our hands up when we’ve got something wrong, and actively looking to improve upon the things we do.

Are you still reading? If so, you’ve done better than many of my examiners, I’m sure. So stay with us as we work together to ensure we bring quality, transparency, and integrity to the work we all do.

The next part in this series will report back on the feedback and discussions and potentially propose some new or adjusted priorities. Join us at the Frankfurt bookfair this week (hall 4.2, booth M5) or comment on this post below.

ISR part two: How our membership approach helps to preserve the integrity of the scholarly record

Amanda Bartell — Mon, 10 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In part one of our series on the Integrity of the Scholarly Record (ISR), we talked about how the metadata that our members register with us helps to preserve the integrity of the record, and in particular how ’trust signals’ in the metadata, combined with relationships and context, can help the community assess the work.

In this second blog, we describe membership eligibility and what you can and cannot tell simply from the fact that an organisation is a Crossref member; why increasing participation and reducing barriers actually helps to enhance the integrity of the scholarly record; and how we handle the very small number of cases where there may be a question mark.

Who can become a Crossref member and do we check new applicants?

Membership is open to organisations that “produce professional and scholarly materials and content”, and this is deliberately defined broadly. We’re a global community of members with content in all disciplines, in many formats, with all kinds of business models - research institutions, publishers, government agencies, research funders, banks, museums and many more.

Essentially, if your content is likely to be cited in the research ecosystem and you consider it part of the evidence trail, then you’re eligible to join.

We ask organisations to complete an online application form and accept our member terms. On receipt of the application, we run a few very basic checks to ensure that:

The applicant can meet the membership criteria and seems to have the capacity to fulfill the obligations (and follow our code of conduct).
We are legally permitted to accept them as a member (for example, we can’t accept applications from some countries due to sanctions.
They haven’t previously been a member of Crossref whose membership was revoked.
They haven’t misrepresented themselves in the application (such as their location).
The applicant or an affiliate is not already a member of Crossref (so that we can advise they join under a single membership fee).

As long as the applicant can meet these requirements, and as long as they are able to pay any membership fees upfront for their first year of membership, they are able to become a Crossref member, get a DOI prefix, and start registering their metadata to share it with the global scholarly community.

We are aware that some organisations in some regions may not be able to join Crossref independently. There may be barriers for them - the cost of membership fees, the fact that we only accept payment in US dollars, language barriers or technical barriers.

To help increase participation globally, we work with sponsors in some regions. All sponsors facilitate membership for organisations who wish to participate in Crossref. They pay one central membership fee on behalf of all the members they work with, and they also pay content registration fees on behalf of their members. Many sponsors register content on behalf of their members, and even if they don’t, most provide local language and technical support. Sponsors are able to charge for their services, but it can be a very economical route for a member to join. In the last year, out of the 2,322 new members that we’ve welcomed, almost 58% joined via a sponsor.

We also waive registration fees for members in certain lower income countries who join via three of our sponsors, and we are planning to expand this program soon (pending board approval in November). [EDIT 2022-November-23: The new Global Equitable Membership (GEM) Program was approved and takes effect 1st January 2023]

The importance of keeping barriers to entry low

As you can see, the checks that we run on new applicants are fairly limited in scope. In the last year, we’ve welcomed 2,322 new members and we only declined 39 applications. And 34 of these declined applications were effectively from one organisation whose membership was revoked in 2019.

Even this minimal set of checks takes a lot of research and keeps our member support specialists very busy - thank you Sally Jennings and Robbykha Rosalien (as well as contractors Kim and Collin).

So why shouldn’t we run more extensive checks on new member applicants? Why don’t we check the quality of their content, or that they are following best practices? Why don’t we decline membership for organisations that can’t demonstrate editorial integrity or that aren’t meeting 100% of the membership obligations from the start?

Nevermind the additional capacity that more extensive checks on the over 200 applicants we receive per month would entail, it’s more fitting with our mission to:

enable equitable participation; and
focus on evidence:

Equitable participation

Inclusivity is very important to us - after all, one of our organisational truths (the guiding principles for everything we do) is “come one, come all”, and this is mirrored in the POSI principles that commit us to broad stakeholder representation. We know that for new organisations, it may take them a while to be able to completely fulfil the membership obligations. We support them with information to help them understand what being a participant in the Crossref community entails. These organisations would have less of a chance of developing better practices if we were to limit membership in Crossref to ‘proven’ candidates. Besides, it would introduce a race condition; if joining and sharing metadata through Crossref is widely considered best practice, new entrants need to join Crossref in order to show that they are adopting best practices.

Trust signals and the Research Nexus

Secondly, it’s not our role to make such a call; we don’t have the expertise to decide if an organisation would be considered “good” at what they are producing; there are other organisations guiding in this area, such as with the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing. Instead, we focus on the decision-making tools, metadata, and relationships that can help provide trust signals for the community.

Once members start registering their content, their activity and metadata speak about their practices – others in the community can process that metadata, combined with its wider context, and identify trust signals to make their own decisions. That metadata can only be shared in an open and machine-readable way if an organisation joins Crossref and starts registering their records and underpinning data with us.

To paint a more detailed picture of the scholarly record, our priority is to get more and varied organisations contributing to the research nexus, rather than putting up barriers and blockers until they are performing perfectly. If they aren’t acting in the best interests of the scholarly community, then having the metadata available to assess will quickly make that obvious and hopefully encourage changes - sunlight being the best disinfectant, as the saying goes.

As we said in the first ISR blog:

“Crossref itself doesn’t assess the quality of content or the integrity of the research process but rather enables those who produce scholarly outputs to provide metadata (effectively evidence) about how they ensure the quality of content and how the outputs fit into the scholarly record.”

In our next post in the series, we’ll talk more about the workflow and decision-making tools we have in place and are planning to develop. We’ll pose questions about what kinds of metadata give what kind of levels of trustworthiness.

Helping new members become “good Crossref citizens”

Once an applicant becomes a member, we help them to completely fulfil the membership terms - ensuring that, for example, they register and display DOIs, keep their metadata up to date, and implement reference linking properly.

We have a lot of documentation on our website, we run regular events and webinars, and we have a series of automated onboarding emails for new members to help them move through the key stages of the member journey from set up and onboarding to levelling up and using additional services like Crossmark and Similarity Check. Our staff are also on hand alongside Ambassadors and other members in our Community Forum. Speaking of POSI (and transparent operations) we receive around 3,000 emails per month with support requests so we are gradually moving support from closed 1:1 email to the more public and efficient community support forum.

We work with members who aren’t fulfilling the obligations to understand challenges and help explain what they need to do. This is currently reactive, but we have plans to automate checks on whether members are meeting the membership terms in future.

Outside of confirming that our members are behaving as “good Crossref citizens”, there aren’t many other areas where the membership team typically gets involved. Our mission is to help preserve the integrity of the scholarly record by making the metadata provided by our members openly available in a machine-readable format. We don’t investigate our members’ business practices or take a deep dive into their editorial processes (such as peer review), and there are many areas where we aren’t able to get involved. For example, we cannot arbitrate title ownership disputes.

It’s all about preserving the integrity of the scholarly record

We do sometimes revoke membership, but this is for limited reasons:

unpaid invoices;
legal sanctions or judgments against the member or its home country; or
contravention of the membership terms.

Membership revocation due to unpaid invoices

We spend a lot of time communicating with members who haven’t paid their invoices and ensuring they have the information they need to solve the problem. Revoking membership due to unpaid fees is an absolute last step for us, but financial sustainability means we can keep the organisation afloat and keep our infrastructure running.

Where members have unpaid fees, we eventually suspend their access to register new records and then ultimately revoke their membership if the fees remain unpaid. Once an organisation’s membership has been revoked, they would need to re-apply if they wanted to become a member again in the future. If accepted, the applicant would need to pay all outstanding invoices before re-joining.

In March 2022, we revoked membership for around 140 members due to unpaid invoices (out of a total of over 17,000 active members).

Membership revocation due to sanctions

Occasionally, we are informed of sanctions that we need to comply with, such as the recent case of Russia invading Ukraine where each Russian member needed to be checked for individual sanctions and some were revoked. Such revocations have to be voted on by the Executive Committee and then ratified by the board. Read more information on our sanctions process.

Membership revocation for cause

Very occasionally there may be evidence that a member is in contravention of the membership terms. This may include:

Misrepresentation in the original membership application
Fraudulent use of identifiers or metadata
Contravening the code of conduct
Any other basis set forth in our governing documents.

We always try to work together with the member to solve problems, and again, revoking membership is an absolute last step. The revocation has to be voted on by the Executive Committee and then ratified by the board.

Our first ever revocation for cause was in July 2019 for OMICS, after the board voted that the US Federal Trade Commission’s ruling against them amounted to a cause for revocation. There have been a handful of cases since. For example, most recently in September this year we revoked membership for a member who was registering DOIs for journals with the ISSNs of similarly-named publications.

There’s more information about our processes to revoke membership on our website.

More participation for the win

In conclusion, we believe that the more parties able to participate in Crossref and provide metadata and context for the research nexus, the more robust this makes the scholarly record.

But do you agree? Are these measures enough? What other information about our membership operations would help us be more transparent? As we said in our first blog, we need your help to establish whether our approach is still the right one, if we are missing anything and what else we might be able to do.

Here’s how you can help:

Join the discussion about the integrity of the scholarly record on our community forum.
Keep an eye out for future blog posts and meetings. We are having a small, in-person discussion prior to the Frankfurt Book Fair and will report on this in a future blog post.
Sign up to attend Crossref LIVE22 for updates on these topics and all things Crossref.
Join and support initiatives and organisations that we partner with or who use our metadata to look at ethical practices, for example, COPE, DOAJ, and OASPA, and review the Principles of Transparency in Scholarly Publishing, which these organisations worked on with WAME.

ISR part one: What is our role in preserving the integrity of the scholarly record?

Amanda Bartell — Thu, 22 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The integrity of the scholarly record is an essential aspect of research integrity. Every initiative and service that we have launched since our founding has been focused on documenting and clarifying the scholarly record in an open, machine-actionable and scalable form. All of this has been done to make it easier for the community to assess the trustworthiness of scholarly outputs. Now that the scholarly record itself has evolved beyond the published outputs at the end of the research process – to include both the elements of that process and its aftermath – preserving its integrity poses new challenges that we strive to meet… we are reaching out to the community to help inform these efforts.

Scholarly research, and therefore scholarly communications, are rapidly changing with the development of new approaches, technologies, and models. We need open scholarly infrastructure that can adapt to these changes and provide trust signals that enable assessment of the integrity of the research and reflect the ways that research is changing. Crossref has been changing and adapting by building on the concept of the scholarly record with our vision of the Research Nexus:

“a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organisations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society”.

The foundation of the scholarly record and Research Nexus is metadata and relationships - the richer and more comprehensive the metadata and relationships in Crossref records, the more context there is for our members and for the whole scholarly research ecosystem. This will lead to a range of benefits from better discovery and saving researchers time to the assessment of research impact and research integrity. This is why Crossref is focused on enriching metadata to provide more and better trust signals while keeping barriers to membership and participation as low as possible to enable an inclusive scholarly record.

We want to engage with the community to emphasise this role, share our plans for the future, and get feedback to establish if we are heading in the right direction.

This blog explains our current position and will be followed by subsequent posts exploring all our services and plans in this area, as well as more details on our membership operations and policies.

What is “Integrity of the Scholarly Record” (ISR), and how does it feed into Research Integrity?

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) defines research integrity as a set of values in scientific research: honesty; accuracy; efficiency; and objectivity. It’s concerned with the soundness of the process of science. As a subset of that, the outputs of the scholarly publishing process create a “scholarly record” which allows those in the community to find evidence and context to help confirm whether these values have been adhered to. The scholarly record is Crossref’s focus. This means that Crossref itself doesn’t assess the quality of content or the integrity of the research process but rather enables those who produce scholarly outputs to provide metadata (effectively evidence) about how they ensure the quality of content and how the outputs fit into the scholarly record (through reference links, ORCID iDs for authors, ROR IDs for affiliations, funding and licensing information, etc.).

Crossref members include any organisation that produces research objects and materials (publishers, societies, universities, funders, research institutions, scholars) so they can establish a persistent record—tied to a persistent and unique identifier—for these outputs and supply metadata about this content in an open, machine-readable way. Maintaining this record for the long term, and adding in an important layer of context, establishes the integrity of the scholarly record as well as ensuring it is something that can be used by the whole community to improve scholarly research for generations to come.

The scholarly record is about more than just published outputs - it’s also a network of inputs, relationships, and contexts

In the past, the Scholarly Record was seen as just the published outputs at the end of the research process - for example, journal articles or book chapters. But as the OCLC Research Group notes in their 2014 report on The Evolving Scholarly Record:

“The boundaries of the scholarly record are in flux, as they stretch to extend over an ever-expanding range of materials.”

OCLC describes how outputs at the “process” and “aftermath” stages of the research process are becoming increasingly important alongside the outputs at the traditional “outcomes” stage.

We like to take this even further. We think the evolving Scholarly Record is about more than just recording different types of works. As the above report notes “The scholarly record is evolving to have greater emphasis on collecting and curating context of scholarly inquiry […] One can imagine an article in quantitative biology published in a Wiley journal, the data for which resides in Dryad; the e-print in arXiv; and the conference poster in F1000. All of these materials may be considered part of the scholarly record, but no single institution will collect them all. Instead, access is achieved through a coordination of stewardship roles in which the scholarly record is decomposed into discrete, interrelated units that organisations specialize in collecting, preserving, and making available.”

It’s this interrelatedness that we think is important, and Crossref plays an important role in collecting, matching, and sharing those relationships. We now focus on this ‘nexus’ - so no longer primarily the different types of objects, but increasingly the interplay and relationships between them. The context, rather than the individual metadata elements, is what’s key.

Martin Eve explores this idea further in his blog What is the Scholarly Record, suggesting “the scholarly record is a decentralized network of evolving truth assertions” and “Whether a truth assertion is part of the scholarly record is determined by another set of distributed assertions and their power configurations (say, through institutional affiliation) of the individuals who make such assertions.”

Barbara Fister’s excellent talk about the importance of lateral reading as a way to understand information systems discusses how professional fact checkers “engaged in “lateral reading,” check other sources for context before spending time reading and analyzing a source.”

Fister highlights the “SIFT” approach from A Curriculum for Civic Online Reasoning, created by a group of educators at Stanford University for students to evaluate online content. And she argues that this approach is also useful for assessing scholarly materials noting

“The networked, social nature of scholarship is worth making explicit”.

Where does Crossref fit in? Where do we have the most impact and opportunity?

To address the question of our role in the integrity of the scholarly record, we need to understand several aspects that Crossref has to balance in this capacity, such as

We don’t have the means or desire to be the arbiter of research quality. However, we operate neutrally, at the centre of scholarly communications, and we can help develop a shared consensus or framework. Our metadata elements and tools can be positioned to signal or detect trustworthiness. An important distinction is that we can play a role in assessing legitimacy but not in assessing quality.
We must be cautious that our best practices for demonstrating legitimacy and handling less-than-legitimate behaviour do not raise already-high barriers for emerging publications or organisations that present in ways that some may not recognise as professional standards. Disruption is different from deception. In discussions with our board this point has come out strongly: that Crossref has an opportunity to think about how to help the community identify deceptive actions and pair that with our efforts to bring more people on board.
Addressing this issue may involve changes to our membership eligibility and processes, bylaws, policies, staff resources, and technical and metadata solutions; actually, a combination of all these aspects. Many of these are projects that are already planned and we have ideas for extending these.
We regularly review the process we use for evaluating when and why to revoke membership for reasons other than non-payment. The volume of cases that we believe justify membership revocation—while a tiny fraction of members—is growing and does take staff and legal resources to address.

Crossref and our members aleady help preserve the integrity of the scholarly record in significant ways

Almost all of our services in some way touch on enabling people to express and evaluate trustworthiness; our mission statement commits us to “making research objects easy to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse […] all to help put research in context.”

We have, of course, specific tools and services that augment this activity too. Many members are active in:

Reporting corrections and retractions through Crossmark metadata.
Assessing originality using Similarity Check.
Conveying their stewardship via the public participation report.
Establishing provenance and stakeholders through funding metadata, ORCID, and ROR.
Acknowledging funding through the use of the Open Funder Registry and registering grants metadata.
Citing data for transparency and reproducibility, including linking to related research data via Event Data.
Demonstrating open peer review by registering peer review reports.

As recently concluded in this Nature editorial calling for us to think beyond open references,

“Depositing all relevant metadata in Crossref should become the norm in scholarly publishing.”

For those members just starting out on their journey, there are some immediate specific things that all members are able to do. Check your participation report and start registering more metadata to add that contextual layer:

References
Abstracts
Corrections and retractions via Crossmark
License links
ORCID IDs for authors
ROR IDs for affiliations
Grant IDs for funding acknowledgements
Cite data (preferably using DataCite DOIs in reference lists)
Register all related objects such as versions and translations via relationships
Register grants with Crossref (funder members).

By enabling our members to register their research objects and create metadata records about them that are freely and openly shared with the scholarly community, we facilitate them in being able to communicate the context and trustworthiness of that object.

And within that metadata, they can create relationships not just between research objects and also between research stakeholders - the individuals, affiliations, funders, and other players involved. That’s why we work so closely with other parts of foundational scholarly infrastructure (ORCID, DataCite, ROR) and why we now have more than 30 funders registering grants with us. We want to help to capture, identify, and link together all these important elements and more to deliver context for the scholarly record.

