Governance on Crossref

Express your interest in joining our Board of Directors

Lucy Ofiesh — Fri, 22 May 2026 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 January 2027. 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 Monday, June 22, 2026

This is an exciting time to join the board, as we have a number of active projects underway. Our focus is on how our community and metadata can contribute to ensuring the integrity of the scholarly record. We are redesigning our content system to better serve the changing needs of our community. We’re broadening our metadata record to capture richer funding and institutional affiliations. We envision a future where the scholarly record prioritizes relationships between research outputs to build a holistic research nexus. The board helps guide this work.

About our board elections

The board is elected through the “one member, one vote” policy wherein every member organization of Crossref has a single vote to elect representatives to the Crossref board. Board terms are for three years, and this year, there are seven 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 an effort to ensure that the scholarly community’s diversity of experiences and perspectives is represented in decisions made at Crossref.

This year, we will elect one large seat (membership tiers $600 and above) and six small member seats (membership tiers $550 and below). You don’t need to specify which seat you are applying for; we will provide that information to the Nominating Committee.

The board election takes place online and will open in September, with results announced at the annual meeting on October 22nd. New members will begin their term in January 2027.

About the Nominating Committee

The Nominating Committee reviews the expressions of interest and selects a slate of candidates for election. This year’s committee includes:

Nick Lindsay*, MIT Press, chair
Oscar Donde*, Pan Africa Science Journal
Shaharima Parvin, East West University
Nicolas Mejia Torres, Universidad de la Sabana
Amanda Ward*, Taylor & Francis

Staff liaison: Lucy Ofiesh, Crossref

(*) indicates Crossref board member

Board roles and responsibilities

Crossref’s services provide a central infrastructure for 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 organization, as well as guidance to the Executive Director and the executive team, with the key responsibilities being:

Setting the strategic direction for the organization;
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 work of the board takes place in board meetings and board committees. Board members attend four meetings each year that typically take place in January, March, July, and November. January, March, and November board meetings are held virtually, and all committee meetings take place virtually. The July meeting is in-person and takes place in a variety of international locations; travel support is provided when needed. Each board member sits on at least one Crossref committee. Care is taken to accommodate the wide range of time zones in which our board members live.

While the expressions of interest are specific to an individual, the seat that is elected to the board belongs to the member organization. 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 organization 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.

Who can apply to join the board?

Any active member of Crossref can apply to join the board. Crossref membership is open to organizations that produce content, such as academic presses, commercial publishers, standards organizations, and research funders. If you’re considering submitting an expression of interest to serve on our Board of Directors, attend our drop-in session on 17 June at 12:00 UTC.

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 not currently reflected on the board are strongly encouraged to apply. Successful candidates often have some or all of these characteristics:

Demonstrate a commitment to or understanding of our strategic agenda or the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure;
Have expertise that may be underrepresented on the board currently;
Hold decision-making positions in their organizations;
Have experience with governance and/or community involvement;
Represent member organizations that are active in the scholarly communications ecosystem;
Demonstrate metadata best practices as shown in the member’s participation report

The committee aims to build a slate that represents a range of professional backgrounds, global diversity, and organizational sizes and types

What does the application evaluation process look like?

Open call for board interest, May 22nd to June 22nd:

Any active member in good standing can apply for a seat on the board. This includes direct members, sponsored members, and GEM members. Sponsoring organisations, service providers, and Metadata Plus subscribers who are not also members are not eligible to sit on the board.

Application review, June through August:

Applications will be reviewed by our Nominating Committee. We also gather internal information about the member organization, such as metadata habits, history with Crossref, any previous experience in Crossref working groups or community initiatives.

Brief interviews with final candidates, August:

The committee will hold brief virtual interviews with the top candidates before finalising the slate of nominations.

Announcement of the slate and election, September:

The committee will announce the final slate of candidates in September and the online election will begin, culminating at the annual meeting at the end of October.

How to apply

Please click here to submit your expression of interest.

The goal of the expressions of interest is to get to know the candidates. We will not use AI tools to evaluate your application. We ask that if you use AI tools to assist in writing your application that you please disclose how you’ve used them. We want to hear your original ideas, but understand the tools may be used to refine and polish your statement, provide support for translation, proofread for grammar, and improve readability.

