We are pleased to share the 2021 board election slate. Crossref’s Nominating Committee received over 60 submissions from members worldwide to fill five open board seats. It was a fantastic group of applicants and showed the strength of our membership community.
There are five seats open for election (three small, two large), and the Nominating Committee presents the following slate.
Candidate organizations, in alphabetical order, for the Small category (three seats available):
Crossref Similarity Check news: iThenticate v2.0 ready for launch
Last year, we announced the upcoming launch of a new version of iThenticate, the product from Turnitin that powers Crossref Similarity Check. We know some of you have been waiting a long time for this upgrade and we are very happy to share with you that we are now ready to release it.
We will be rolling out this new version in stages, so not everyone will be able to upgrade to the new version immediately. We’ll start with new Crossref Similarity Check subscribers who use iThenticate in the browser, and one member who uses iThenticate via the eJournalPress API integration.
We missed an error that led to resource resolution URLs of some 500,000+ records to be incorrectly updated. We have reverted the incorrect resolution URLs affected by this problem. And, we’re putting in place checks and changes in our processes to ensure this does not happen again.
Our technical support team was contacted in late June by Wiley about updating resolution URLs for their content. It’s a common request of our technical support team, one meant to make the URL update process more efficient, but this was a particularly large request. Shortly thereafter, we were provided with nearly 1,200 separate files by Atypon on behalf of Wiley in order to update the resolution URLs of ~9 million records. We manually spot checked over 50 of these files, because, prior to this issue, our technical support team did not have a mechanism to automatically check for errors. That labor intensive review did not turn up any problems. That is, those 50 samples had no errors with the headers, like were found later.
Crossref Conversations is an audio blog we’re trying out that will cover various topics important to our community. This conversation is between colleagues Anna Tolwinska and Rosa Morais Clark, discussing how we can make research happen faster, with fewer hurdles, and how Crossref can help. Our members have been asking us how Crossref can support open science, and we have a few insights to share. So we invite you to have a listen.
We’ve just added to our input schema the ability to include affiliation information using ROR identifiers. Members who register content using XML can now include ROR IDs, and we’ll add the capability to our manual content registration form, participation reports, and metadata retrieval APIs in the near future. And we are inviting members to a Crossref/ROR webinar on 29th September at 3pm UTC.
We’ve been working on the Research Organization Registry (ROR) as a community initiative for the last few years. Along with the California Digital Library and DataCite, our staff has been involved in setting the strategy, planning governance and sustainability, developing technical infrastructure, hiring/loaning staff, and engaging with people in person and online. In our view, it’s the best current model of a collaborative initiative between like-minded open scholarly infrastructure (OSI) organizations.
UPDATE, 14 October 2021:
We received several excellent proposals in response to this RFP and we’d like to thank everyone involved for their time and enthusiasm.
We are excited to announce the two projects that have been selected, to run through early 2023. Stay tuned!
With or Without: Measuring Impacts of Books Metadata
This project will test the premise that academic books metadata improves discoverability and usage by assessing the impact of book chapter records with DOIs (unique from metadata associated with the entire book) with associated chapter and book attributes. The study aims to prove or disprove its hypothesis and rank metadata attributes by their association with successful content discovery and access. The findings will be considered alongside similar metadata research in order to develop a metadata efficacy framework, which can be used to determine the return on metadata investments by publishers and service providers.
UPDATE, 24 August 2021: All pools have been migrated to the new Elasticsearch-backed API, which already appears to be more stable and performant than the outgoing Solr API. Please report any issues via our Crossref issue repository in Gitlab.
UPDATE, 9 August 2021: The cutovers for the polite and Plus pools are delayed again. We’re still working to ensure acceptable performance and stability before serving responses from the new application and infrastructure. Each cutover is currently delayed by one more week–the polite pool is scheduled for 2021 August 17 and the Plus pool is scheduled for 2021 August 24.
22 June 2021, London, UK and Boston, MA, USA — The future of global open access publishing received a boost today with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and Crossref. The MOU formalizes an already strong partnership between the two organisations and furthers their shared pursuit of an open scholarly communications ecosystem that is inclusive of emerging publishing communities.
Both organisations aim to encourage the dissemination and use of scholarly research using open infrastructure, online technologies, regional and international networks, and community partners - all supporting local institutional capacity and sustainability around the world.
UPDATE August 2, 2021: This work was awarded to Laura Paglione of the Spherical Cow Group.
To date, we have collected around 740 million events from 12 different source since we launched our Event Data service service in 2017. Each event is an online mention of the research associated with a DOI, either via the DOI directly or using the associated URL. However, we know that there is much more out there. Because of this, we would like to explore where we could expand.
We are delighted to announce the formation of a new Advisory Group to support us in improving preprint metadata. Preprints have grown in popularity over the last few years, with increasing focus brought by the need to rapidly disseminate knowledge in the midst of a global pandemic. We have supported metadata deposits for preprints under the record type ‘posted content’ since 2016, and members currently register a total of around 17,000 new preprints metadata records each month.