We started this blog by talking about the changes that are taking place in the world of research and how the infrastructure needs to adapt and change. Although we have extensive plans in place to improve our contribution to ISR, we need your help to establish whether our role is still the right one, whether we are missing anything and what else we might be able to do.

Join the discussion about the integrity of the scholarly record, and the Research Nexus on our Community Forum.
Keep an eye out for future blog posts and meetings. We are having a small, in-person discussion prior to the Frankfurt Book Fair and will report on this in a future blog post.
Sign up to attend Crossref LIVE22 for updates on these topics and all things Crossref.
Join and support initiatives and organisations that we partner with or who use our metadata to look at ethical practices in publishing, for example, COPE, DOAJ, and OASPA, and review the Principles of Transparency in Scholarly Publishing, which these organisations worked on with WAME.

In the coming weeks, we will post more about our product and metadata plans and also about the specifics of membership operations and cases we see and how we’re currently addressing them.

2022 Board Election

Lucy Ofiesh — Fri, 16 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’m pleased to share the 2022 board election slate. Crossref’s Nominating Committee received 40 submissions from members worldwide to fill five open board seats.

We maintain a balance of eight large member seats and eight small member seats. A member’s size is determined based on the membership fee tier they pay. We look at how our total revenue is generated across the membership tiers and split it down the middle. Like last year, about half of our revenue came from members in the tiers $0 - $1,650, and the other half came from members in tiers $3,900 - $50,000. We have four large member seats and one small member seat open for election in 2022.

The Nominating Committee presents the following slate.

The 2022 slate

Tier 1 candidates (electing one seat):

eLife, Damian Pattinson, Executive Director
Pan Africa Science Journal, Oscar Donde, Editor in Chief

Tier 2 candidates (electing four seats):

Clarivate, Christine Stohn, Director of Product Management
Elsevier, Rose L’Huillier, Senior Vice President Researcher Products
The MIT Press, Nick Lindsay, Journals and Open Access Director
Springer Nature, Anjalie Nawaratne, VP Data Transformation & Chief Business Architect
Wiley, Allyn Molina, Group Vice President, Research Publishing

Here are 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 6th, 2022, you are eligible to vote when voting opens on September 20th, 2022.

How can you vote?

Your organisation’s designated voting contact will receive an email the week of September 19th with the Formal Notice of Meeting and Proxy Form with concise instructions on how to vote. You will also receive a username and password with a link to our voting platform.

The election results will be announced at the LIVE22 online meeting on October 26th, 2022. Save the date! Incoming members will take their seats at the March 2023 board meeting.

Accessibility for Crossref DOI Links: Call for comments on proposed new guidelines

Jennifer Kemp — Tue, 06 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Our entire community – members, metadata users, service providers, community organisations and researchers – create and/or use DOIs in some way so making them more accessible is a worthy and overdue effort.

For the first time in five years and only the second time ever, we are recommending some changes to our DOI display guidelines (the changes aren’t really for display but more on that below). We don’t take such changes lightly, because we know it means updating established workflows. We appreciate the questions that prompted us to make this recommendation and we know it’s critical that we get community input on the proposed updates.

TL;DR

Here is a quick overview:

DOIs and URLs themselves don’t really tell readers much. People with visual impairments rely on screen readers to read out loud the contents of a page. We’re asking for the title of each DOI to be added, in an ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) attribute, so these users understand what these links are for.
Accessible text, as this kind of description is known, should be included for all links, but at this time, we’re specifically recommending it for landing pages of newly registered records.
It’s not required, yet. We’re proposing a 2 year recommendation period and we want your feedback on the particulars, including timing and how we can help. Please take a short survey and/or get in touch and share your thoughts.
We’ll finalize these recommendations after assessing the feedback. Please check back for updates.

What is changing, when and why

The proposed updates are meant to improve overall usability, particularly for people with visual impairments, by aligning our guidelines with modern accessibility requirements such as the new W3C recommendations and the European Accessibility Act. This means that assistive technologies such as screen readers can interpret DOI links.

Why are changes being recommended?

DOIs are unique and persistent links to items in the scholarly record so it makes sense that they link to the full URLs for the associated content –for example, a journal article. The issue for people who rely on screen readers is that a DOI link doesn’t provide title or other information to give that link context. Users of screen readers need to know what the destination of a link is.

These users often lack the context that other users have; in fact, they may be presented with links in a document as a list. That’s why all links, not just DOI links, need what is called “accessible text.” Providing additional information for links requires ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) techniques. This speaks to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the standard guidelines for accessibility across the web, specifically success criterion 2.4.4 - Link Purpose (In Context), which aims to ‘help users understand the purpose of each link so they can decide whether they want to follow the link.’

For your feedback: recommended draft changes

We recommend the addition of an aria-label attribute for DOI links, containing as its value the descriptive title of the content represented by the DOI, so that screen readers can interpret DOI links. This means that, while the DOI display itself doesn’t actually change, the link is enhanced with additional, contextual information for the user of assistive technology, in one of two ways, either:

an aria-label attribute, described as ‘a way to place a descriptive text label on an object,’ identifying the destination, or
an aria-describedby attribute pointing to where the destination is identified in the surrounding text.

The updated HTML for a journal article*, for example, would be:

<a href="https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.5555/12345678" aria-label="DOI for Toward a Unified Theory of High-Energy Metaphysics: Silly String Theory">https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.5555/12345678</a>

Here the aria-label has been set to the value of the ‘title’ property as retrieved from the Crossref REST API at https://api-crossref-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/v1/works/10.5555/12345678.

*Note that fields may vary slightly for different record types.

This proposed solution allows screen readers to read aloud to users the value of the aria-label attribute, instead of the full DOI in the link text.

At this time, we are recommending the change for landing pages in particular, but it can and should be applied to wherever DOI links appear, whenever feasible (more on this below).

Our guidelines will continue to state that the DOI should always be displayed as a full URL link–that will not change. Neither will content registration–we are not asking for additional information in your deposits.

It’s not perfect, but it’s very worthwhile

This recommendation has some limitations worth noting but it must be said that there is no perfect solution.

DOI links appear in lots of places - PDFs for one notable example. We reviewed and tested the recommendation with Bill Kasdorf, Principal, Kasdorf & Associates, LLC, Richard Orme, CEO, DAISY Consortium, and George Kerscher, Chief Innovations Officer, DAISY Consortium-Senior Officer, Global Literacy, Benetech, who graciously provided their time and expertise. EPUBs and websites proved to be easy to update; other formats, notably PDFs, less so. Widespread adoption of accessible DOIs is so important and we don’t want confusion or frustration to get in the way of making progress. We support and welcome efforts to include an ARIA attribute wherever DOI links appear, but we recommend focusing on landing pages, for now.

Patrick Vale, Crossref Senior Front End Developer, explains that:

”DOI links serve a very specific purpose: to provide the persistent link to an item in the scholarly record. And as such, they present an unusual set of requirements when balancing accurately presenting the information they encode - the persistent link - and making that link accessible, and understandable. With these proposed changes, we hope to strike this balance.“

We know it will be a challenge (more on that below) but we think it’s absolutely a worthwhile effort. Indeed, we are undertaking a project to update our own website to meet these recommendations and to review overall accessibility.

As Bill Kasdorf notes:

“Most people have no idea how many people with visual impairments there are. Not only is it unfair to those people not to provide accessible text for links, the authors and publishers of the linked resource are missing a lot of readers. This update is a great move by Crossref, and every bit aligned with its mission to make scholarly content discoverable and consumable.”

We propose the following timeline, also for your feedback

Once finalized, following community feedback, the updated guidelines will be issued as a recommendation for a suggested period of two years starting next year, 2023. Beginning in 2025, the changes will be required for landing pages of newly registered content (and strongly recommended for existing registered content). Feedback on this approach and timeline is also encouraged.

Help us help you

We are conscious that adding descriptive information to DOI links places a significant responsibility on the members and Service Providers creating and hosting these links. Therefore, we are also considering the creation of a tool to help with implementation. Initial discussions suggest this could be a JavaScript helper tool, which could be included on member websites. We also welcome feedback as to how such a tool might be implemented, and how it would best integrate with existing sites and workflows.

Call for comments - by 1st November

We hope that this proposal is a welcome one and that the timing is good for moving forward together toward greater accessibility of the scholarly record. We welcome questions, feedback and suggestions through 1st November via the survey below or by email to feedback@crossref.org

Small changes, big impact

We’re excited to make changes that improve accessibility and we look forward to the community’s response to our proposal. We will share aggregated feedback in an updated post later this year.

A note on language

Multiple sources were consulted to find the most appropriate and inclusive term(s) for users of screen readers in this context. “Print disabled,” for example, seemed to be a good candidate but was ultimately deemed likely to be confusing to a very global publishing audience, who often don’t physically print anything. Sources differ slightly, for example between the US and UK and of course, this English text may well be translated into other languages. Feedback on the terms used here is also very welcome.

Additional resources

The Inclusive Publishing Hub (DAISY Consortium)
National Center on Disability and Journalism (Arizona State University, US)
Inclusive Language guidance (UK government)
The American Psychological Association (APA) Bias-Free Language Disability Guide
The Open Access Books Network (OABN)

Martin Paul Eve is joining our R&D group as a Principal Developer

Geoffrey Bilder — Fri, 26 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’m delighted to say that Martin Paul Eve will be joining Crossref as a Principal R&D Developer starting in January 2023.

As a Professor of Literature, Technology, and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London- Martin has always worked on issues relating to metadata and scholarly infrastructure. In joining the Crossref R&D group, Martin can focus full-time on helping us design and build a new generation of services and tools to help the research community navigate and make sense of the scholarly record.

Martin himself explains the logic of this move on his own blog, so I won’t attempt to do the same here other than to say:

praxis makes perfect.

(mic drop)

Created with DALL·E, an AI system by OpenAI with the the prompt: ‘A bookwheel in the style of the 16th-century illustration by Agostino Ramelli and where the books are replaced by open laptops’

Flies in your metadata (ointment)

Isaac Farley — Mon, 25 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Quality metadata is foundational to the research nexus and all Crossref services. When inaccuracies creep in, these create problems that get compounded down the line. No wonder that reports of metadata errors from authors, members, and other metadata users are some of the most common messages we receive into the technical support team (we encourage you to continue to report these metadata errors).

We make members’ metadata openly available via our APIs, which means people and machines can incorporate it into their research tools and services - thus, we all want it to be accurate. Manuscript tracking services, search services, bibliographic management software, library systems, author profiling tools, specialist subject databases, scholarly sharing networks - all of these (and more) incorporate scholarly metadata into their software and services. They use our APIs to help them get the most complete, up-to-date set of metadata from all of our publisher members. And of course, members themselves are able to use our free APIs too (and often do; our members account for the vast majority of overall metadata usage).

We know many organisations use Crossref metadata. We highlighted several different examples in our API case study blog series and user stories. Now, consider how errors could be (and often are) amplified throughout the whole research ecosystem.

While many inaccuracies in the metadata have clear consequences (e.g., if an author’s name is misspelled or their ORCID iD is registered with a typo, the ability to credit the author with their work can be compromised), there are others, like this example of typos in the publication date, that may seem subtle, but also have repercussions. When we receive reports of metadata quality inaccuracies, we review the claims and work to connect metadata users with our members to investigate and then correct those inaccuracies.

Thus, while Crossref does not update, edit, or correct publisher-provided metadata directly, we do work to enrich and improve the scholarly record, a goal we’re always striving for. Let’s look at a few common examples and how to avoid them.

Pagination faux pas

First page marked as 1

In the XML registered

<pages>
<first_page>1</first_page>
<last_page>1</last_page>
</pages>

https://api-crossref-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/works?filter=type:journal-article&select=DOI,title,issue,page&sample=100

Other pagination errors

In the XML registered

<item_number item_number_type="article-number">1</item_number>

In the XML registered

<pages>
<first_page>121-123</first_page>
<last_page>129</last_page>
</pages>

Author naming lapses

Examples: Titles (Dr., Prof. etc.) in the given_name field; Suffixes (Jr., III, etc.) in the surname field; superscript number, asterisk, or dagger after author names (usually carried over from website formatting that references affiliations); full name in surname field

In the XML registered

<contributors>
<person_name sequence="first" contributor_role="author">
<given_name>DOCTOR KATHRYN</given_name>
<surname>RAILLY</surname>
</person_name>
<person_name sequence="additional" contributor_role="author">
<given_name>DOCTOR JOSIAH S.</given_name>
<surname>CARBERRY</surname>
</person_name>
</contributors>

<contributors>
<person_name contributor_role="author" sequence="first">
<surname>Mahmoud Rizk</surname>
</person_name>
<person_name contributor_role="author" sequence="additional">
<surname>Asta L Andersen(</surname>
</person_name>
</contributors>

organisations as authors slip-ups

Examples: The contributor role for person names is for persons, not organisational contributors, but we see this violated from time to time. Unfortunately, no persons are being credited with contributing to content that have these errors present in the metadata record.

In the XML registered

<contributors>
<person_name sequence="first" contributor_role="author">
<surname>Society</surname>
</person_name>
</contributors>

<person_name contributor_role="author" sequence="first">
<given_name>University of Melbourne</given_name>
<surname>University of Melbourne</surname>
</person_name>
</contributors>

Null no-nos

Examples: Too many times we see “N/A”, “null”, “none” in various fields (pages, authors, volume/issue numbers, titles, etc.). If you don’t have or know the metadata, it’s better to omit it for optional metadata elements than to include inaccuracies in the metadata record.

In the XML registered

<journal_volume>
<volume>null</volume>

<pages>
<first_page>null</first_page>
<last_page>null</last_page>
</pages>

<person_name sequence="first" contributor_role="author">
<given_name>Not Available</given_name>
<surname>Not Available</surname>
</person_name>
<person_name sequence="additional" contributor_role="author">
<given_name>Not Available</given_name>
<surname>Not Available</surname>
</person_name>

Where to go from here?

One thing we’ve said throughout this blog that we’ll reiterate here is: accurate metadata is important. It’s important in itself, and the metadata registered with us is heavily used by many systems and services, so think Crossref and beyond. In addition to that expanding perspective, there are practical steps members and metadata users can take to help us:

As a member registering metadata with us:

make sure we have a current metadata quality contact for your account and update us if there’s a change
if you receive an email request from us to investigate a potential metadata error, help us
if you do not know what to enter into a metadata element or helper tool field, please leave it blank; perhaps some of the examples of errors within this blog were placeholders that the responsible members intended to come back to - to correct in time; that’s also a practice to avoid
if you find a record in need of an update, update it - updates to existing records are always free (we do this to encourage updates and the resulting accurate, rich metadata, so take advantage of it).

As a metadata user:

if you spot a metadata record that doesn’t seem right, let us know with an email to support@crossref.org and/or report it to the member responsible for maintaining the metadata record (if you have a good contact there)
if you’re eager to confirm the last update of a metadata record, our REST API is a great resource; here’s a handy query to use as a starting point: this one returns records on our Crossref prefix 10.5555 that have been updated in 2022: https://api-crossref-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/prefixes/10.5555/works?rows=500&filter=from-update-date:2022-01-01,until-pub-date:2022-12-31&mailto=support@crossref.org

Making connections between research objects is critical, and inaccurate metadata complicates that process. We’re continually working to better understand this, too. That’s why we’re currently researching the reach and effects of metadata. Our technical support team is always eager to assist in correcting errors. We’re also keen on avoiding those mistakes altogether, so if you are uncertain about a metadata element or have questions about anything included in this blog post, please do contact us at support@crossref.org. Or, better yet, post your question in the community forum so all members and users can benefit from the exchange. If you have a question, chances are others do as well.

How I think about ROR as infrastructure

Amanda French — Fri, 08 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The other day I was out and about and got into a conversation with someone who asked me about my doctoral work in English literature. I’ve had the same conversation many times: I tell someone (only if they ask!) that my dissertation was a history of the villanelle, and then they cheerfully admit that they don’t know what a villanelle is, and then I ask them if they’re familiar with Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do not go gentle into that good night.” So far, everyone has heard of it – it’s a very well-known poem indeed. I then explain that “Do not go gentle into that good night” is a villanelle, and that a villanelle is a poetic form something like a sonnet. So far, everyone also knows what a sonnet is, which is why I use that as a comparison, even though a villanelle isn’t all that much like a sonnet, in my opinion. They’re both poetic forms, however, with a particular standard number of lines and a particular standard rhyme scheme, so in that sense they certainly are alike.

Oddly enough, I think my early background in the study of poetic form is very much of a piece with my new role here at Crossref as Technical Community Manager for ROR, the Research Organization Registry. Both poetic form and metadata are invisible to most people, but both are valuable infrastructure. Both poetic form and metadata involve generally-accepted practices and standards that differ between different groups of people and change over time. Both writing formal poetry and creating rich metadata can seem burdensome and rigid to some people, but to my mind, both are generative. A solid underlying foundation allows for all kinds of creativity to flourish on the surface.