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

March 2026 board meeting summary

Lucy Ofiesh — Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We’re providing a summary of the board’s March 2026 meeting. At the meeting, the board reviewed progress in our key programs and initiatives, the strategic outlook for 2026, filled a vacancy on the Board, considered an additional legal entity for Crossref, and reviewed our governance structures. The resolutions are available on the dedicated section of our website, which also lists the members of the Board and offers further information about our governance.

Board business

January board minutes

The board voted unanimously to approve the minutes of the January 2026 board meeting.

March board meeting agenda

The board voted unanimously to approve the agenda for the March 2026 meeting. The board then voted to approve the consent agenda, which includes a package of routine board business items.

Vote to appoint a director to a vacated seat

Lisa Schiff of California Digital Library (CDL) stepped down from the board at the end of February, and CDL decided not to name a replacement. The board voted unanimously to take the most recent member election results and appoint Oscar Donde of Pan Africa Science Journal to fill the seat. Oscar will serve out the remaining years on CDL’s term, which is to the end of 2027.

2025 year in review & framing the strategy for 2026

Ed Pentz and Lucy Ofiesh presented a review of 2025, including our financial performance, member participation, and growth of metadata records, connections, and usage. Crossref ended 2025 in a healthy financial position, exceeding revenue by 6% and saving 3% on expenses as compared to the budget. Member participation and statistics on the metadata records are captured in our State of Research Nexus report.

We then turned the discussion to the strategic issues in focus for 2026. Ed discussed the projects in focus for each of the three program groups: Co-creation and Community Trends, Contributing to the Research Nexus, and Open and Sustainable Operations. Details of these programs can be found on the strategic agenda page and public roadmap.

The board discussed the ongoing work of the project known as Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability (RCFS). This multi-year effort, which began in 2023, aims to make our fees more accessible, equitable, and simpler to understand and operate. In January 2026, we rolled out a new, lower membership fee, removed little-used discounts that contributed to fee complexity, extended our GEM program to include zero-fee membership and content registration for 18 additional countries, and introduced a two-year fee waiver on back-year grants. In 2026, we are monitoring the effects of these changes and initiating the review of content registration fees.

We provided an update on community investments we’ve made in line with the use-of-surplus funds framework that the board adopted in November 2025. To date, Crossref has committed USD $447,000 to several organisations and initiatives that share our mission.

Establishing an additional legal entity in Europe

The board discussed the decision to broaden our operations by setting up an entity in Europe, specifically an AISBL (International Non-Profit Association) in Belgium. This entity will sit alongside our existing organization and share the same name, mission, and services. They will be connected through a managed agreement. This will help build organisational resiliency, create the capacity for future operations if needed, and reflect the global nature of our membership.

The board discussed the structure of the entities. The entity will be organized so that it may conduct business in the future in a way that maintains equal governance with the primary entity. Concurrently, the team is reviewing storing a back up of the system in the EU for redundancy purposes. A board discussion ensued, followed by a vote.

The board voted unanimously to approve proceeding with establishing a Crossref AISBL to sit alongside the primary entity and serve the goals described above.

Governance review

Periodically, the board conducts a review of the organization’s stakeholder governance. The board discussed the strengths and areas for improvement in the current board structure and options to adjust it in the future. Discussions were preliminary to scope the review and will continue in more detail at the July board meeting.

There being no other business, the meeting was adjourned.

Introducing board meeting summaries, starting with the January 2026 meeting

Lucy Ofiesh — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In an ongoing effort to make more of our operations transparent, we have decided to start sharing summaries of our board meetings on the blog. We already post our board resolutions, but the summaries will give a bit more information on what the board discusses that may or may not show up on the list of resolutions.

We do observe the Chatham House Rule for our board discussions, so we won’t disclose who says what, and there will still be executive sessions that discuss confidential matters that we can’t share. But those discussions constitute a minority of the time we spend together, so the summaries will cover much of what the board discusses.

Let’s start with our recent meeting in January, which is online and lasts one hour.

Crossref Board of Directors Meeting Executive Summary, January 22nd, 2026

The January meeting is held primarily to conduct board business at the start of the board term.

