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We now have linked clinical trials deposits coming in from five publishers: BioMedCentral, BMJ, Elsevier, National Institute for Health Research and PLOS. It’s still a relatively small pool of metadata - around 4000 DOIs with associated clinical trial numbers - but we’re delighted to see that “threads” of publications are already starting to form.

If you look at this article in The Lancet and click on the Crossmark button you will see that in the Clinical Trials section there are links to three other articles reporting on the same trial: two from the American Heart Journal and one from BMJ’s Heart. Readers can navigate between these four articles in three separate journals using the Crossmark functionality- a new set of links and routes for discovery have appeared.

It’s here. After years of hard work and with a huge cast of characters involved, I am delighted to announce that you will now be able to instantly link to all published articles related to an individual clinical trial through the Crossmark dialogue box. Linked Clinical Trials are here!

In practice, this means that anyone reading an article will be able to pull a list of both clinical trials relating to that article and all other articles related to those clinical trials – be it the protocol, statistical analysis plan, results articles or others – all at the click of a button.

We will shortly be adding a new feature to Crossmark. In a section called “Clinical Trials” we will be using new metadata fields to link together all of the publications we know about that reference a particular clinical trial.

Most medical journals make clinical trial registration a prerequisite for publication. Trials should be registered with one of the fifteen WHO-approved public trial registries , or with clinicaltrials.gov which is run by the US National Library of Medicine. Once registered, a trial is assigned a clinical trial number (CTN) which is subsequently used to identify that trial in any publications that report on it.

We’ve been talking a lot about infrastructure here at Crossref, and how the metadata we gather and organize is the foundation for so many services - those we provide directly - and those services that use our APIs to access that metadata, such as Kudos and CHORUS, which in turn provide the wider world of researchers, administrators, and funders with tailored information and tools.

The initiative formerly known as FundRef 

Together Crossref’s funding data (previously known as FundRef  – we simplified the name)  and the Open Funder Registry, our taxonomy of grant-giving organisations, comprise a hub for gathering and querying metadata related to the questions:

“Who funded this research?” and “Where has the research we funded been published?”

Crossref’s funding data initiative (FundRef) encourages publishers to deposit information about the funding sources of authors’ research as acknowledged in their papers. The funding data comprises funder name and identifier, and grant number or numbers. Funding data can be deposited on its own or with the rest of the metadata for an item of content.