That might be part of why as soon as I heard about ROR I understood its tremendous potential. As someone who’s worked in digital humanities and scholarly communication for over fifteen years, I’ve long appreciated the value of clean, standard, comprehensive metadata in general. For instance, I explained the origin and value of the Dublin Core metadata standard to many a history scholar in the Omeka workshops I often taught at THATCamp. Later, while overseeing the institutional repository at Virginia Tech University Libraries, I learned even more about both the importance and the difficulty of creating, acquiring, and providing good metadata. When the pandemic began in 2020, I learned more than I ever wanted to know about messy data as Community Lead for The COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic.

Data and metadata are, let’s admit it, very hard to keep clean and consistent as they travel through multiple systems, and that’s why it’s important to regularize as much as we can through automatic means such as APIs that use agreed-upon standards. Scholarship is a network of networks, and common identifiers like DOIs and ORCIDs enable the interchange of information in those networks about scholarly outputs and scholars, and thus they enable scholarship itself. What could be more important than that?

But the organisations that employ, fund, and publish scholarly researchers have had a hard time keeping track of everything “their” researchers have given to the world. That’s the problem that ROR, “a community-led registry of open, sustainable, usable, and unique identifiers for every research organisation in the world,” can help solve. In an ideal world, universities might use ROR IDs to track the research their faculty have produced, certainly, but they might also discover which universities their faculty’s co-authors most often come from. Funders might use ROR IDs to identify the research outputs that have benefited from their funds, certainly, but they might also analyze whether they are funding enough researchers from institutions in rural areas. Publishers might use ROR IDs to offer affiliation searching in their own public interfaces, certainly, but they might also create internal reports on compliance with institution-level transformative Open Access agreements. Once something like ROR is widely adopted, the vision of the Research Nexus becomes closer to reality: “A rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organisations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society.” ROR is all about the “organisations” part of that alluring vision.

If you’re curious about ROR and want to learn more (hey, that rhymes!), you might want to watch the highly informative presentation from September 2021 “Working with ROR as a Crossref Member”, in which you’ll learn several interesting things, including the following:

ROR itself is not an organisation, but an initiative supported jointly by Crossref, DataCite, and the California Digital Library;
Crossref members cited institutional affiliation identifiers as one of their top priorities in 2019, second only to abstracts;
The specifics of how one recent ROR integrator, the open access journal publisher Hindawi, used the ROR API to create a typeahead widget in its manuscript submission system that replaces user-supplied free text with a standard institution name and a ROR ID behind the scenes, helping them to generate useful internal reports about institutional payments; and
Crossref supports the submission of ROR IDs in its XML content registration process and makes ROR IDs available in its API.

I’m also enthusiastically inviting you to get in touch with me if you’d like to learn more about ROR or if you’d like to tell me about your previous experience with ROR. And if you don’t get in touch with me, please be aware that I might well reach out to you – I’m eager to hear what you hope for from ROR, but also what you’re skeptical about. For, after all, I learn by going where I have to go – don’t we all?

Seeing your place in the Research Nexus

Kornelia Korzec — Wed, 22 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Having joined the Crossref team merely a week previously, the mid-year community update on June 14th was a fantastic opportunity to learn about the Research Nexus vision. We explored its building blocks and practical implementation steps within our reach, and within our imagination of the future.

Read on (or watch the recording) for a whistlestop tour of everything – from what on Earth is Research Nexus, through to how it’s taking shape at Crossref, to how you are involved, and finally – to what concerns the community surrounding the vision and how we’re going to address that.

Summary of presentations

Click on image above to access the presentation.

The idea is simple in principle: scholarly records ought to be transparent – available to examine and learn from for all. Much of scientific production and communication these days has a heavy digital footprint so the Nexus is nothing but simply connecting the loose strands, right? Yet, as the scholarly record is a reflection of the continuous progress made by multiple actors within the context of scientific structures and processes, bringing the Nexus to life is a little short of simple.

“What we think of as metadata is expanding, and the notion of ‘record types’ is changing” – said Ginny Hendricks. A great majority of scholarly ‘objects’, whether they are data sets, research articles, monographs, or others, undergo many processes (including review, publication, licensing, correction, derivation) and influence knowledge and practice over time.

Making that progress visible and discoverable will allow for tracing the development of ideas and changes in our thinking over time. Transparency of the complete scholarly records will help to understand the impact of science funding and changing policies. It can support a more robust and comprehensive assessment of research, and contribute to improving integrity within as well as public trust in sciences.

The Research Nexus concept was first introduced by Jennifer Lin in 2017 as “Better research through better metadata”. Important adaptations to the model were needed to break it out of the content-specific schema. Ginny also pointed out that the concept is shared among the scholarly infrastructure community, citing a report from 2015 by OCLC Research on conscious coordination for stewardship of the evolving scholarly record.

Patricia Feeney has given us reasons for optimism in building a robust Nexus. She’s shown areas of greatest growth in metadata reported to Crossref and shared a public roadmap of types of information we’re asked to enable in the future. We’re seeing a true boom of datasets and peer review reports registrations, and the relationship metadata for our records is improving too. At the dawn of defaulting to open references, 44% of records we hold have associated references and that is growing. Provision of the newly enabled affiliation information (ROR IDs) is on the rise, as is the funder information. Some conversations and questions followed highlighting the need for further guidance in these areas.

To make a case for enriching metadata records, Martyn Rittman demonstrated examples of traceability of research influence on realities outside academia. He captured recent examples of data citations and other references present not just between scholarly papers, but also in policy documents and popular media. These allow for greater discoverability of literature – but also show the public influence and impact of the research and the work’s context in our wider society.

While Martyn shared our blue-skies aspiration to streamline Crossref’s APIs to offer insight to all these relationships with a single service, Joe Wass grounded those ambitions in the reality of technical work underway. His team’s attention is divided between three main areas. They continue to maintain and de-bug our existing infrastructure. They are developing self-service solutions for members. Finally, they are mapping and planning improved infrastructure, evaluating technology against the Research Nexus vision.

Bringing it back to the source (of metadata), Rachael Lammey offered a very practical guide to key activities enabling Research Nexus that all members can take on now. She highlighted the benefits of collecting and registering data citations, ROR IDs, and grant funding information. She went on to talk about challenges of subject classification (at a journal level) that our research and development efforts are focusing on at the moment.

Summary of discussions

Publishing has changed dramatically and our members recognise increasing opportunities for transparency of the scholarly record. Breaking the distant vision of Research Nexus down into actionable chunks made it more relatable for call participants. Many reflected on seeing their place in it properly for the first time. Yet, challenges remain and many were brought to the fore in the discussions.

The reliability and usability of the technology for registering metadata with Crossref needs to improve. We need to do better in supporting multi-language and multi-alphabet information. Not just developing systems anew, but also streamline the way content is registered and annotated, and continue to disambiguate the competing identifiers. Different record types, chiefly books, present specific challenges in this regard. Finally, making all that metadata accessible and usable is key to enabling insights from the rich data we collectively make available.

Technology is important, but won’t overcome the barriers that exist in the mindsets. Siloed thinking means that publishers may not be sensitive to benefits that improved relationship metadata could have for colleagues working on assessment, even within the same institutions. Greater guidance or best practices for new identifiers, such as ORCID, ROR, grants, would allow more publishers to get on board with the changes. Researchers often don’t help the cause either – many don’t realise the role and benefits of metadata for their work and are reluctant to provide rich information related to it, perceiving it as a bureaucratic burden.

In a nutshell, I learnt that – while the concept of Research Nexus is pretty complex – we’re all already participating in making it a reality. I’m grateful to the call participants for sharing their challenges and ideas so generously. It means we can work to address those. I’ll be sure to follow-up on requests for support and clearer guidelines about citing data, recording ROR IDs and grants information in the metadata, and we’ll engage our community on complex topics of record updates (corrections, retractions and versions). Be sure to keep in touch with the conversations on the Community Forum. I’ll see you there!

Announcing our new Head of Strategic Initiatives: Dominika Tkaczyk

Geoffrey Bilder — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR

A year ago, we announced that we were putting the “R” back in R&D. That was when Rachael Lammey joined the R&D team as the Head of Strategic Initiatives.

And now, with Rachael assuming the role of Product Director, I’m delighted to announce that Dominika Tkaczyk has agreed to take over Rachael’s role as the Head of Strategic Initiatives. Of course, you might already know her.

We will also immediately start recruiting for a new Principal R&D Developer to work with Esha and Dominika on the R&D team.

What does this mean for R&D?

Before I talk about what Dominika’s move means in practice, I just want to take a moment to thank Rachael for the time she spent working with us. Over the past year, she has injected a massive amount of energy into the group and rebuilt the team’s momentum. This is exactly what we asked her to do.

Rachael’s first task was to repatriate her two R&D colleagues, who we had loaned to work on other urgent projects. Dominika was the technical lead on the port and relaunching of the REST API. Esha was the technical lead for the ROR initiative. In addition, Rachael has been working with Esha, Dominika, Paul Davis, and me on several shorter-term strategic projects that are shaping our overall development strategy.

Exploring and implementing a new approach to building content registration front ends. This approach is schema-driven and bakes in localization and accessibility support from the start. The new approach is currently the basis for the grant registration tool that our Product & Tech teams are now testing with our new funder members.
Exploring and ultimately rejecting a “pull-based” approach to registering metadata, where Crossref would harvest structured metadata from member landing pages instead of asking members to deposit it with us via XML. You are not really doing R&D unless some of your ideas fail. In this case, we quickly discovered that the logistics of crawling our members’ websites, combined with the sparsity of structured metadata in landing pages, made a pull-based approach fragile and impractical.
Exploring the use of ML techniques to fill gaps in the journal classification data that is currently in the REST API. Gaining new data science badges in the process.
Exploring alternative approaches to building community-extendable reporting tools using standard data science tooling and techniques.
Exploring how we can help reduce support toil by using data science tools like notebooks to create new support tools and self-serve UIs for information frequently requested by members that can otherwise prove difficult to get using our existing tools.
Looking at extending the matching technology previously developed by labs to try and better match funder grant-information research outputs.

And this is just a sample of projects Rachael helped promote and prioritize. It is the nature of many of the larger R&D projects that you don’t see the immediate results until long after they’ve been conceived and put into motion. This means that Rachael has been working on some things over the past year that are not yet public.

But, with any luck, we may see some significant new developments in how Crossref collects and distributes information about significant updates to the scholarly record- including retractions and withdrawals. We are also likely to see more work to promote data citation amongst our members. And finally, we are likely to see an attempt to create a community-managed and open research classification taxonomy. Of course, as is the case with research projects, there is no guarantee that any of these nascent ideas/projects will make it into a production service. Still, if even one of them does, it will become as vital a part of open scholarly infrastructure as DOIs, ORCIDs, or ROR IDs are now.

And we will have Rachael and the hard work of the R&D group, important cameos from others, and community input to thank for giving them the initial push to realization. So that’s a pretty good track record for just a year in the R&D group.

Passing the torch

And this is a track record I’m confident that Dominika can match as she takes over Rachael’s role.

Soon after Dominika joined the Crossref R&D team, she started to expand her activities to include more production engineering practice, team leadership, and community outreach. She has also worked extensively with support and outreach- providing them with data science consulting and mentoring in software development. Her new role as the Head of Strategic Initiatives will continue this trend. She will spend less time prototyping software and analyzing data and more time liaising with our members and the broader community to understand their needs and design R&D projects to test approaches to meeting those needs. This means a lot more liaising with other Crossref teams, speaking with our members and the wider community, and participating in working groups and conferences.

It also probably means a lot less programming and analysis. But programming and building prototypes are critical to the R&D team. And so the first thing we will do is start recruiting for a new Principal R&D Developer to continue working along with Esha on conducting experiments and developing POCs.

I’m looking forward to the next year. With Rachael taking the role of Product Director and Dominika taking over as the Head of Strategic Initiatives, we are well-positioned to make profound technical and conceptual improvements to Crossref’s services while simultaneously working with the community to line up our next strategic priorities.

Rethinking staff travel, meetings, and events

Ginny Hendricks — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

As a distributed, global, and community-led organisation, sharing information and listening to our members both online and in person has always been integral to what we do.

For many years Crossref has held both in-person and online meetings and events, which involved a fair amount of travel by our staff, board, and community. This changed drastically in March 2020, when we had to stop traveling and stop having in-person meetings and events. Due to the hard work and creativity of our team and the support of our Ambassadors and Sponsors, we were able to move to exclusively online meetings and events and maintain connections with colleagues, members, and much of the scholarly research community.

Online meetings have benefits compared to in-person ones; they have a much lower carbon footprint, and they can be more inclusive because people don’t have to find the time and money to travel. But there are limitations to online meetings; individual connections made in person do become harder to maintain, and new connections are more difficult to make and grow online. Sometimes just by sitting with someone, meeting their team and drinking their tea, free-flowing conversation leads to real progress.

But with over 17,000 members in 150 countries, our small staff can’t be everywhere, and we need to consider the personal as well as the environmental impacts.

When we started work on the 2022 budget last year, our staff and board took the opportunity to think about our approach, with the goal of not going back to ‘normal’. So we asked ourselves, now that we have a better sense of what works and what doesn’t, how can we make our travel and in-person meetings have a greater impact on our goals, while also traveling less and reducing our impact on the environment?

We decided that in the context of our mission and values, we had to take into account three key areas:

The environment and climate change
Inclusion
Work/life balance.

We developed an updated strategy for in-person and online meetings from 2022 onwards along with a set of recommendations and commitments to reduce our carbon footprint. The commitments were approved by the board at its November 2021 meeting.

Our plan for online and in-person meetings

Online events will generally be aimed at broad groups, in multiple timezones, to inform, update, and test general ideas and assumptions at scale. In contrast, in-person events will be smaller, focusing on deep learning, co-creation, and collaborating through various formats such as workshops, roundtables, or sprints, ideally working toward a specific outcome. These smaller in-person meetings will be scheduled alongside other community events so there will be fewer trips on the whole but each trip more consolidated.

Each in-person meeting will have stated goals such as recruiting and onboarding a new Sponsor, bringing our Ambassadors together to build relationships and share best practices, or getting experts together in a room to help decide important polices, improve some code, or plan new initiatives. At the moment, we are not planning ‘hybrid’ events as we don’t believe they will help meet our goals.

While online meetings and webinars provide a breadth of interactions, in-person meetings can provide greater depth and opportunities for more meaningful engagement and purposeful discussion, and it is this depth that we have missed over the last two and a half years. Therefore, we are identifying focus countries where we plan on engaging more with local community groups. Each country-level engagement plan includes outreach and communications activities and some in-person meetings.

Factors and aims for selecting focus countries

Inclusion is important for us and we are committed to supporting the needs of our community members worldwide. We aim to combine meaningful conversations with informational activities. We want to provide time in the day for technical problem solving and/or a more strategically focused session, both of which have worked well in the past. We hope to learn more about trends in our selected focus countries, including the challenges our members face, local publishing norms, barriers to participation in Crossref, and understand and help to adapt government policies.

We consider a number of factors when selecting countries with which to focus our activities:

Where we have a relatively large number of members.
Where we are seeing an increase in new members joining.
Where we have not undertaken engagement activities in at least 3 years.
Where we have good contacts to collaborate with, i.e., a national funder, a sponsor or ambassador, a government body, or another organisation aligned with our mission.
Where we have very few members but where research output is high according to other sources, in order to understand and overcome barriers to participating in Crossref.
Where we can consolidate multiple engagement activities in one trip, for example run a LIVE (informational) meeting or workshop, develop relationships with a key Sponsor, or discuss national research policy with government representatives.
Where we can coordinate our engagement efforts alongside other local community events.

Our environmental commitments

In line with rethinking how we engage with our members and making sure we do so in the most sustainable, inclusive, and impactful way, we are making the following commitments:

Crossref staff will think strategically and consider environmental, inclusion, and work/life balance issues when they plan travel. We will make the most of in-person events by focusing on those that involve interaction, such as listening and learning from our members and users, deepening relationships, co-creating, and forming new alliances
We will travel less and have fewer face-to-face meetings going forward compared with 2019 as a baseline year. The 2022 travel and events budget was reduced by 40% and set at 60% of the 2019 budget. Travel and in-person events for the first half of 2022 have been limited so we will make this same commitment for 2023 still using 2019 as the baseline.
Crossref will track the carbon footprint of staff travel to meetings and events. We will regularly review the data and find ways to reduce the environmental impact.
Combine stakeholder visits with event trips and vice versa whenever possible (if you do 1 plane trip to a location 1000 miles away instead of 2 trips, you reduce your impact by 0.5t)
As previously planned before the COVID-19 pandemic, the Crossref LIVE Annual Meetings will remain online only and will be held in different time zones. Having them in different time zones will enable global sharing of updates with a lower environmental impact.
Crossref board meetings will be reduced from three in-person meetings per year to one face-to-face and two online meetings per year.
Fewer staff will attend fewer in-person conferences and will combine them with other travel.
For Crossref staff meetings, it is important for our distributed staff to meet face-to-face as a whole organisation and as teams. We will plan for one all-staff in person meeting per year (at which there can also be team meetings). Additional team meetings will be based on the reduced travel and meetings budget. Where possible, team meetings will be combined with other meetings (e.g. conferences or other community events).
While trips that combine meetings may mean longer time away from home, we will still try to avoid staff having to travel or be away on weekends. We will also:
- Avoid short-haul flights (under 2.5 to 3 hours) where trains are available.
- Book hotels within walking distance of the event locations (if safe) in order to reduce taxi use.
- Use public transport and trains (if efficient and safe).
- Select hotels that have good sustainability plans in place, seeking out ‘green’ hotels where (if available and within budget).
- Prioritize locations where the fewest number of staff have to travel or travel the shortest distances.