Board business

The board conducted elections for this year’s board leadership, and approved each of the following positions:

Board Chair: Marin Dacos
Board Treasurer: James Phillpotts
Executive Committee members (3 seats): Rose L’Huillier; Rebecca Wambua; and Aaron Wood
Board Secretary and Assistant Secretary: Lucy Ofiesh, Ed Pentz
Audit Committee Chair: Ashley Towne
Nominating Committee Chair: Nick Lindsay

The board then turned to review and adopt the minutes from the November board meeting, December board meeting, and October executive committee meeting.

The board discussed a proposal to update the financial authorization approval levels, a set of guidelines established by the board to define the limits on the approval of expenses that are part of Crossref’s Financial and Accounting Operating Policies. The board adopted changes to the policy that would bring it in line with the scale of Crossref’s business operations.

Looking ahead to 2026

Ed Pentz gave a brief overview of what the board can expect at the 2026 board meetings and reviewed topics that will be discussed at each meeting.

The board next meets in early March.

Crossref annual report 2025: highlights of a very busy year

Ginny Hendricks — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Crossref Annual Report 2025

Crossref’s 2025 Annual Report — published on the blog with a DOI, rather than as a standalone designed PDF. The post covers the year’s governance, finances, programmes, and community highlights. Registered with DOI 10.64000/hsdpk-8cm70.

Strategists

See where Crossref stands at the end of 2025. The shape of membership, infrastructure, and community across the year, and the direction the organisation is heading into 2026.

Decision-makers

Understand governance, finances, and POSI commitments. Board decisions, financial position, and how Crossref measures up against the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure.

Practitioners

See what shipped, what’s running, and what’s next. Programme updates, service activity, and the practical work members and staff delivered together through 2025.

What the report covers

Membership — growth, geographic distribution, and the makeup of the membership at the end of 2025
Programmes — the year’s work on integrity, equity, and metadata quality
Services and infrastructure — registration and retrieval activity, service uptake, and resilience work
Governance — board composition, member meetings, and committee work
Finances — revenue, expenditure, and the financial position at year end
POSI — the year’s commitment audit against the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure
Community highlights — events, ambassadors, sponsored memberships, and member contributions

Read the report

Read the 2025 Annual Report

Meet the candidates and cast your vote in our 2025 Board elections

Lucy Ofiesh — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

On behalf of the Nominating Committee, I’m pleased to share the slate of candidates for the 2025 board election.

Each year we do an open call for board interest. This year, the Nominating Committee received 51 submissions from members worldwide to fill five open board seats.

We have four large member seats and one small member seat open for election in 2025. We maintain a balanced board of 8 large member seats and 8 small member seats. Size is determined based on the organization’s membership tier (small members fall in the $0-$1,650 tiers and large members in the $3,900 - $50,000 tiers).

We were pleased to see the diversity in candidates, with applicants from 19 countries. The committee was keen to prepare a diverse slate of organization types, individual skills and perspectives, and global representation.

Tier 1, Small member seats (electing one candidate)

Rebecca Wambua, Distance, Open and e-Learning Practitioners’ Association of Kenya
Oscar Donde, Pan Africa Science Journal
Nwachukwu Egbunike, Pan-Atlantic University Press

Tier 2, Large member seats (electing four candidates)

Damian Bird, CABI
Rose L’Huillier, Elsevier
John Sivo, IEEE
Nick Lindsay, The MIT Press
Anjalie Nawaratne, Springer Nature

Please read the candidates’ statements

Every member has a vote

If your organisation is a voting member in good standing as of September 5th, 2025, you are eligible to vote.

The voting contact for your organisation will receive a ballot from eBallot, a third party election platform. You should receive your ballot by Wednesday, September 17th, and you will have until 12:00 UTC on October 22nd to submit your ballot.

The election results will be announced at Crossref2025, our annual online meeting on October 22nd, 2025.

Special thanks to the committee: James Phillpotts of Oxford University Press, Wendy Patterson of Beilstein Institut, Abiodun Falodun of University of Benin, Amanda Ward of Taylor & Francis, and Chaerul Umam of the National Library of Indonesia for the time they dedicated to reviewing the expressions of interest and participating in committee meetings.

If you have any questions about our election process, please contact me

Happy voting!