Reporting

From now on, we will:

Track staff travel incl. the number of trips, miles flown, and the carbon impact.
Estimate the carbon footprint of our two offices, staff home working, our data center, and our cloud infrastructure.
Track all Crossref-hosted events - in-person and online and review annually (what went well, what can be improved, how to further reduce carbon footprint) as part of the budgeting process.

Many organisations are now rethinking how to go about travel, conferences, meetings, and work in general. The pandemic may have been the trigger for a big shift in the ways we work and interact, and not all of it was welcome or should continue; however, sometimes it takes a big event to give us the space to sit back, reflect, and change things for the better going forward. As always, we’ll evaluate these approaches over time.

All of this means we may be declining some in-person meetings (and when we do, please don’t take it personally) but we still look forward to engaging with our community in a purposeful way.

This feels like a good time to give a shout-out to all our Ambassadors and Sponsors around the world who are very important for insight and engagement, and we will continue to partner with them for both online and in-person meetings.

Annual call for board nominations

Lucy Ofiesh — Tue, 31 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The Crossref Nominating Committee is inviting expressions of interest to join the Board of Directors of Crossref for the term starting in March 2023. The committee will gather responses from those interested and create the slate of candidates that our membership will vote on in an election in September.

Expressions of interest will be due Friday, June 24th, 2022.

About the our board elections

The board is elected through the “one member, one vote” policy wherein every member organisation of Crossref has a single vote to elect representatives to the Crossref board. Board terms are for three years, and this year there are five seats open for election.

The board maintains a balance of seats, with eight seats for smaller members and eight seats for larger members (based on total revenue to Crossref). This is in an effort to ensure that the diversity of experiences and perspectives of the scholarly community are represented in decisions made at Crossref.

This year we will elect four of the larger member seats (membership tiers $3,900 and above) and one of the smaller member seats (membership tiers $1,650 and below). You don’t need to specify which seat you are applying for. We will provide that information to the Nominating Committee.

The election takes place online and voting will open in September. Election results will be shared at the annual meeting in October. New members will commence their term in March 2023.

About the Nominating Committee

The Nominating Committee reviews the expressions of interest and selects a slate of candidates for election. The slate put forward will exceed the total number of open seats. The committee considers the statements of interest, organisational size, geography, gender, and experience.

2022 Nominating Committee:

Abel Packer, SciELO, Brazil, chair*
Patrick Alexander, Penn State University Press, US
Nisha Doshi, Cambridge University Press, UK
Marc Hurlbert, Melanoma Research Alliance , US*
Kihong Kim, Korean Council of Science Editors, South Korea*

(*) indicates Crossref board member

What does the committee look for

The committee looks for skills and experience that will complement the rest of the board. Candidates from countries and regions that are not currently reflected on the board are strongly encouraged to apply. Successful candidates often demonstrate a commitment to or understanding of our strategic agenda or the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure; hold positions within their organisations that may be underrepresented on the board currently; and/or have experience with governance or community involvement. The Nominating Committee will also review the member organisation’s participation report.

Who can apply to join the board?

Any active member of Crossref can apply to join the board. Crossref membership is open to organisations that produce content, such as academic presses, commercial publishers, standards organisations, and research funders.

Board roles and responsibilities

Crossref’s services provide central infrastructure to scholarly communications. Crossref’s board helps shape the future of our services, and by extension, impacts the broader scholarly ecosystem. We are looking for board members to contribute their experience and perspective.

The role of the board at Crossref is to provide strategic and financial oversight of the organisation, as well as guidance 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 is representative of our membership base and guides the staff leadership team on trends affecting scholarly communications. The board sets strategic directions for the organisation while also providing oversight into policy changes and implementation. Board members have a fiduciary responsibility to ensure sound operations. Board members do this by attending board meetings, as well as joining more specific board committees.

What is expected of board members?

Board members attend three meetings each year that typically take place in March, July, and November. Meetings have taken place in a variety of international locations and travel support is provided when needed. Following travel restrictions as a result of COVID-19, the board adopted a plan to convene at least one of the board meetings virtually each year and all committee meetings take place virtually. Most board members sit on at least one Crossref committee. Care is taken to accommodate the wide range of timezones in which our board members live.

While individuals apply to join the board, the seat that is elected to the board ultimately belongs to the member organisation. The primary board member also names an alternate who may attend meetings in the event that the primary board member is unable to. There is no personal financial obligation to sit on the board. The member organisation must remain in good standing.

Board members are expected to be comfortable assuming the responsibilities listed above and to prepare and participate in board meeting discussions.

How to apply

Please click here to submit your expression of interest. We ask for a brief statement about how your organisation could enhance the Crossref board and a brief personal statement about your interest and experience with Crossref.

Please contact me with any questions at lofiesh@crossref.org

2022 public data file of more than 134 million metadata records now available

Patrick Polischuk — Fri, 13 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In 2020 we released our first public data file, something we’ve turned into an annual affair supporting our commitment to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI). We’ve just posted the 2022 file, which can now be downloaded via torrent like in years past.

We aim to publish these in the first quarter of each year, though as you may notice, we’re a little behind our intended schedule. The reason for this delay was that we wanted to make critical new metadata fields available, including resource URLs and titles with markup.

Crossref metadata is always openly available via our API. We recommend you use this method to incrementally add new and updated records once you’re up and running with an annual public data file. If you’re interested in more frequent and regular “full-file” downloads, consider subscribing to our Metadata Plus program. Plus subscribers have access to monthly snapshots in JSON and XML formats.

Every year our metadata corpus grows. The 2020 file was 65GB and held 112 million records; 2021 came in at 102GB and 120 million records. This year the file weighs in at 160 GB and contains metadata for 134 million records, or all Crossref records registered up to and including April 30, 2022.

Tips for using the torrent and retrieving incremental updates

Use the torrent if you want all of these records. Everyone is welcome to the metadata, but it will be much faster for you and much easier on our APIs to get so many records in one file. Here are some tips on how to work with the file.
Use the REST API to incrementally add new and updated records once you’ve got the initial file. Here is how to get started (and avoid getting blocked in your enthusiasm to use all this great metadata!).
‘Limited’ and ‘closed’ references are not included in the file or our open APIs. And while bibliographic metadata is generally required, lots of metadata is optional, so that records will vary in quality and completeness.

Questions, comments, and feedback are welcome at support@crossref.org.

Announcing our new Director of Product: Rachael Lammey

Ed Pentz — Thu, 12 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Unfortunately, Bryan Vickery has moved onto pastures new. I would like to thank him for his many contributions at Crossref and we all wish him well.

I’m now pleased to announce that Rachael Lammey will be Crossref’s new Director of Product starting on Monday, May 16th.

Rachael’s skills and experience are perfectly suited for this role. She has been at Crossref since 2012 and has deep knowledge and experience of all things Crossref: our mission; our members; our culture; and our services.

In all her roles at Crossref Rachael has demonstrated how community-focused product development can be done.

Starting as a Product Manager for Similarity Check and Crossmark, she then led community discussions on text and data mining and taxonomies, introduced our support of preprints, and led the very successful ORCID Auto-update integration. She initiated our important partnership with the Public Knowledge Project including scoping and overseeing the joint plugin development work over the years. She helped to grow the Sponsors program, establish the LIVE informational events, oversaw the founding of our ambassador program, engaged more research funders and institutions, and became a go-to person for data citation expertise in our community.

In her brief time in our Research & Development team, she helped to kick off that group’s reinvigoration and has engaged with numerous new community and technical initiatives. Such relationships—together with her knowledge of our systems and API—have enabled her to be a key driver in the development and adoption of ROR and grants - two of the highest strategic priorities of recent years.

Rachael says:

“Alignment in planning and focusing on delivering outcomes will be my initial priorities. I’m conscious that we have a lot in play and I want to support the product team in their existing and ambitious goals while working with the leadership team and our very diverse community to focus and prioritise our development roadmap. I’m really grateful for this opportunity and I am looking forward to working with our members, users, and other open infrastructure organisations in this new capacity”.

Our staff and the board are very enthusiastic about Rachael’s appointment and we know our community will be too. Please join us in congratulating Rachael!

Similarity Check: what’s new with iThenticate v2?

Fabienne Michaud — Tue, 10 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Since we announced last September the launch of a new version of iThenticate, a number of you have upgraded and become familiar with iThenticate v2 and its new and improved features which include:

A faster, more user-friendly and responsive interface
A preprint exclusion filter, giving users the ability to identify content on preprint servers more easily
A new “red flag” feature that signals the detection of hidden text such as text/quotation marks in white font, or suspicious character replacement
A private repository available for browser users, allowing them to compare against their previous submissions to identify duplicate submissions within your organisation
A content portal, helping users check how much of their own research outputs have been successfully indexed, self-diagnose and fix the content that has failed to be indexed in iThenticate.

We’ve received some great feedback from iThenticate v2 users and user testers:

“There are a lot of new and helpful features implemented in version 2 of iThenticate.”

– Beilstein Institut

“The updates to the user interface make working with the new version a pleasure. It has a very modern feel and is easy to use, as an app on a phone. We particularly like being able to click on a link and easily exclude a source from view with just a few clicks. The response time and speed of download are also greatly improved which will cut down processing time on our end.”

– Frontiers

“I like the ability to be able to exclude content directly from the report.”

– American Chemical Society

More information for administrators and users is available on the Turnitin website: iThenticate v2 documentation.

Upgrading to iThenticate v2

In September, we started inviting new and existing Similarity Check subscribers using iThenticate in the browser to upgrade to this new version. And now some of the manuscript submission systems have completed their integrations with the new version of iThenticate too, so users of these systems can start to migrate. Morressier users are already using iThenticate v2, and in the next few days, we will be emailing all eJournalPress users. We know the other major manuscript submission systems are also working on their integrations, and we’ll be in touch with members using them as soon as they confirm they are ready.

Manuscript tracking system integrations

All Similarity Check subscribers using a manuscript management system will particularly appreciate a closer integration with iThenticate v2 which means that users will be able to view their Similarity Report and investigate sources within their manuscript tracking system.

eJournalPress

eJournalPress users will also be able to customise their iThenticate v2 settings via a configuration interface and to decide, for example, to include or exclude bibliographies from their Similarity Reports. The new integration will also show the top five matches returned by iThenticate directly in the eJournalPress interface.

eJournalPress configuration settings in iThenticate v2

Editorial Manager and ScholarOne

Aries (Editorial Manager) and Clarivate (ScholarOne) are planning to release their iThenticate v2 integrations later this year and we will be inviting users to upgrade in the coming months.

Please check our community forum for updates on manuscript tracking system integrations.

More new and improved features

User-friendly PDF report

“The report is clean and easy to read.”

– The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

“The clickable links will save us a considerable amount of time as they make it easy for the author to understand where the overlap is coming from, meaning we do not need to spend time clarifying overlap reports to the authors. The summary page is also very useful as authors and editors are easily able to see which sections have been included and excluded from the report.”

– Frontiers

The PDF version of the Similarity Report has been completely redesigned and can easily be downloaded, emailed and printed. It contains a summary of the report i.e. word count, character count, number of pages, file size, excluded sections, submission, and report dates as well as the similarity score and a list of the top sources with clickable links.

First page of the Similarity Report in iThenticate v2

Summary and clickable links in the new Similarity Report in iThenticate v2

Custom section exclusion filter

In iThenticate v2, users can now exclude sections that are standard such as authors, affiliations, ethics statements, acknowledgments, etc. from the Similarity Report which often impacts similarity scores. You can choose from the templates available and/or create your own custom section exclusions from the admin portal.

Custom section exclusion filter in the iThenticate v2 admin portal

Summary of excluded custom sections on the iThenticate v2 Similarity Report

“The user interface is definitely more responsive than v1, especially when I am looking at the full-text viewing mode, scrolling through the text to compare matches, reading through the box of text in the matching source […] I also especially like the options around excluding, I was able to see our submitted work was also taken into the database and showed matches against the papers we’d uploaded already. Going forward, this is a really interesting thing for us, especially if we are looking at duplicated content in the same journal.”

– Taylor & Francis

User reporting

Details of user activity including folder names, similarity scores, word count, and file format are now also available in iThenticate v2 and downloadable as Excel and csv. files.

Up next

Product development

Further enhancements to existing features and interface such as the view full-text mode, user groups, and custom section exclusions are planned for this year. Paraphrase detection and citation matching are currently in development.

iThenticate v2 training

iThenticate v2 documentation is available from the Turnitin website. Training videos and webinars will be available later on in the year.

✏️ Do get in touch via support@crossref.org if you have any questions about iThenticate v1 or v2 or start a discussion by commenting on this blog post below.

Do you want to be a Crossref Ambassador?

Vanessa Fairhurst — Thu, 14 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A re-cap

We kicked off our Ambassador Program in 2018 after consultation with our members, who told us they wanted greater support and representation in their local regions, time zones, and languages.

We also recognized that our membership has grown and changed dramatically over recent years and that it is likely to continue to do so. We now have over 16,000 members across 140 countries. As we work to understand what’s to come and ensure that we are meeting the needs of such an expansive community, having trusted local contacts we can work closely with is key to ensuring we are more proactive in engaging with new audiences and supporting existing members.

We know that Crossref still remains inaccessible to many around the world, and in line with our strategic goal to engage communities, we want to lower the barriers to participation. Our Ambassadors are essential to us achieving this goal as we look to develop additional content in languages other than English, identify organisations to work closer with to support local research ecosystems, provide more in-person and online events in local time zones and languages, and do more in terms of open support via our community forum.

What are our ambassadors up to now?

We currently have a team of 30 ambassadors, spanning Indonesia, Turkey, Ukraine, India, Bangladesh, Colombia, Mexico, Tanzania, Cameroon, Nigeria, Russia, Brazil, USA, UAE, Australia, China, Malaysia, Mongolia, Singapore, and Taiwan. The program is reviewed annually, welcoming new faces and sometimes sadly saying goodbye to others. This enables us to continue improving how we work together and ensures the Ambassador team remains a diverse group of committed individuals that have the time and support from Crossref to fully participate in the program.

Over the last 3 years, we’ve had some great successes alongside a few challenges, not least of which has been working across 15 countries during a pandemic. We have all experienced the additional personal and professional strain that COVID-19 brought along, including shifts in the way we work and anxieties in the way we go about our lives. Of course, it has also meant that all our interactions have been restricted to Zoom, which has many benefits but doesn’t compare to face-to-face interactions when it comes to building strong working relationships, particularly across language and cultural barriers.

Despite this, our ambassador team helped us run 15 multi-lingual webinars last year, including Content Registration in Arabic, Getting Started with Books in Brazilian Portuguese, and an Introduction to Crossref in Chinese. They also helped us translate various materials and content into other languages, provided feedback on our new developments, took part in beta-testing, provided support to members on our community forum, and participated in calls to contribute to the program’s future.

I love helping people get to know Crossref’s products and services.

I was proud to work as Ambassador and give an online Chinese webinar to introduce Crossref and the services in Oct. 2021.

I am glad to be of help to Spanish speakers who are not able to grasp all the Crossref information correctly because of a language barrier or because they don’t have the time to read and explore all the information available.

Muy contento de poder formar parte como Embajador y con ello poder promover el uso y aprovechamiento de los productos de Crossref.

I feel so blessed meeting with many diverse friends in Crossref ranging from Europe to Asia continents.

Feeling happy by giving back knowledge to my regional community.

The future is ours to co-create

As countries are slowly dropping restrictions and we are taking our first cautious steps into a potential ‘post-pandemic’ world, our Community Engagement and Communication team has been looking at what this means for our activities in 2022 and beyond.

A big part of this is identifying local communities and groups to engage with to learn what challenges our members are facing, what barriers to participation in Crossref still exist, and how we can overcome these together. This practice is also fundamental to our vision of the Research Nexus––a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organisations, people, things, and actions––which can only become a reality if everyone can fully contribute to the scholarly record.

As such, we would like to expand our Ambassador Program and particularly encourage applications from those based in the following countries:

Argentina
Chile
Canada
Croatia
El Salvador
Germany
Ghana

Iraq
Kenya
Nicaragua
Nigeria
Peru
Poland
Vietnam

By being one of our ambassadors, you will become a key part of the Crossref community; our first port of call for updates or to test out new products or services, become well connected to our wide network of members, and work closely with us to make scholarly communications better for all.

If you are interested in participating, please read more on our Ambassadors page. You can submit an application letting us know why you are interested, how you work with Crossref currently, and a bit more about yourself. We will then follow up with you to discuss your ideas and the program in more detail.

The Ambassador Program is quite flexible, so you can choose how and when you contribute based on your comfort levels and other commitments. However, it does come with some minimum requirements of attending two team calls a year, being responsive and letting us know if anything is preventing you from participating, and completing our annual feedback survey so we can continue to improve the program going forward. A good level of English and a firm understanding of our services and systems at Crossref is also a must to participate fully in the program and provide support to others in your local community. If you have just joined Crossref or want to learn more about how to work with us, then the Ambassador program may be too much for you right now, but our documentation has lots of helpful information and step-by-step guides, and you could also look at attending one of our events or joining our community forum.

If you have any questions, you can always contact us at feedback@crossref.org. We look forward to hearing from you!

Amendments to membership terms to open reference distribution and include UK jurisdiction

Ginny Hendricks — Mon, 04 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Tl;dr

Forthcoming amendments to Crossref’s membership terms will include:

Removal of ‘reference distribution preference’ policy: all references in Crossref will be treated as open metadata from 3rd June 2022.
An addition to sanctions jurisdictions: the United Kingdom will be added to sanctions jurisdictions that Crossref needs to comply with.

Sponsors and members have been emailed today with the 60-day notice needed for changes in terms.

Reference distribution preferences

In 2017, when we consolidated our metadata services under Metadata Plus, we made it possible for members to set a preference for the distribution of references to Open, Limited, or Closed. Prior to the 2017 change, we acted as a broker of 1:1 feeds of parts of metadata for parts of our community - clearly a role that was not scalable.

We are well underway to pay back technical debt on our 20-year-old metadata system and effectively rearchitect it. We therefore recently needed to decide whether to rewrite code for a capability that hardly any member was using. Just one member has chosen Closed, and Limited was the default for a while, but the vast majority of our members now prefer Open distribution. Additionally, bringing references in line with other metadata significantly simplifies this work and will speed up the technical development.

The Crossref Board discussed the issue in our meeting on 10th March 2022, and voted to remove the reference distribution policy set in 2017. All board motions go on our website, and the wording of this particular motion is:

Resolve that, based on a technical assessment, we will change the reference distribution policy so that all references registered with Crossref are treated the same as other metadata, following a planned transition.

This motion means that 60 days from today—3rd June 2022—all references in Crossref will be open and after that available through our API. As with all other metadata, if members cannot make references available, or do not want them openly distributed, they can choose not to deposit them. However, depositing references is necessary in order to retrieve citation links from our members-only Cited-by API.

Check the documentation for information on how to deposit references and use Cited-by. Also look up your participation dashboard to see if you are already registering references and your current distribution setting.

Sanctions jurisdictions

Following the UK departing from the European Union, we needed to add the United Kingdom as a separate jurisdiction that we must comply with, alongside the United Nations, the United States of America, and the European Union.

Where there are either relevant financial or governance-based sanctions against individuals, organisations, geographic regions, or whole countries, Crossref is legally bound to comply with these four different jurisdictions. These laws supersede our own governing bylaws.

We have launched a new operations and sustainability section of our website, which includes a sanctions page which we will keep updated with any changes and actions we’re taking.

The specific terms that will change

The complete membership terms are online here. In the text below, any text to be removed is shown in ‘strike-through’ text and any additions are in bold. These new terms will be in effect from 3rd June 2022.

5. Distribution of Metadata by Crossref. Without limiting the provisions of Section 4 above, the Member acknowledges and agrees that~~, subject to the Member’s reference distribution preference,~~all Metadata and Identifiers registered with Crossref are made available for reuse without restriction through (but not limited to) public APIs and search interfaces, which enhances discoverability of Content. Metadata and Identifiers may also be licensed to third party subscribers along with an agreement for Crossref to provide third parties with certain higher levels of support and service. For the avoidance of doubt, the scope of Crossref’s distribution (if any) of a Member’s references is based on such Member’s reference distribution preference, as established by the Member in accordance with the “Reference Distribution” page on the Website.

20. Compliance. Each of the Member and Crossref shall perform under this Agreement in compliance with all laws, rules, and regulations of any jurisdiction which is or may be applicable to its business and activities, including anti-corruption, copyright, privacy, and data protection laws, rules, and regulations.

The Member warrants that neither it nor any of its affiliates, officers, directors, employees, or members is (i) a person whose name appears on the list of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons published by the Office of Foreign Assets Control, U.S. Department of Treasury (“OFAC”), (ii) a department, agency or instrumentality of, or is otherwise controlled by or acting on behalf of, directly or indirectly, any such person; (iii) a department, agency, or instrumentality of the government of a country subject to comprehensive U.S. economic sanctions administered by OFAC; or (iv) is subject to sanctions by the United Nations, the United Kingdom, or the European Union.

As always, please get in touch with us via member@crossref.org with any questions.

With a little help from your Crossref friends: Better metadata

Jennifer Kemp — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We talk so much about more and better metadata that a reasonable question might be: what is Crossref doing to help?

Members and their service partners do the heavy lifting to provide Crossref with metadata and we don’t change what is supplied to us. One reason we don’t is because members can and often do change their records (important note: updated records do not incur fees!). However, we do a fair amount of behind the scenes work to check and report on the metadata as well as to add context and relationships. As a result, some of what you see in the metadata (and some of what you don’t) is facilitated, added or updated by Crossref.

Much of the work is automated but some of it still requires manual intervention (sound familiar?). Here’s an overview:

Before registration

Our open APIs allow for Crossref metadata to be used throughout research and scholarly communications systems and services, before and after records are registered with us. Those who have used a search function in something like a manuscript submission system, rather than having to hand key or copy and paste the information, will appreciate how these integrations reduce time, effort and the likelihood of errors in collecting metadata well before it gets to Crossref.

For one example, it’s very common for members to use the metadata to add DOIs to reference lists when preparing deposits. Of course, new members first need a prefix (and a memberID and name, but more on that later) in order to register content. We also provide a suffix generator for help in constructing DOIs. If you’re not sure how best to make use of existing metadata in deposits, we’ve got a few options for you. Questions are welcome.

We don’t often put it this way but we should: Crossref members rely on the metadata as much, if not more, than the rest of the community. More and better metadata directly benefits our members.

Upon registration

There are a number of ways we work with the metadata when deposits are received.

Checking for uniqueness In order to avoid duplicate records, we check to make sure that a title or work hasn’t been registered before. Depending on what we find, a conflict report or failed registration may result.
Adding DOIs to references When references come to us without DOIs, we’ll try to match and add them.
ORCID auto-update We automatically update authors’ ORCID records (with their permission of course) whenever deposits include their ORCID iDs.
Preprint to VoR reports We compare title information and provide notifications of matching records to members depositing preprints, to help them fulfill their obligation to link to Versions of Record (VoRs), where they exist.
Relationships Like preprint to VoR links, components are another kind of relationship. These might be supplementary material such as figures we can link to the ‘parent’ record.
Funding data When members register only a funder name as part of the information on who funded the work, we’ll try to match it to its identifier from the Funder Registry, to support better linking between funders and works.
Timestamps We add date-times for first created and last updated to member-supplied timestamps.
Count of references That’s right, we count all the references for each record that includes them and add the total to the metadata.

After registration

Once registered, we check, report on and update metadata in a few ways.

Link checking We email each member a monthly Resolution Report with details of the number of failed and successful resolutions for their DOIs. If someone in the community reports a DOI that isn’t registered, we email the member a DOI Error Report.
Citation counts and matches Citation counts for records of members participating in our Cited-by service are openly available in our REST API. The matching citations themselves are available to members, for their own records only.
Title transfers Title, prefix and DOI transfers are common and require assistance from our team.
MemberID It’s not uncommon for members to have more than one prefix. The memberID means users of the REST API can query for records associated with all of a member’s prefixes.
Digital preservation We handle the infrequent but critical update of URLs that are necessary when titles are triggered for digital preservation. We also preserve the metadata itself, with both CLOCKSS and Portico.

Of course, since records are often redeposited with updates (note, deposit fees are only charged once per record), some of these processes on our side are repeated as necessary.

This list isn’t exhaustive and other needs and opportunities will emerge. For example, we are looking at matching to add ROR IDs, as we do for funderIDs, and doing some research into how we might determine and assert subject classifications at the work-level. If you’re interested in more about this kind of work, you’ll want to read this recent post by my Labs colleague Dominika on matching grants to outputs.

Get in touch if you have questions or for more information.

Perspectives: Bruna Erlandsson on scholarly communications in Brazil

Bruna Erlandsson — Mon, 28 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Join us for the first in our Perspectives blog series. In this series of blogs, we will be meeting different members of our diverse, global community at Crossref. We learn more about their lives, how they came to know and work with us, and we hear insights about the scholarly research landscape in their country, challenges they face, and plans for the future.

In our first blog, we meet Bruna Erlandsson, Crossref Ambassador in Brazil, co-owner of Linceu Editorial, and client services manager at ABEC Brasil. Bruna has dedicated her career to scholarly publishing and has worked with Crossref for many years. We invite you to have a read and a listen below to meet Bruna!

<a type="button" style="cursor:pointer;" class="video-language-button" data-videoid="1030565718" data-playerid="video-player-perspectives-bruna-english">Portuguese</a>

<a type="button" style="cursor:pointer;" class="video-language-button" data-videoid="1030565745" data-playerid="video-player-perspectives-bruna-portuguese">English</a>

Tell us a bit about your organisation, your objectives, and your role
Conte-nos um pouco sobre sua organização, seus objetivos e sua função

I am a co-founder of the company Linceu Editorial, dedicated to publishing scientific and technological research in ethical, creative, and innovative ways. We strive to provide quality editorial services that meet standard industry requirements and best practices, increase visibility, attract readers and potential authors, and ensure their work is properly cited. My personal goal is to be recognized by the scientific community for providing excellent service to our clients.

Sou sócia proprietária da empresa Linceu Editorial, que se dedica à editoração de artigos científicos de inúmeras revistas, de forma ética, criativa e inovadora. Buscamos atribuir aos periódicos de nosso portfólio os requisitos de qualidade editorial alinhados às melhores práticas editoriais, de forma que aumentem sua visibilidade e atraiam leitores, potenciais autores e, não menos importante, que recebam citações em seus artigos. Meu objetivo pessoal é obter reconhecimento da comunidade científica por meio de uma prestação de serviço em nível de excelência.

What is one thing that others should know about your country and its research activity?
O que os outros deveriam saber sobre seu país e sua atividade de pesquisa?

Brazil is the South American leader in publishing scientific articles in Open Access journals. However, it faces challenges due to the absence of a more comprehensive public policy to support scientific editors. As a result, most journals are produced by teaching and/or research institutions or scientific associations with volunteer editorial teams that, although lacking professional journal production skills, produce high-quality journals. Only a tiny percentage of Brazilian journals are published through commercial publishers.

O Brasil é o líder sul-americano na publicação de artigos científicos, com destaque para as revistas em acesso aberto. No entanto, enfrenta desafios em função da ausência de uma política pública mais abrangente para apoio aos editores científicos. A maior parte dos periódicos é produzida por instituições de ensino/pesquisa ou Sociedades Científicas, tendo uma equipe editorial voluntária e carecendo de profissionalização em sua produção, embora, em muitos casos, apresentem boa qualidade. Apenas uma pequena porcentagem de periódicos brasileiros é publicada por meio de um publisher comercial.

Are there trends in scholarly communications that are unique to your part of the world?
Existem tendências nas comunicações acadêmicas que são únicas em sua parte do mundo?

I wouldn’t say unique. However, adherence to Open Science practices, such as preprints and making research data available, is already part of the editorial culture. On the other hand, open peer review is not yet well accepted by everyone in the scientific community, and only a few journals adopt it. In addition, in some areas of research, such as Education and Social Science, researchers are very active - on forums, in discussions lists and attending the same conferences - so there’s this feeling that ‘everyone knows everyone’ which can then lead to potential conflicts of interest and apprehensiveness around open peer review, particularly when it comes to publishing a negative review.

Eu não diria única, mas penso que, no Brasil, a adesão às práticas da ciência aberta, como publicação em preprint e disponibilização de dados de pesquisa, já fazem parte da cultura editorial. Por outro lado, a revisão aberta ainda não é bem aceita por toda comunidade científica, sendo poucos os periódicos que o adotam. Além disso, em algumas áreas de conhecimento com grande produção local, como por exemplo a Ciências Sociais e Educação, a interação entre membros da comunidade é muito grande, visto que são pesquisadores muito ativos em fóruns, listas de discussões e conferências da área, causando a sensação de que “todo mundo conhece todo mundo”, resultando em um possível conflito de interesse, visto que existe um grande receio em publicar um parecer aberto, especialmente se o caso for um parecer negativo.

What about any political policies, challenges, or mandates that you have to consider in your work?
E as políticas, desafios ou mandatos políticos que você deve considerar em seu trabalho?

In Latin America we have a large indexing database, Redalyc, and a digital library of Open Access journals, which has recently excluded a number of journals for charging APCs (Article Processing Charges), upon the understanding that this would go against their Diamond Open Access requirement.

However, in Brazil - in general - the understanding of Open Access is not so limited. Charging APCs are in fact encouraged by many as a form of self-sustainability of the journal while still being Open Access.

As for challenges, one of the biggest is whether or not to publish in English. Although the number of Brazilian journals that publish exclusively in English or both languages (Portuguese and English) is remarkably high. There is still however a belief that local science is only of interest to the local public, and so some question whether there is a value in publishing in English (or other languages). For example, if an author writes a research paper about a small riverside community in the countryside of Acre state in Brazil, they might ask why someone outside the country would be interested in reading that.

Aqui na América Latina, temos uma grande base indexadora, Redalyc, e biblioteca digital de periódicos de Acesso Aberto que, recentemente, excluíu da base um número considerável de periódicos que cobrassem qualquer tipo de taxa de publicação, por entender que isso iria contra os requisitos de seu modelo de Acesso Aberto Diamante (periódicos em acesso aberto livre de taxa de publicação).

No entanto, no Brasil, em geral, o entendimento é outro, a cobrança de taxas de processamento não descaracteriza o acesso aberto, sendo, na verdade, encorajado por muitos como uma forma de auto-sustentabilidade do periódico.

Já em relação a desafios, acredito que um dos maiores é a questão de publicar ou não em inglês. Embora seja notável o número de periódicos brasileiros que publicam exclusivamente em inglês ou ainda nos dois idiomas (português e inglês), existe ainda a crença de que a ciência local só teria interesse do público local, criando assim o questionamento se há ou não o valor em publicar em outro idioma. Por exemplo, se uma pesquisa estuda algo sobre uma comunidade ribeirinha no interior do estado do Acre, aqui no Brasil, é comum existir a dúvida se algo tão específico seria do interesse de alguém de fora do nosso país.

How would you describe the value of being part of the Crossref community; what impact has your participation had on your goals?
Como você descreveria o valor de fazer parte da comunidade Crossref; que impacto teve sua participação em seus objetivos?

I get immense value from being part of the Crossref community. Being a Crossref Ambassador brings greater recognition and legitimacy to my role working with editors and adds value to my company’s services as well. The title of Ambassador enhances trust in my opinions, presentations, and when providing support and clarification to those asking questions. However it also comes with a great responsibility to do this well, which motivates me to always keep up to date with developments at Crossref. Through the Ambassador Program I have given several webinars for Crossref and the Associação Brasileira de Editores Científicos (ABEC Brasil), which provide much needed information and support to Portuguese speaking Crossref members as well as enhancing the visibility of my professional activities at Linceu Editorial.

É um valor enorme fazer parte da comunidade Crossref! Ser Embaixadora do Crossref traz um reconhecimento entre os editores e agrega valor aos serviços de minha empresa. Esse título assegura confiabilidade em minhas opiniões, apresentações, e esclarecimentos de dúvidas, o que traz junto uma grande responsabilidade que me motiva a me manter sempre atualizada com tudo em relação ao Crossref. Através do Programa de Embaixadores eu ministrei diversos webinários para a Crossref e também para a Associação Brasileira de Editores Científicos (ABEC Brasil), fornecendo muitas informações necessárias para os membros da Crossref que falam português, e também isso tudo acaba por retornar em visibilidade para as minhas atividades profissionais na Linceu Editorial.

For you, what would be the most important thing Crossref could change (do more of/do better in)?
Para você, qual seria a coisa mais importante que o Crossref poderia mudar (fazer mais/fazer melhor)?

I think there is still a need for more multilingual training both online and face-to-face, which has been particularly lacking during the pandemic, to provide more information on Crossref services beyond Content Registration. For example Similarity Check is a service that people still have a lot of questions about (such as ‘what is the magic similarity percentage score to identify plagiarism?’ Answer - there isn’t one!). Crossmark is another service where I believe people could benefit from more training on it’s importance in the publication process, not only in cases of retraction but also in guaranteeing that the article is up-to-date and trustworthy. In Brazil many people use Open Journal Systems (OJS) and so the development of Crossref service specific plugins and training on how to use them is really useful!

Acho que ainda há necessidade de mais treinamentos multilíngues, tanto online quanto presencial – o que tem sido particularmente escasso durante a pandemia – para fornecer mais informações sobre os serviços do Crossref além do Registro de Conteúdo. Por exemplo, o Similarity Check é um serviço sobre o qual as pessoas ainda têm muitas dúvidas (como ‘qual é a porcentagem de similaridade aceitável para identificar plágio?’ Resposta - não existe!). O Crossmark é outro serviço onde acredito que as pessoas poderiam se beneficiar de mais treinamento sobre sua importância no processo de publicação, não apenas em casos de retratação, mas também para garantir que o artigo esteja sempre atualizado e confiável. No Brasil muitas pessoas usam o Open Journal Systems (OJS) e por isso o desenvolvimento de plugins específicos do serviço Crossref e treinamento sobre como usá-los seriam muito úteis!

Which other organisations do you collaborate with or are pivotal to your work in open science?
Com quais outras organizações você colabora ou é fundamental para o seu trabalho em ciência aberta?

I contribute to ABEC Brasil in a variety of ways including speaking on short courses about Crossref, designing content for lectures as part of an online program called ABEC Educação (which will be launched soon), and as a volunteer consultant to answer a variety of questions from editors regarding content registration at Crossref.