Our annual open call for expressions of interest to join our board

Lucy Ofiesh — Wed, 14 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Crossref Nominating Committee invites expressions of interest to join the Board of Directors of Crossref for the term starting in January 2026. 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 Monday, June 9th, 2025

This is an exciting time to join the board, as we have a number of active projects underway. Our focus is on how our community and metadata can contribute to ensuring the integrity of the scholarly record. We are redesigning our content system to better serve the changing needs of our community. We’re broadening our metadata record to capture richer funding and institutional affiliations. New board members will be part of on-going discussions about how to make our fees simpler and more equitable. Additionally, we envision a future where the scholarly record prioritizes relationships between research outputs to build a holistic research nexus. The board helps guide this work.

About 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.

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 online election will open in September, with results announced at the annual meeting scheduled for October 22nd. New members will begin their term in January 2026.

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, and experience.

James Phillpotts*, Oxford University Press, committee chair
Abiodun Falodun, University of Benin
Wendy Patterson*, Beilstein Institut
Chaerul Umam, National Library of Indonesia
Amanda Ward*, Taylor & Francis

(*) indicates Crossref board member

Board roles and responsibilities

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 represents of our membership base and guides the staff leadership team on trends affecting scholarly communications.

The work of the board takes place in board meetings and board committees. The board sets strategic directions for the organisation while also providing oversight into policy changes and implementation. Board members join four meetings each year that typically take place in January, March, July, and November. The July meeting is in-person and may take place in a variety of international locations; travel support is provided when needed. January, March, and November board meetings are held virtually, and all committee meetings take place virtually. Each board member should sit on at least one Crossref committee. Care is taken to accommodate the wide range of time zones in which our board members live.

While the expressions of interest are specific to an individual, the seat that is elected to the board 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.

Who can apply to join the board?

What does the committee look for?

Demonstrate a commitment to or understanding of our strategic agenda or the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure
Have expertise that may be underrepresented on the board currently;
Hold decision-making positions in their organisations;
Have experience with governance or community involvement;
Represent member organisations that are active in the scholarly communications ecosystem;
Demonstrate metadata best practices as shown in the member’s participation report

The board is also encouraging Crossref members who are research funders to apply.

What does the application evaluation process look like?

Open call for board interest, May 14 to June 9th: Any active member in good standing can apply for a seat on the board. This includes direct members, sponsored members, and GEM members. Sponsoring organisations, service providers, and Metadata Plus subscribers who are not also members are not eligible to sit on the board.

Application review, June through August: Applications will be reviewed by our Nominating Committee. We also gather internal information about the member organisation, such as metadata habits, history with Crossref, any previous experience in Crossref working groups or community initiatives.

We might also refer to external information to help the committee’s review including LinkedIn profiles or member organisation websites and publications.

Brief interviews with final candidates, August: The committee will hold brief virtual interviews with the top candidates before finalising the slate of nominations.

Announcement of the slate and election, September: The committee will announce the final slate of candidates in September and the online election will begin, culminating at the annual meeting at the end of October.

How to apply

Please click here to submit your expression of interest by Monday, June 9th. 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 voting@crossref.org

A summary of our Annual Meeting

Rosa Morais Clark — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The Crossref2024 annual meeting gathered our community for a packed agenda of updates, demos, and lively discussions on advancing our shared goals. The day was filled with insights and energy, from practical demos of Crossref’s latest API features to community reflections on the Research Nexus initiative and the Board elections.

Our Board elections are always the focal point of the Annual Meeting. We want to start reflecting on the day by congratulating our newly elected board members: Katharina Rieck from Austrian Science Fund (FWF), Lisa Schiff from California Digital Library, Aaron Wood from American Psychological Association, and Amanda Ward from Taylor and Francis, who will officially join (and re-join) in January 2025. Their diverse expertise and perspectives will undoubtedly bring fresh insights to Crossref’s ongoing mission.

The meeting started with a recap of our mission and priorities. Ed Pentz reiterated the Research Nexus vision of increasing transparency of the connections that make up the scholarly record and underpin the research ecosystem.

Crossref is dedicated to openness, community ownership, and a stable, accessible infrastructure that researchers, publishers, funders, and institutions can rely on for the long term. This is demonstrated by Crossref’s commitment to the the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI), which constitute commitments to building a resilient and transparent infrastructure for research—sustainability, community governance, and openness. Ed emphasized how Crossref is aligning with these principles and collaborates with other adopters to reflect and continuously align these with the needs of the scholarly community, with a public consultation on proposed revisions to POSI forthcoming next year.