Contribuo com a ABEC Brasil, participando tanto como ministrante de minicursos sobre ferramentas Crossref quanto como conteudista de um curso no Programa EaD ABEC Educação (que será lançado em breve), além de como consultora voluntária para atender a diversas dúvidas de editores em relação a depósito de conteúdo.

What are the post-pandemic challenges you are facing and how are you adapting to them?
Quais são os desafios pós-pandemia que você está enfrentando e como você está se adaptando a eles?

Considering the current situation in Brazil, I don’t think I would consider us having reached ‘post-pandemic’ just yet. Although vaccination is taking place successfully, there are still many uncertainties and fears. A good example of this is Crossref LIVE Brazil which was canceled at the start of the pandemic and at the moment we still don’t know when we will be able to reschedule this. It still feels too risky to bring a number of speakers from abroad to Brazil and too soon to hold such a large in-person event.

However, if I had to highlight one challenge I’ve been facing, it would be something more personal rather than work-related. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, it would be the lack of human contact! It has been really hard to get use to not gathering together with family and friends and not being able to travel, meet new people, and experience new cultures. To deal with it, I spend my free time planning the places I will go to and people I will visit as soon as this whole situation is over!

Para ser honesta, considerando a realidade atual no Brasil, eu ainda não considero o momento atual “pós-pandemia”. Embora a vacinação esteja ocorrendo com sucesso, ainda existem muitas incertezas e medos. Um exemplo bem claro é o Crossref Live in Brazil, que foi cancelado assim que a pandemia foi “anunciada” e, até hoje, não sabemos quando ocorrerá, pois ainda soa muito arriscado trazer palestrantes de fora para o Brasil e também se encontrar com diversas pessoas em um evento presencial.

No entanto, se eu tivesse que destacar um desafio que tenho enfrentado, seria algo mais pessoal e não relacionado ao trabalho. E, sem sombras de dúvidas, seria a falta de contato humano! Está sendo realmente complicado se acostumar em não encontrar amigos e familiares, e também não poder viajar e conhecer novos lugares, pessoas e culturas – o jeito que encontrei para lidar com isso é gastar meu tempo livre planejando todos os lugares que irei e todas as pessoas que visitarei assim que essa situação toda passar.

What are your plans for the future?
Quais são seus planos para o futuro?

My plans for the future include continuously learning more and more about scholarly publishing including the various services that Crossref provides. I want to be able to help publishers implement valuable tools into their workflows such as Similarity Check and Crossmark, and contribute to greater scientific dissemination of Brazilian research so that Brazilian journals can get the global recognition, visibility and value they deserve.

Meus planos para o futuro incluem aprender cada vez mais e mais sobre publicação científica, incluindo os vários serviços que o Crossref oferece. Quero poder ajudar os editores a implementar ferramentas valiosas em seus fluxos de trabalho, como Similarity Check e Crossmark, e contribuir para uma maior divulgação científica das pesquisas brasileiras para que os periódicos brasileiros possam obter o reconhecimento global, visibilidade e valor que merecem.

Thank you, Bruna!
Obrigado, Bruna!

Outage of March 24, 2022

Geoffrey Bilder — Thu, 24 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

So here I am, apologizing again. Have I mentioned that I hate computers?

We had a large data center outage. It lasted 17 hours. It meant that pretty much all Crossref services were unavailable - our main website, our content registration system, our reports, our APIs. 17 hours was a long time for us - but it was also an inconvenient time for numerous members, service providers, integrators, and users. We apologise for this.

Like the outage last October, the issue was related to the data center that we are trying to leave. However, unlike last time, our single nearby network admin wasn’t in surgery at the time. Tim was alerted in the early hours of his morning and was able get up and immediately investigate.

Despite having both secondary and tertiary backup connections, neither activated appropriately.

The problem was with incomplete BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) settings on our primary connection’s network provider’s side. We never noticed this because our backup connection had the correct and complete BGP settings. But our backup circuit went down (we don’t know why yet), and when the router with complete settings went down, only the router with the incomplete settings was available and so everything went down.

We hadn’t yet fully configured the tertiary connection to cut over automatically. This meant cutting over to the tertiary during the outage would have required manual and potentially error-prone reconfiguration. Not something we wanted to do in a hurry with a sleep-deprived network admin.

It’s not an excuse at all. But we are currently down two people in our infrastructure group. One of our infrastructure staff recently left for a startup, and we are already hiring a new third position. In short, our one-long-suffering sysadmin had to field this all by himself. But hey - we are hiring a Head of Infrastructure, and if you are interested you can now see the work you’d have cut out for you!

So things are back up and we’ve resolved the incident but we are carefully and cautiously monitoring. We will further analyze what went wrong and post an update when we have a clearer picture.

I apologize for the downstream pain this outage will have inevitably caused. We realize that many people will now be scrambling to clean things up after this lengthy outage.

More when I have it… but for now I’ll mostly be curled up in a ball.

Announcing the ROR Sustaining Supporters program

Ed Pentz — Wed, 23 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In collaboration with California Digital Library and DataCite, Crossref guides the operations of the Research Organization Registry (ROR). ROR is community-driven and has an independent sustainability plan involving grants, donations, and in-kind support from our staff.

ROR is a vital component of the Research Nexus, our vision of a fully connected open research ecosystem. It helps people identify, connect, and analyze the affiliations of those contributing to, producing, and publishing all kinds of research objects. Crossref added support for ROR to its schema and REST API in 2021 and we are asking Crossref members to use ROR IDs for author affiliations in the metadata they deposit with Crossref. But this post is about how the Crossref community can support ROR in another way.

All three lead organisations—as well as the ROR initiative—have publicly committed to the POSI Principles and we know that our diverse and global community is increasingly interested in showing its support for open scholarly infrastructure too. Now there’s an opportunity to show that support; the following blog by Maria Gould, cross-posted from the ROR blog, explains how.

ROR begins a new round of community fundraising

Since ROR launched in 2019, we have been charting a path to sustainability that leverages our broad community network and diversifies our funding sources. ROR is currently funded through a combination of in-kind support from its three operating organisations, project-based grant funds, and financial contributions from community members.

While ROR aims to minimize overhead and contain costs, it still requires resources to build and maintain the registry’s infrastructure, especially as adoption continues to grow. ROR has been working to establish independent revenue streams that complement ROR’s in-kind support, avoid dependence on grant funds, and ensure the registry data remains openly available.

This year, ROR is initiating a new round of community fundraising. Building on the community fundraising campaign we ran during 2019-2021, we are renewing a call for organisations to commit to supporting ROR financially. We are launching a Sustaining Supporters program that opens up new ways for organisations to participate in the collective funding of ROR.

ROR Sustaining Supporters program

With the Sustaining Supporters program, organisations are encouraged to support ROR’s operating expenses on a recurring annual basis. Any organisation that signs up to support ROR through the end of 2022 will be recognized as a Founding Supporter and receive a supporter badge that can be displayed on their website.

We want to make the process of contributing to ROR as easy as possible. To ensure this is the case, organisations can support ROR at any amount that works for their budget and capacity. Also, to simplify the invoicing process, organisations that are already members of Crossref or DataCite can choose to receive an invoice directly from Crossref and DataCite for their ROR contributions. However, if organisations prefer, they can also be invoiced directly from ROR.

Why support ROR

ROR aims to be an example of the power and potential of community-funded open infrastructure. ROR is committed to providing open, stakeholder-governed infrastructure for research organisation identifiers and associated metadata. Implementation of ROR IDs in scholarly infrastructure and metadata enables more efficient discovery and tracking of research outputs across institutions and funding bodies.

The Sustaining Supporters program is the next step in ROR’s sustainability journey. ROR is continuing to explore future potential paid service tiers designed for those organisations and companies that rely heavily on our infrastructure, which would complement the supporters program. However, rest assured that any paid services will not impact the availability of ROR data or our commitment to supporting our community, in line with our commitment to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI).

We’ve all seen key infrastructure components disappear, be enclosed, or get acquired. We are also realistic about how much effort and cost is involved in sustaining key components of open infrastructure that the scholarly community depends on. And we are committed to doing this right. That means not just sustaining core infrastructures, but investing in them so that they can evolve alongside community needs.

ROR is a free resource for the research community. However, this shared infrastructure does require a collective funding approach that can sustain it as a common good.

Join us!

This is an exciting moment to be part of ROR’s growth. Let’s fund open infrastructure together!

If your organisation is interested in supporting ROR and helping to fund open, community-led infrastructure, sign up here.

Follow the money, or how to link grants to research outputs

Dominika Tkaczyk — Tue, 22 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The ecosystem of scholarly metadata is filled with relationships between items of various types: a person authored a paper, a paper cites a book, a funder funded research. Those relationships are absolutely essential: an item without them is missing the most basic context about its structure, origin, and impact. No wonder that finding and exposing such relationships is considered very important by virtually all parties involved. Probably the most famous instance of this problem is finding citation links between research outputs. Lately, another instance has been drawing more and more attention: linking research outputs with grants used as their funding source. How can this be done and how many such links can we observe?

TL;DR

We looked for links between research outputs and grants registered with Crossref.
Grant DOIs alone are not enough for linking research outputs with grants, because the funding information in research outputs typically does not contain grant DOIs (yet). Award numbers alone are also not enough because they are not globally unique.
We used either grant DOIs (if available) or the combination of award number and funder information to match grants to research outputs.
In total, we found 20,834 links between research outputs and registered grants, involving 17,082 research outputs and 3,858 grants (10% of all registered grants)¹.
Erroneous and incomplete metadata, especially involving award numbers, is the main factor that prevents linking research outputs to grants.

Introduction

The ecosystem of scholarly metadata is filled with relationships between items of various types: a person authored a paper, an author works at a university, a paper cites a book, a book contains a chapter, a funder funded research. Those relationships are absolutely essential: an item without them is missing the most basic context about its structure, origin, and impact.

No wonder that finding and exposing relationships between items in the scientific ecosystem is considered very important by virtually all parties involved. Probably the most famous instance of this problem is finding citation links between research outputs. Another, relatively new example, is linking research outputs with grants used as their funding source.

At Crossref, for some time now we have been seeing a steady growth of funder membership and grant registration. We are aware that the possibility of finding relationships between grants and research outputs is a big reason why funders are registering grants with us in the first place. Being able to see which research outputs are being supported by which grants helps reduce the reporting burden on researchers, funders, and institutions alike, especially now with the addition of ROR IDs to help complete the picture. Exposing relationships between research outputs and grants also increases the transparency of funding sources of the research, making it easier to assess and trust scientific findings.

But how can we find those relationships and how many of them can we already observe? Thankfully our REST API, recently equipped with the grant metadata, can help us answer these questions.

The perfect scenario

Imagine a world where the metadata of any scientific output states all relationships with other items existing in the scientific ecosystem, and those related items are always referred to by their persistent identifiers, allowing all this information to be accessed in a fully machine-readable way… Lovely, right?

In the case of citations, in such a perfect world every bibliographic reference has a DOI of the cited item. And in the case of funding information, a scientific paper contains grant DOIs, stating the funded-by relationships between the paper and the grants.

But, as the last two years have painfully taught us all, life is not all rainbows and unicorns.

The reality kicks in

We know that around 71% of bibliographic references are deposited with Crossref without a DOI of the cited item. This means that if we want to establish citation links between items, we need to match the bibliographic references using the provided metadata, which is not a trivial task and can potentially introduce errors.

And the situation with the funding information and grant DOIs is even worse.

Problem #1: our schema does not allow the publishers to attach grant DOIs to research outputs

This issue is 100% on us. Because grant DOIs are relatively new, our deposit schema does not yet allow to specify the grant DOI in the funding information of a research output, even if the publisher wanted to. We are working on changing this.

Interestingly, it looks like persistent identifiers always find a way. Within over 7.4 million research outputs with funding information, we noticed 6 cases where a grant DOI was provided as an award number. For example in 10.1093/nar/gkaa994 we have the following:

funder: [
{
name: "Wellcome Trust",
award: ["10.35802/108758"],
doi-asserted-by: "publisher",
DOI: "10.13039/100010269"
}, ...
]

This may not be 100% correct from the schema perspective, but it is very useful when one is interested in linking grants to research outputs!

But those cases are extremely rare outliers. For the vast majority of the outputs, grant DOIs are not present in the metadata. This means that, just like in the case of bibliographic references, we have to use the metadata to match funding information to grants.

Funding information is typically given as a pair: award number, funder information. Grants contain similar metadata. One might be tempted to use only the award number for linking, as in some cases it can look like a grant identifier.

Let’s consider an example. We want to find all papers funded by grant 10.37807/gbmf7622. The award number is GBMF7622. A simple approach might be to search for items with this award number in Crossref’s REST API, which returns 12 results². However, one of the resulting items is the grant itself³. So excluding that, it seems like there are 12-1=11 research outputs funded by this grant.

Simple and easy, right? Well, think again.

Problem #2: award numbers are not unique

Let’s look at another example grant: 10.25585/60000600. Its award number is 2817 and the funder is the US Department of Energy.

When we search for this award we get 10 results⁴. Like before, one of them is our grant. After examining the remaining 9 we will see that:

3 items have been funded by the Joint Genome Institute, which according to the Funder Registry has been incorporated into Basic Energy Sciences, which is a descendant of the US Department of Energy
2 items have been funded by International Rett Syndrome Foundation from the US
2 items have been funded by Agencia Nacional de Promoción Científica y Tecnológica from Argentina
1 item has been funded by Arak University of Medical Sciences from Iran
1 item has been funded by Shahrekord University also from Iran

So among only 9 items mentioning the same award number we have in fact 5 different grants. Our input grant should probably be linked only to the three items mentioning Joint Genome Institute. The main problem illustrated here is that the award numbers are not globally unique, and thus should not be treated like identifiers.

Indeed, within 38,326 grants registered so far, we have 37,608 distinct award numbers, and among those, there are 716 award numbers, each of which appears in multiple grants. This issue comes in two flavours: conflicts between and within funders.

Between-funder award number conflicts

A conflict between funders is when more than one funder uses the same award number for one of their grants. This is expected - award numbers are assigned by funders internally and are not designed to be a globally unique identifier.

Out of 716 award numbers that appear in multiple grants, 12 are numbers that appear in grants of different funders. For example, there are two grants with the award number 105626:

Systemic MFG-E8 Blockade as Melanoma Therapy funded by Melanoma Research Alliance
Institutional Strategic Support Fund Phase2 FY2014/16 funded by Wellcome Trust

Because of those conflicts, we cannot simply rely on the award numbers for linking grants to research outputs. Instead, we have to use more information to be sure that the links are correctly established.

Within-funder award number conflicts

To our big surprise, it turns out that the majority of the award number conflicts happen not between different funders, but within the grants of a single funder. Out of 716 award numbers that appear in multiple grants, 704 appear in multiple grants of a single funder only. Such situations are not expected and could indicate an error or some other systematic issue with the data.

Interestingly, out of those 704 award numbers, 700 are associated with the US Department of Energy. We’ve followed up with them in order to clarify or resolve this. The US Department of Energy pointed out a fundamental issue with the data model: currently a grant deposited with Crossref has to have at least one funder DOI, and no other way of identifying the associated organisation is allowed. At the same time, some of the facilities that should appear in their grants’ metadata are not funders at all and thus cannot be identified by a funder DOI. In the future, they plan to identify those facilities in their grant metadata by providing ROR IDs.

Because of within-funder award number conflicts, in some cases it might be difficult to distinguish between two grants with the same award number and funder. A solution might be to use additional information or simply not accept any links if a research output cannot be reliably linked to one grant only.

Our linking approach

Based on all those observations, we adopted the following approach:

We iterated over all registered grants, for each we performed the following steps:
- We used award.number:<grant DOI> filter in the REST API to find all items listing a given grant’s DOI as the award number. Because this is based on the grant’s persistent identifier, we recorded those links without any further verification.
- We used the award.number:<grant award number> filter in the REST API to find all items listing grant’s award number in the funding information. Each resulting item was then verified by comparing the funder information in the item to the funder information in the grant. We recorded the link between the grant and the candidate item only if the verification succeeded.
In the final step, we examined all recorded links to make sure that each pair (research output, award number) is linked to at most one grant. Links violating this rule were flagged as not reliable.

We used different techniques to verify the funder information between the research output (item) and the grant, depending on what information is available. Grants always have the funder DOI. The item, however, can have the funder DOI, the funder name, or both.

If the funder DOI was available on both sides, the following rules were used for the funder verification (ordered by decreasing confidence):

Both the item and the grant contain the same funder DOI, for example, 10.35802/089928 and 10.1242/jcs.196758
The funder in the item replaced or was replaced by the funder in the grant (according to the Funder Registry), for example, 10.35802/104848 and 10.1136/medethics-2020-106821
The funder in the paper is an ancestor or a descendant of the funder in the grant (according to the Funder Registry), for example, 10.46936/sthm.proj.2010.40084/60004575 and 10.1016/j.heliyon.2018.e00629

If the funder DOI was not available in the item, the following rules were used for the funder verification (ordered by decreasing confidence):

The funder name in the paper is the same (ignoring the case) as the funder name in the grant, for example, 10.35802/110166 and 10.12688/wellcomeopenres.14645.4
The funder name in the item is the same (ignoring the case) as the name of the funder that replaced/was replaced by the funder in the grant, for example, 10.35802/206194 and 10.1172/jci.insight.96381
The funder name in the item is the same (ignoring the case) as the name of the ancestor/descendant of the funder in the grant, for example, 10.46936/cpbl.proj.2001.2191/60002922 and 10.1109/tkde.2016.2628180

Note that this is in fact very similar to our reference matching approach. In both cases, first we search for candidate items, and then verify the candidates by comparing the metadata. The actual metadata used for the verification varies, because different information is typically given in the bibliographic reference and the funding information.

What we found

This procedure applied to the entire Crossref dataset resulted in 20,846 links between research outputs and grants⁵. Of those, 12 were flagged as unreliable, because they involved more than one grant linked to the same item and award number. The rest of this section focuses on the remaining 20,834 links.

Within the 20,834 links, we have 17,082 research outputs and 3,858 (10.1%) grants.

Here is the breakdown into the verification approaches used:

Verification	#links	%links
The item contains grant DOI - no verification	6	<0.1%
Funder DOIs are the same	8,364	40.1%
Funder DOIs are related with a replaced/was replaced by relationship	3,704	17.8%
Funder DOIs are related with an ancestor/descendant relationship	7,718	37.0%
Funder names are the same	591	2.8%
The name of the funder in the item is the same as the name of the funder that replaced/was replaced by the funder in the grant	364	1.7%
The name of the funder in the item is the same as the name of the ancestor or descendant of the funder in the grant	87	0.4%

In most cases, just using the funder DOIs for the verification was enough. Verifying by the funder name added 1,042 links, which is 5% of all links.

And here are statistics for individual funders. Only funders with at least 10 deposited grants are listed in the table. The table shows the number of detected links, the number of distinct research outputs linked, the total number of outputs mentioning the given funder DOI, and the number of grants.

Funder	#links	#linked research outputs	#total outputs with funder DOI	#grants
Japan Science and Technology Agency	11,922	10,411	25,779	9,383
Wellcome Trust (including both funder DOIs 10.13039/100004440 and 10.13039/100010269)	8,001	6,246	49,492	17,534
James S. McDonnell Foundation	463	457	2,534	557
Melanoma Research Alliance	152	150	894	392
Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research	100	100	838	539
ALS Association	84	78	909	434
U.S. Department of Energy	56	52	97,482	8,462
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation	51	50	5,928	94
American Cancer Society	3	3	7,276	107
Children’s Tumor Foundation	1	1	759	630
American Parkinson Disease Association	0	0	181	12
Neurofibromatosis Therapeutic Acceleration Program	0	0	101	68
International Anesthesia Research Society	0	0	94	34
Australian National Data Service	0	0	92	67

Note that the fourth column reports the total number of outputs registered with Crossref and mentioning the given funder DOI, including grants, journal papers and all other record types.

It is interesting to compare the number of linked research outputs for a given funder with the total number of research outputs mentioning a given funder DOI. In general, for a funder that registers grants, the more research outputs mentioning this funder, the more links we should be able to find.

And for some funders (Japan Science and Technology Agency, Melanoma Research Alliance, Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research, Wellcome Trust, James S. McDonnell Foundation), the number of linked outputs is indeed high, as compared with how many outputs mention the funder in the first place. This suggests our procedure was quite successful in linking outputs funded by these funders, meaning that in general the metadata in their grants and the funding information in the research outputs match.

On the other hand, we have a few funders for which we managed to link only a very small fraction of research outputs. There are several potential explanations here. A simple one is that not all relevant grants have been deposited yet. For example, a funder might be registering new grants only, whereas many research outputs mention older, not yet registered grants. It is also possible that there are systematic differences in how the publishers deposit the funding information in articles and other outputs, and how it is given in grants. Such differences might prevent us from establishing links, contributing to the overall low percentage of linked grants.

The importance of being precise

Here are some examples of existing links that should’ve been found, but were not.

The award number in grant 10.48105/pc.gr.93156 is CTF-2020-01-004. This article: 10.3390/ijms22094716 mentions award number 2020‐01‐004 and the same funder (Children’s Tumor Foundation). It is very probable that this is the same grant, but our procedure expects exactly the same award number, and so the two were not linked.

Paper 10.1128/genomea.00159-18 contains award number 1931 and U.S. Department of Energy as the funder. There are two grants with the same award number and funder: 10.46936/10.25585/60001053 and 10.46936/genr.proj.2000.1931/60002530. It is difficult to choose between them, and these links were marked as unreliable.

These examples could be signs of systematic errors and/or discrepancies that effectively prevent linking of those funders’ grants.

What’s next

In problems such as linking grants to research outputs, there are typically two key ingredients of the success, which at the same time are the main areas of improvement: the quality of the metadata, and the strength of the linking approach.

The metadata could be improved greatly by addressing existing discrepancies between grants and research outputs and allowing (and encouraging!) the publishers to provide grant DOIs in the funding information. Thankfully, we are not alone in those efforts. Both this recent Upstream blog from Alexis-Michel Mugabushaka, and this Scholarly Kitchen post from Robert Harrington call for the development and adoption of grant DOIs in scholarly metadata.

In terms of the linking approach, there are some ideas that could be used to further improve the linking accuracy and completeness:

The verification by funder name could be fuzzy and allow for minor variations like typos or additional words.
Apart from replaced/replaced by and ancestor/descendant, there are other relationships between funders in the Funder Registry: continuation of, incorporates/incorporated into, merged with, renamed as, split into/split from. We could also consider those relationships during the funder validation.
Apart from the funder information, there is other information that could be potentially used for verification, for example, the names of the authors and the investigators, the domain, or keywords.

If you have any questions, do get in touch!

All numbers are as of March 8, 2022 ↩︎
https://api-crossref-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/works?filter=award.number:gbmf7622 ↩︎
https://api-crossref-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/works?filter=award.number:gbmf7622,type:grant ↩︎
https://api-crossref-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/works?filter=award.number:2817 ↩︎
The code and data available here: https://gitlab.com/crossref/labs_data_analyses/-/tree/master/analyses/22-01-26-grants-matching ↩︎

A Registry of Editorial Boards - a new trust signal for scholarly communications?

Fabienne Michaud — Wed, 09 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Background

Perhaps, like us, you’ve noticed that it is not always easy to find information on who is on a journal’s editorial board and, when you do, it is often unclear when it was last updated. The editorial board details might be displayed in multiple places (such as the publisher’s website and the platform where the content is hosted) which may or may not be in sync and retrieving this information for any kind of analysis always requires manually checking and exporting the data from a website (as illustrated by the Open Editors research and its dataset).

For well-established as well as early career researchers, membership of an editorial board demonstrates their contribution to their community, brings prestige, improves (or maintains) their professional profile and often increases their chances of being published.

Whilst most journal websites only give the names of the editors, others possibly add a country, some include affiliations, very few link to a professional profile, an ORCID ID. Even when it’s clear when the editorial board details were updated, it’s hardly ever possible to find past editorial boards information and almost none lists declarations of competing interest.

We hear of instances where a researcher’s name has been listed on the board of a journal without their knowledge or agreement, potentially to deceive other researchers into submitting their manuscripts. Regular reports of impersonation, nepotism, collusion and conflicts of interest have become a cause for concern.

Similarly, recent studies on gender representation and gender and geographical disparity on editorial boards have highlighted the need to do better in this area and provide trusted, reliable and coherent information on editorial board members in order to add transparency, prevent unethical behaviour, maintain trust, promote and support research integrity.

Registry of Editorial Boards

We are proposing the creation of some form of Registry of Editorial Boards to encourage best practice around editorial boards’ information and governance that can easily be accessed and used by the community.

What we have in mind

A Registry of Editorial Boards could be a new trust-signal for Crossref members and details would be included on a member’s Participation Report.

Crossref members would register and maintain this information for their journal titles in a similar way as they currently manage their metadata. Only the owner of the title, or their trusted service provider, would be able to update it. Editors would be linked by ORCID iD and ROR and Crossref would use ‘autoupdate’ to push editorship information to ORCID profiles, saving researchers time. The information would be made available via Crossref’s API.

This new service would introduce more transparency and automation to the editorial process and connect content platforms (i.e. peer review management systems, publishers’ websites, ORCID and other author register systems, ROR, bibliographic databases, etc.) and make available current and historical information on editorial boards including metadata on the editorial boards’ full affiliations.

The benefits for the community

The benefits would be wide-ranging for the different stakeholders in the scholarly communications community, from publishers, researchers, institutions, funders, bibliometricians to librarians including:

providing those involved in the peer review process and research ethics a single, authoritative and up-to-date resource on editorial boards
reducing fraudulent claims to be or to have been on an editorial board of a publication in order to be published or publish others
connecting and automating editorship role updates with e.g. ORCID, ROR, etc.
generating a detailed analysis of the publication practices of editorial board members and their close contacts
assessing any relationships between authors, reviewers and editorial board members for conflict of interest, etc.
supporting researchers responding to a request to join an editorial board, making proactive approaches to a journal or wanting to ensure that an editorial board is representative of its community and assess its levels of diversity and inclusivity
providing increased visibility to researchers, particularly to early career researchers

Your feedback

Before we progress further, we would like to fully understand what the needs of the community are and whether members would be willing and have the capacity to participate and contribute regularly in registering and maintaining details of their editorial boards.

✏️ Please let us know what your thoughts and experience are with editorial boards by completing this brief survey by 31 March 2022.

POSI fan tutte

Geoffrey Bilder — Tue, 08 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Just over a year ago, Crossref announced that our board had adopted the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI).

It was a well-timed announcement, as 2021 yet again showed just how dangerous it is for us to assume that the infrastructure systems we depend on for scholarly research will not disappear altogether or adopt a radically different focus. We adopted POSI to ensure that Crossref would not meet the same fate.

POSI proposes three areas that an Open Infrastructure organisation can address to garner the trust of the broader scholarly community: accountability (governance), funding (sustainability), and protection of community interests (insurance). POSI also proposes a set of concrete commitments that an organisation can make to build community trust in each area. There are 16 such commitments.

In our announcement of Crossref’s adoption of POSI, we made two critical points:

One doesn’t have to meet all the commitments of POSI already to adopt it. For one thing, this would make it impossible for new organisations to adopt POSI. So instead, we should view the adoption of the POSI principles as a “statement of intent” against which stakeholders can measure an organisation’s progress.
That, conversely, meeting all of the POSI principles doesn’t mean an organisation can relax. It is always possible for an organisation to regress on a particular commitment. For example, an emergency expenditure might mean that the organisation no longer maintains a 12-month contingency fund and therefore has to replenish it.

With these two points made, we ended our announcement with a candid self-audit against the principles. We concluded that Crossref was already entirely or partially meeting the requirements of 15 of the 16 POSI commitments. And adopting the 16th commitment would just formalize a direction Crossref had already been heading toward for several years. We also said that we would update our self-audit regularly.

But before we continue with the Crossref POSI audit update, we should talk about the immediate aftermath of our adopting the principles.

Since Crossref adopted POSI, nine other organisations have made the same commitment and conducted similar self-audits. We affectionately call them the “POSI Posse”.

Dryad
ROR
JOSS
OurResearch
OpenCitations
DataCite
OA Switchboard
Sciety
Europe PMC

These organisations represent a critical part of the hidden infrastructure that scholarly research depends on every day. By committing to POSI, they are helping ensure their accountability to the research community. They are also emphasizing that stakeholders must participate in the governance and stewardship of organisations running that infrastructure.

But perhaps most importantly- these ten organisations that have publicly committed to adopting POSI will not suddenly disappear or change priorities without giving the community time to react and, if need be, intervene.

There are also more quotidian advantages to these organisations adopting POSI. Adopting the principles makes it easier for the respective organisations to collaborate to make research infrastructure more effective and efficient. The foundation of effective collaboration is trust. And, so by agreeing that we share basic principles of operation, we virtually eliminate a whole slew of negotiations that typically need to occur before two organisations trust each other enough to collaborate closely on projects.

One of Crossref’s strategic priorities is to “collaborate and partner” with other organisations on improving our open scholarly infrastructure. And the easiest way to collaborate with us is to adhere to the same principles. So we look forward to more scholarly infrastructure organisations adopting POSI in 2022 so that, together, we can make research infrastructure work better.

Establishing this level of trust has already paid significant dividends with the Research Organization Registry (ROR) - a relatively new infrastructure project founded jointly by DataCite, CDL, and Crossref.

Having nine organisations adopt POSI so soon after our announcement was a wonderful feeling. It is hard for us to convey how happy we are about this without gushing.

Here is a picture of me gushing.

But now we have some outstanding business to update our self-audit.

This post is the first of our regular updates on our progress (or regress) on meeting the POSI principles.

TL;DR

We didn’t regress on any commitment. We’ve improved a little bit where we were not meeting the POSI principles, but we have still not met all our POSI commitments.

Area	Commitment	2020	2021
Governance	Coverage across the research enterprise
	Non-discriminatory membership
	Transparent operations
	Cannot lobby
	Living will
	Formal incentives to fulfill mission & wind-down
	Stakeholder-governed
Sustainability	Time-limited funds are used only for time-limited activities
	Goal to generate surplus
	Goal to create a contingency fund to support operations for 12 months
	Mission-consistent revenue generation
	Revenue based on services, not data
Insurance	Available data (within constraints of privacy laws)
	Patent non-assertion
	Open source
	Open data (within constraints of privacy laws)

Details

Stakeholder governance moves from red to yellow

Our only red mark in our POSI self-audit was against the principle of stakeholder governance. Our board did not yet reflect our members’ diversity or the broader stakeholder community. In particular, as funders have become more central to shaping the scholarly communications landscape, it seemed important that Crossref have funder representation in our governance.

So this year, the Crossref nominations committee was charged with proposing a board slate that addressed some of our representational gaps. They did this, and as a direct result, two of the members elected to next year’s board were a funder (Melanoma Research Alliance) and a significant preprint platform (Center for Open Science).

These new additions to our board mark a significant improvement in stakeholder governance, but we can do more. Researchers and research institutions are also substantial Crossref stakeholders. We need to have a better representation of their concerns.

Also, there are still members of the scholarly communications community who depend on Crossref but cannot afford to join it because our fees are too high for them. Since membership is a prerequisite to participation in Crossref governance, we are also placing emphasis on figuring out how to further extend Crossref membership to those who still cannot afford it, through programs like Sponsorship, country-level journal gap analyses work, and a forthcoming fee review. So this is a source of stakeholder governance inequity that may be best handled by our membership & fees committee rather than our nominations committee.

In short, we’ve made progress on our stakeholder governance commitment. Still, we need to do more- so we are updating our adherence to the POSI stakeholder governance principle from red to yellow.

Another place where we have improved things is under the banner of “transparency.” But here, we see one of the shortcomings of the ‘traffic light” representation used in the self-audit. The degree that one meets a commitment falls along a gradient. And this gradient cannot be represented accurately in the ternary classification of red/yellow/green. So while last year we marked ourselves as “green” under the commitment to transparency, over the past year we have become greener. We did this by creating sections on our website that provide further detail on our governance and finances- even including the 990 forms that are required by US tax authorities for non-profits when they submit their taxes. So what do we do here? Make it neon-green? Make it blink?

Sustainability moves from yellow to chartreuse stays yellow

In our first self-audit, we had several yellow marks- places where we were doing OK, but where we needed to make improvements.

The first yellow mark involved one of the principles of “sustainability,” which stipulates that an organisation should have a goal to create a contingency fund to support operations for 12 months. At the time, we had a contingency fund of 9 months. The board instructed the finance committee to develop a plan for meeting the new 12-month goal. To do this, the board decided to create three funds. The first is fairly flexible and holds operating expenses for three months. Staff leadership can use this fund at their discretion to manage cash flow issues and support budgeted expenses. The second fund is the fund that holds operating expenses for 12 months. This fund is board-restricted and is only meant to be used in emergencies to help with substantial changes in our financial position or to, in extremis, fund an orderly wind-down of Crossref’s operations. Furthermore, the board’s investment committee established guidelines for investing our operating and investment surpluses. Any surpluses are first applied to supporting the 3-month fund. Once that funding goal is met, any surpluses are applied to the 12-month fund. And once both the 3-month and 12-month funding goals are met, any further surpluses will be put into another board-restricted fund that can be used to fund new investments or new Crossref initiatives.

But again, the simple yellow mark against this item does not capture this level of detail. We only get to turn it green once we have the 12-month fund in place.

It looks like we will meet the goal in 2022, but it is hard to say exactly when. If we did shades of color- we might make it chartreuse. But nobody wants to see chartreuse. So while we have made significant progress here, our commitment to maintaining a 12-month contingency fund remains yellow until we have reached our goal.

Patent non-assertion stays yellow

The second yellow mark was against our publishing a patent-non-assertion statement. This feels like a missed opportunity because it will be straightforward for us to do, but we have not yet done it. We have never applied for patents, and we don’t intend to start. In short, nothing is blocking us from doing this other than our natural reluctance to have to draft anything that involves lawyers. Our lawyers are very nice people, but everything we have to draft with them makes our eyes glaze over. We need to get this done ASAP in 2022.

Open source remains yellow

The third yellow mark makes me cringe because, as technical director, it is firmly in my bailiwick. We have committed to open-sourcing all of our code. In last year’s self-audit, I predicted that we should be able to open all of our code within 12 to 18 months. I was wrong. That means this commitment remains yellow. And what’s more- it is likely to remain yellow for a year or two. Let me try and explain why.