Ginny Hendricks highlighted key membership and metadata trends. She noted that as of 2024, half of Crossref members are based in Asia. This year, as always in recent years, we saw many new organisations from Indonesia, Turkey, India, and Brazil join us. Removing those fast-growing countries for the chart’s clarity, we can see that some of the next most active countries are Pakistan, Mexico, Spain, Bangladesh, and Ecuador, among others.

There are now ~163 million open metadata records with Crossref DOIs, and Ginny pointed out increases in the registration of preprints, peer-review reports, and grants. In terms of metadata elements, it’s good to see that more publishers recognize the importance of including abstracts and ROR IDs in their metadata records. Also, in line with the community’s concerns about integrity, our members have been enriching their records with direct assertions of retractions.

Then, Ginny went on to report on the progress towards our strategic goals:

Contribute to an environment where the community identifies and co-creates solutions for broad benefit
A sustainable source of complete, open, and global scholarly metadata and relationships
Manage Crossref openly and sustainably, modernizing and making transparent all operations so that we are accountable to the communities that govern us.
Foster a strong team because reliable infrastructure needs committed people who contribute to and realize the vision and thrive in doing it.

Demos

Lena Stoll and Patrick Vale’s session gave members a practical preview of our latest tools.

Patrick started by reflecting on the challenge of making our identifiers useful for people using screen readers (and other assistive technologies). He thanked all who responded to our past consultation on the topic and presented the Crossref DOI Accessibility Enhancer – the browser plug-in initially available for Firefox (and soon also for Chrome). He shared the Gitlab repo for anyone interested in trying it and invited feedback as we’re hoping to iterate on this.

Patrick then went on to talk about our openness to community contributions to Crossref tools, with an example of the recent contribution from CWTS Leiden to our Participation Reports. Thanks to their work, our members can now see the proportion of works they’ve registered that include affiliation information and ROR IDs, alongside the previously available key metadata such as references, abstracts, ORCID iDs, funding information, or Crossmark.

Finally, Lena demonstrated the latest extension of our record management tool that’s just been made available to make manual registration of metadata records for journal articles easier. The new form is flexible and driven by our metadata schema. Importantly for our members, it simplifies the workflow with input validations and automated ISSN matching, and it enables members to register author affiliations with an integrated ROR look-up. We hope this will support our smaller members, who are relying on our helper tools to register their content.

Throughout the session, members were encouraged to use these tools and explore new resources available through Crossref. We believe that by taking advantage of these resources, you can enhance your research and publishing experience, and contribute to the growth and development of the scholarly community.

The discussion about open scholarly infrastructure

The panel on open scholarly infrastructure brought together experts with a wide range of experience in the field. Moderated by Lucy Ofiesh, Crossref’s Chief Operating Officer, the discussion featured six invited speakers who shared their insights on the opportunities and challenges facing the scholarly ecosystem: Ed Pentz, Crossref; Sarah Lippincott, Dryad; Amélie Church, Sorbonne University; Joanna Ball, DOAJ; Ann Li, Airiti; and Richard Bruce Lamptey, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology.

The panel talked about what openness in scholarly infrastructure means, why it’s important, its sustainability, and how to tackle challenges and gaps across the ecosystem. They highlighted frameworks like the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI), the Barcelona Declaration, and the FOREST Framework as key tools for guiding work on governance, sustainability, and equity. The discussion highlighted the need for more collaboration, inclusivity, and practical ways to ensure open infrastructure remains sustainable in the long run.

They also stressed how openness supports research integrity. How transparent systems allow researchers to question methods, verify findings, and preserve data. Amelie Church expanded on this point, underscoring the important role of open infrastructure in addressing challenges to integrity. She explained that such transparency enables the scholarly community to scrutinize research processes, ensuring the quality of outputs and their impact on society. Without openness, researchers face barriers to maintaining trust in their work, making open infrastructure necessary for research integrity and public confidence in science.