First, I should note that all new services that we’ve written since 2007 have been released as open-source (under an MIT license). These include our REST API, Crossmark, Metadata Search, and Event Data. You can find all our open-source code on Gitlab.

This leaves us with our “content system” with its legacy code, which handles content registration, OAI-PMH, OpenURL, and XML APIs. This code was originally developed for Crossref by a third party (who I won’t name because they are in no way to blame for our predicament). Crossref only took over the development of the code base internally ~ 2010. But the system has accumulated over twenty years of technical debt and includes many once-common engineering practices that are deprecated (to put it delicately). Additionally, the code is a labyrinth of dependencies on very old libraries under very old licenses.

And although we have spent much of the past two years replacing critical parts of the system’s authentication and authorization code, I am certain that there remain swathes of code that, under scrutiny, would prove a security nightmare.

Now we know that so-called “security through obscurity” is bad practice. Our legacy code base illustrates the point. We had credentials embedded in the code. We had backdoors and application-level root access. We had countless places where we didn’t sanitize input. But the code was private- and so it gave developers a false sense of confidence when they occasionally made these shortcuts in the interest of developing new features more quickly. And in those early days of hyper-growth, we often had to develop things very, very quickly. Technical debt, like any debt, is a tradeoff.

As I said- we’ve cleaned a ton of this stuff up. For example, we’ve replaced our primary authentication system. But this experience has made us better appreciate just how difficult it would be to harden a system this old.

And besides, we are already replacing it - albeit incrementally. We have been extracting and rewriting key components of the old system, and we plan to continue to extract and rewrite until there is nothing left of the old code. All this new code is, naturally, open-source. And it follows modern security practices.

And so we face a difficult choice- do we try and fix code that is hard to fix and that we are replacing anyway- or do we just focus just on replacing the code and making sure the new, open-source code follows modern security best -practices? We’ve chosen to take the latter route. But it does mean this entry will have a yellow circle next to it for a few more years as we replace things.

Open data moves from yellow to green

And this brings us to our final yellow mark- which was next to the principle of open data. The root of the problem is that what we colloquially call “Crossref metadata” is a mix of elements, some of which come from our members, some from third parties, and some from Crossref itself. These elements, in turn, each have different copyright implications.

On top of this, Crossref has terms and conditions for its members and terms and conditions for specific services. These terms and conditions grant Crossref the right to do things with some classes of metadata and not do things with other classes of metadata - regardless of copyright.

The net result is that users can freely use and redistribute any metadata they retrieve via our APIs or in our periodic public data files. But it also means we cannot just slap a CC0 waiver on all the data. Instead, we have to specify exactly what copyright and terms apply to each class of data. We’d never done this in a clear and accessible way, so some of our users were understandably concerned that maybe we were hedging or perhaps the reuse rights were unclear. But we are not hedging; they are clear. They just weren’t documented. And now they are. In human-readable form. And soon-to-be in machine-readable form. So we can move this from yellow to green.

Reflections on the year since our adoption of POSI

When the Crossref board adopted POSI last year, frankly, a few of us were surprised. We never doubted Crossref’s direction as an open infrastructure organisation, but we were not sure that others would see the value in making a public commitment to the principles. We’d heard some people say that they thought adopting them would be seen as “Virtue Signaling.” Which, to be fair, it is. This shouldn’t be surprising or contentious. Our entire scholarly communication system is based on virtue signaling. But, of course, the term “virtue signaling” (with scare quotes) is also sometimes used to insinuate that such signaling is disingenuous and designed primarily for marketing purposes. And that would be a real danger. But the principles were drafted with a built-in safeguard against disingenuous use. The commitments POSI lists are practical things that can be verified by anyone. Is our data open? Does the diversity of our board reflect the diversity of our stakeholders?

So from the start, we knew that the community would be able to hold us to our commitments. And knowing that made it imperative that we develop a mechanism and process for tracking whether we were meeting them. Thus was born the self-audit.

And the self-audit, in turn, has served as a forcing function to ensure that we didn’t just launch a proclamation and then forget about it. We needed to integrate our POSI commitments into all aspects of our day-to-day work. As such, “Live up to POSI” is now a prominent part of Crossref’s Strategic Agenda. POSI has become a fundamental part of our planning and our public product roadmap. POSI has even become a part of our internal staff annual development plans.

Adopting POSI has changed the way we work. It has changed the way the board works. It has changed the way staff works.

And we hope that it is having a similar effect on our fellow POSI Posse.

But how about changing the way POSI works?

Now that Crossref and the nine other members of the POSI Posse have had a year of considering and/or living up to the POSI standards, what would we change? What would we add?

A few themes have started to emerge as we’ve fielded questions from the current POSI Posse and others who have expressed an interest in adopting POSI.

How does POSI apply to non-membership organisations?
Can POSI apply to commercial organisations?
How could POSI be extended to apply to open infrastructure organisations outside of scholarly communication?
How in the hell do you pronounce “POSI?”

We’ve tried to answer some of these questions in the POSI FAQ, but can we update POSI so that we don’t need the FAQ? Or at least so that we can start a new FAQ?

And, critically, if we change POSI, how do we ensure we make it stronger and not weaker? Because, to be candid, some of the questions that we’ve fielded have come from parties concerned that POSI is too restrictive. That, for example, the stipulation that revenue should be based on services and not on data makes for inflexible business models. Yes. It does. Deliberately.

Because one of the biggest barriers to a community being able to fork digital infrastructure is closed (incl. fee-based) data. And one of the fundamental positions of POSI is one the authors learned from open-source communities. This is that these efforts can fail no matter how much care you take to ensure financial sustainability and how much care you take to ensure community-based governance. The ultimate power the open-source community has is to take the code and fork it. This is the insurance policy that helps keep open source projects honest. And we have tried our best to bake this lesson into the POSI principles. We don’t want to weaken POSI. They are, after all, principles.

So in 2022, we look forward to more organisations endorsing POSI. And the current POSI Posse has started a conversation about how we can strengthen the principles and also extend them so that they can more easily be applied to different kinds of organisations and perhaps even in different sectors. A summary of these discussions will be published in the coming weeks.

But how will we open these conversations to the broader community? How will we engage those who have yet to adopt the principles but are interested in doing so? What about those interested but perhaps only if they are adapted in some way?

We already have a mechanism for soliciting feedback, questions, and suggestions concerning POSI. However, it is a relatively primitive system, based on either sending email to one of the POSI Posse or raising a GitLab ticket. It was the best we could do in the short time we had to put together the POSI site. An MVP, if you will. The feedback mechanism served us well over the past year; we engaged with many interested parties and even managed to help nine of them adopt the principles.

But as with all things POSI - there is room for improvement. And so, we hope to have a more user-friendly way to solicit public feedback and hold discussions. This feedback and our own experiences with adopting POSI over the past year will, in turn, inform our efforts at revising POSI to take into account the things we’ve learned since POSI was originally written.

So look out for announcements on the POSI site. And we look forward to another year of expanding the list of POSI adopters and continuing our own POSI progress. If you’re POSI-curious, get in touch with any of the ten POSI adopters to start a conversation about your own path towards truly open infrastructure.

Image integrity: Help us figure out the scale of the problem

Fabienne Michaud — Mon, 07 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Some context

The Similarity Check Advisory Group met a number of times last year to discuss current and emerging originality issues with text-based content. During those meetings, the topic of image integrity was highlighted as an area of growing concern in scholarly communications, particularly in the life sciences.

Over the last few months, we have also read with interest the recommendations for handling image integrity issues by the STM Working Group on Image Alteration and Duplication Detection, followed closely image integrity sleuths such as Elizabeth Bik and have, like many of you, noticed that image manipulation is increasingly given as the reason for retractions.

Image integrity issues are often associated with paper mill activity but can also originate from an individual’s intentional or unintentional unethical behaviour. Currently, such issues with figures and images are being identified manually or by using an image integrity tool, comparing images within the same article and/or the publisher’s past publications only - and we know that this is a source of frustration for the Crossref members we have spoken to.

What next ?

As reported in Nature last December, we believe Crossref is in a unique position to spearhead a cross-publisher solution, similar to what we do for text-based originality checking, as part of our Similarity Check service.

Before we start exploring potential software options, we need your help to understand:

the scale of the issues and whether these are focused on specific disciplines
the type of issues we should prioritise e.g. duplication, beautification, rotation, plagiarism, GAN-generated images/deep-fakes, etc.
what software (if any) members are using or trialling
whether a cross-publisher service with the collective benefit of shared images would be of sufficient interest to the community

✏️ Let us know what your experience and thoughts are on image integrity by completing this survey.

We’re planning to complete our research and share with you the results along with our proposed next steps soon.

Hiccups with credentials in the Test Admin Tool

Isaac Farley — Wed, 26 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR

We inadvertently deleted data in our authentication sandbox that stored member credentials for our Test Admin Tool - test.crossref.org. We’re restoring credentials using our production data, but this will mean that some members have credentials that are out-of-sync. Please contact support@crossref.org if you have issues accessing test.crossref.org.

2025 update

We’re working to scale back our support for the test admin tool. We will continue to support our XML parser for anyone wanting to test their XML. If you’re a service provider and would like to test your integrations, which we will continue to support, you may POST submissions to our test system using https://test-crossref-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/servlet/deposit. You’ll need to email us at support@crossref.org so we can configure an account within the test system before you test your integration.

The details

Earlier today the credentials in our authentication sandbox were inadvertently deleted. This was a mistake on our end that has resulted in those credentials no longer being stored for our members using our Test Admin Tool - test.crossref.org.

To be clear, this error has had no impact on the production Admin Tool - doi.crossref.org - or any member’s access to registering content therein. If you’re a member who registers content with us using our helper tools (e.g., the web deposit form) or OJS, you’re likely unfamiliar with the Test Admin Tool, and this issue will not affect you or your registration of content.

We don’t configure all member accounts for the Test Admin Tool, so, fortunately, this is an issue for the minority of our members. That said, for those members who do use the Test Admin Tool, this is not a trivial problem. And, we’re going to dedicate additional resources across the organisation to ensure it is fixed.

Next steps

We’ve repopulated the credentials in the Test Admin Tool based on our production accounts. It was our best option. While we don’t know your current credentials, our support and membership teams do know that the majority of our members using the Test Admin Tool have historically shared credentials between the Test Admin Tool and our production Admin Tool - doi.crossref.org. That means that many of you will be able to access the Test Admin Tool using those shared credentials; but some of you - who have used different credentials between the two systems - will not.

We also know that for many of you testing submissions is an integral step in your workflow, so we’ve determined this is an all-hands-on-deck situation and our staff, across the organisation, will be assisting members who have issues with access to test.crossref.org. Starting today, we’re actively monitoring submissions to the Test Admin Tool for access errors through Friday, 11 February. We’ll be proactively contacting affected members to reset their passwords. If you encounter problems before we reach out to you, please do contact us at at support@crossref.org and include ‘Accessing Test Admin Tool’ in your subject line.

A ROR-some update to our API

Rachael Lammey — Wed, 19 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier this year, Ginny posted an exciting update on Crossref’s progress with adopting ROR, the Research Organization Registry for affiliations, announcing that we’d started the collection of ROR identifiers in our metadata input schema. 🦁

The capacity to accept ROR IDs to help reliably identify institutions is really important but the real value comes from their open availability alongside the other metadata registered with us, such as for publications like journal articles, book chapters, preprints, and for other objects such as grants. So today’s news is that ROR IDs are now connected in Crossref metadata and openly available via our APIs. 🎉

This means ROR can be used by and within all the tools services that integrate with Crossref APIs to analyse, search, recommend, or evaluate research. It’s an important element of the Research Nexus, our vision of a fully connected open research ecosystem, and helps identify, share, and link the affiliations of those producing and publishing different types of research or receiving grants.

Now that this metadata is available, it helps confer the downstream benefits of ROR for different (and interconnected) groups:

It makes it easier for institutions to find and measure their research output by the articles their researchers have published, or perhaps make it easier to track the grants they’ve received.
Funders need to be able to discover and track the research and researchers they have supported.
Academic librarians need to easily find all of the publications associated with their campus.
Journals need to know where authors are affiliated so they can determine eligibility for institutionally sponsored publishing agreements.
Editors can use more accurate information on author and reviewer institutions during the peer review process, which can help avoid potential conflicts of interest.

Those are just a handful of use cases, which is why disseminating ROR affiliation identifiers via our APIs is so important; it lets others choose to do what they need to with the information, without restriction.

The story so far

A growing number of our members have started to include ROR in the metadata they register with us, so we’re excited to be able to see this via simple API queries.

At the time of writing we can see nearly 4,000 RORs being registered by these 21 members (we’ve removed test accounts). Note that many of these are being baked into metadata being registered for grant records, also recently released and now findable through the REST API:

"Wellcome": 2821,
"Natural Resources Canada/CMSS/Information Management": 277,
"University of Szeged": 139,
"RTI Press": 104,
"American Cancer Society": 103,
"University of Missouri Libraries": 77,
"Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics": 52,
"Boise State University, Albertsons Library": 52,
"Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC)": 52,
"The Neurofibromatosis Therapeutic Acceleration Program": 49,
"Boise State University": 12,
"The ALS Association": 11,
"Children's Tumor Foundation": 9,
"Episteme Health Inc": 3,
"The University of the Witwatersrand": 2,
"Office of Scientific and Technical Information": 2,
"AGH University of Science and Technology Press": 2,
"York University Libraries": 1,
"SZTEPress": 1,
"Masaryk University Press": 1,
"Institut für Germanistik der Universität Szeged": 1,

Our grants schema accommodated ROR first, so it’s the funder members and grant records that dominate the adoption of ROR… so far! But there are a few articles and reports there too already. These record types include ROR in their records:

"Grant": 3047,
"Report": 382,
"Dissertation": 164,
"Journal Article": 140,
"Conference Paper": 22,
"Posted Content": 12,
"Dataset": 7,
"Monograph": 6,
"Book": 3,
"Chapter": 2,
"Proceedings Series": 1,
"Peer Review": 1,
"Journal Issue": 1,
"Book Set": 1,
"Book Series": 1

We can currently see 205 different ROR IDs in Crossref metadata, with the most frequently provided ROR ID being: https://ror.org/02jx3x895, or University College London as it’s also known as.

If you’re a Crossref member keen to assert affiliation identification in your content, our recent webinar, Working with ROR as a Crossref member: what you need to know, covers all the detail.

Interested in using the information? Dig into our REST API documentation and into the API itself, use the polite pool if you can (i.e. identify yourself). There’s also a wealth of information on the ROR support site or being shared among integrators in the growing ROR community.

Join us in doing more with ROR!

2022 on Crossref

Introducing our new Global Equitable Membership (GEM) program

Existing Crossref members in GEM-eligible countries

How funding agencies can meet OSTP (and Open Science) guidance using existing open infrastructure

Infrastructure already exists to support funder goals; it just needs more adoption

What does ‘adoption’ look like? How exactly do funders and other stakeholders work with this infrastructure?

Here is an ideal workflow that funders and publishers can already follow

Suggestions for meeting OSTP and Open Science guidance, point by point

Everybody needs to play their part

Everyone has a part to play, and we must all pull together to prioritize this work.

Better preprint metadata through community participation

What did the community say?

What happens next?

Forming new relationships: contributing to open source

TL;DR

Background and motivations

Enter JSON Schema

Choosing a library

JSON Forms - now with Vuetify

Open source POSItivity

Look out for more

References

ISR part three: Where does Crossref have the most impact on helping the community to assess the trustworthiness of the scholarly record?

Crossref has lots of plans (and lots to do) to improve our role in ISR

1. Collecting better information in better ways

2. Disseminating this information and supporting its downstream use

3. Trying to live up to POSI to underpin this work

ISR part two: How our membership approach helps to preserve the integrity of the scholarly record

Who can become a Crossref member and do we check new applicants?

The importance of keeping barriers to entry low

Equitable participation

Trust signals and the Research Nexus

Helping new members become “good Crossref citizens”

It’s all about preserving the integrity of the scholarly record

Membership revocation due to unpaid invoices

Membership revocation due to sanctions

Membership revocation for cause

More participation for the win

ISR part one: What is our role in preserving the integrity of the scholarly record?

What is “Integrity of the Scholarly Record” (ISR), and how does it feed into Research Integrity?

The scholarly record is about more than just published outputs - it’s also a network of inputs, relationships, and contexts

Where does Crossref fit in? Where do we have the most impact and opportunity?

Crossref and our members aleady help preserve the integrity of the scholarly record in significant ways

Please share your thoughts!

2022 Board Election

The 2022 slate

Tier 1 candidates (electing one seat):

Tier 2 candidates (electing four seats):

Here are the candidates’ organisational and personal statements

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

How can you vote?

Accessibility for Crossref DOI Links: Call for comments on proposed new guidelines

TL;DR

What is changing, when and why

Help us help you

Call for comments - by 1st November

Small changes, big impact

A note on language

Additional resources

Martin Paul Eve is joining our R&D group as a Principal Developer

Flies in your metadata (ointment)

Pagination faux pas

First page marked as 1

In the XML registered

Related REST API query

More on the problem

Other pagination errors

In the XML registered

More on the problem

In the XML registered

More on the problem

Author naming lapses

In the XML registered

Related REST API queries

More on the problem

organisations as authors slip-ups

In the XML registered

Related REST API queries

More on the problem

Null no-nos