“By focusing on accessibility, transparency, and community engagement, open infrastructure can reshape academic and research ecosystems in transformative ways.” ~Richard Bruce Lamptey

Regarding sustainability, Sarah Lippincott stressed the importance of aligning funding models with community needs while addressing governance challenges. She pointed out that while initial funding can launch infrastructure, long-term sustainability requires consistent community investment and robust governance frameworks. This balance, she explained, is essential to ensure equity and transparency.

Collaboration was another important topic. Joanna Ball and Sarah Lippincott shared examples of how pooling expertise and resources—such as in the global support for ROR—can strengthen systems and make them more sustainable. These initiatives show the power of collective efforts in addressing technical and resource barriers. However, inclusivity remains an ongoing challenge.

The panel discussed the ways in which language barriers, resource limitations, and reliance on proprietary systems continue to exclude researchers from underrepresented regions. Ann Li highlighted how addressing these disparities is critical to ensuring the global accessibility of open infrastructure. By fostering inclusive practices, the scholarly community can mitigate biases and build tools that reflect a broader range of research contributions.

”My hope is that open infrastructure can have the resources that it needs to thrive, not just merely survive, and also that open infrastructure communities and organisations look to the value of frameworks that we’ve talked about today to help align themselves and improve their policies and practices, because there’s always room for growth, even in the best, most well-intentioned communities.” ~Sarah Lippincott, Dryad

The panel wrapped up the discussion by expressing optimism for the future of open scholarly infrastructure and emphasized the importance of continued investment, collaboration across organisations, and transparency in operations. The discussion reinforced the idea that open infrastructure provides a strong foundation for research that is equitable, sustainable, and accessible to all.

Updates from our Community

We enjoyed talks from our community about increasing their participation in the Research Nexus by adopting, using and enhancing metadata in different ways. Robbykha Rosalien hosted talks from the EuropePMC, Dutch Research Council, eLife, and CSIRO featured in Session I, and Amanda French hosted CLOCKSS, Sciety, and Redalyc in Session II.

Michael Parkin talked about preprints in Europe PMC. Europe PMC is a database for life science literature and a platform for content-based innovation. They started indexing preprints via Crossref REST API in 2018. Michael presented their work on discoverability of preprints in their database, including reflections on early challenges, as well as the latest efforts in surfacing available community reviews.

Hans de Jonge talked about the Dutch Research Council’s (NWO) dedication to open science, with policies ensuring that publications and data funded by NWO are openly available. They embrace open science principles for their own metadata and is a signatory of the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information. Hans focused on NWO’s recent introduction of Grant IDs through Crossref’s Grant Linking System (GLS). He shared their approach, the motivations behind introducing Grant IDs, and some challenges they faced.

Frederick Atherden explained how eLife, a nonprofit led by scientists, use Crossref’s Grant Linking System to include grant DOIs in their publication metadata. It allows authors to add grant DOIs during submission, and they developed a tool to match grant numbers with DOIs during the proofing process to improve accuracy. Their goal is to follow best practices for metadata, making content easier to find and link to.

Brietta Pike covered how CSIRO is working to improve metadata quality for its journals, making research more discoverable and trustworthy. CSIRO faced challenges like inconsistent XML tagging, outdated systems, and data loss. To address these, they formed a project team, created a clear XML stylesheet, and updated their workflows. Recent progress includes better funding data, clearer license information, and more complete affiliation tagging. These efforts aim to support a more transparent and accessible research environment.

Alicia Wise of CLOCKSS talked about recent collaborations seeking to safeguard our cultural and scholarly heritage over the long term. CLOCKSS, a community-run archive, is dedicated to preserving scholarly content to remain accessible and unchanged for future generations. True preservation requires securely storing content in trusted archives that are actively maintained. A group of librarians and publishers developed a guide to help publishers preserve content, they also established an archival standard for EPUB formats to ensure ebooks can be stored effectively, and launched a pilot project to track preserved books, helping libraries and scholars identify safely stored titles.

Mark Williams from Sciety talked about how Sciety uses Crossref metadata to create detailed preprint histories. By partnering with organisations and communities worldwide, Sciety platform gathers public reviews, highlights, and recommendations on preprinted research, helping researchers evaluate the quality and relevance of new studies. Through linking related preprints and journal articles, Sciety builds a connected view of each research work. Although challenges like inconsistent terminology and identifier gaps persist, these efforts enhance the visibility and credibility of preprints.

Arianna Becerril-García of AmeliCA/Redalyc shared insights on diamond open-access journals in Latin America. Redalyc is an open-access infrastructure that supports journals by providing free services like visibility and production tools. Redalyc has a role in sustaining Latin America’s unique approach to open-access publishing, where most journals are backed by academic institutions and public funds, allowing free access for both readers and authors. Arianna stressed the need to treat these journals as digital public goods and urged the communities they serve to help ensure their long-term sustainability. Despite limited resources and global under-recognition, these journals serve an international research audience, including authors from Europe, Africa, and Asia. Redalyc and other open infrastructures play a key role by offering tools that reduce production co-sts and improve discoverability, all without financial barriers. Noted was how this approach aligns with UNESCO’s open science framework, which promotes inclusivity and addresses long-standing inequalities in scholarly publishing.

Afternoon of more resources and updates from Crossref

After a mid-day break (in Europe), Luis Montilla kicked off the second session with a practical tutorial of Crossref’s REST API. Following his last year’s intro to the Crossref API, this time he offered a step-by-step guide to help attendees maximize the API’s capabilities for metadata retrieval with advice on:

Managing large data requests with pagination and iterations
Incorporating safety mechanisms - to avoid hitting rate limits, Luis recommended adding pauses between requests and sharing example scripts to streamline this.

For those interested in learning more, look at the new Crossref API Learning Hub— a new resource offering guides, scripts, and training materials to simplify complex queries. Please share questions about things you’re not sure about in our community forum, to help guide development of future demos.

Patricia Feeney followed with updates on metadata schema changes. She introduced our recent shift to integrate the Funder Registry with ROR, which allows members to use a single identifier system, simplifying data management by reducing redundancy. Patricia explained that, for now, the current identifiers remain valid, so members won’t need to make immediate changes. She also outlined planned support for version metadata, typed citations, and future plans to expand support for contributor role vocabularies, and invited community participation in a planned multilingual metadata working group.

Next, Kora Korzec offered an update on the progress in our research on Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability and opened up a discussion about the best ways of assessing our members’ size and ability to pay. In light of our ambition to streamline discounts, we also invited suggestions for discounts to support accessibility and fuller participation in the Research Nexus.

As part of the discussion, we’ve learned who was in attendance during the session:

We’ve heard a lot of support for our current GEM program. While it was clear from our poll that publishing revenue is not the most relevant measure of size or capacity for all those present – establishing a good alternative proved challenging. The idea of considering the size of the organisation as its largest entity has been discussed, and important points were raised about budgets in different types of distributed organisations (e.g., on the position of libraries within large universities).

The official Annual Meeting part commenced after the discussion, with a report on the State of Crossref from Lucy Ofiesh, and commenced with our Board election. Lucy highlighted some of the key accomplishments of the year so far, including:

Research for Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability (RCFS)
Integrity of the Scholarly Record (ISR)
Grant Linking System (GLS) reached 5 years
Automated some very manual membership processes
Released new form for journal article record registration
Upgraded Participation Reports to include Affiliations and ROR IDs
Launched a new API Learning Hub
Paused further development of a Relationships API
Migrated to a new open-source database
Schema development - ROR as Funder identifiers
REST API bug fixes and metadata consistency fixes.

Then she reflected on the membership growth––Crossref is now made up of 21,000 organisations from 160 countries. We reviewed our 2024 year-end financial forecast. As we’re bouncing back from COVID-19, our travel expenses have grown this year, and so have the fees for cloud services hosting. These are all as planned and happen in the context of healthy growth, including that from adoption and increased usage of paid services. We’re in a healthy financial position as membership revenue and usage fees, like content registration and Similarity Check document checking fees, continue to grow from the previous year.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for Crossref2024. This year’s meeting showcased our collective dedication to advancing open, accessible research infrastructure and underscored the power of collaboration in building a stronger scholarly community. As we reflect on the rich discussions and insights shared during the event, it’s clear our community is committed to advancing open and sustainable scholarly infrastructure.

Looking ahead, we’ll continue collaborating with members and partners to tackle challenges, expand accessibility, and foster collaboration. A key focus will be enhancing tools and metadata standards to serve the community better. Through innovative solutions and strategic initiatives like the Research Nexus, our collective efforts will make research more connected and accessible for all.

For anyone who couldn’t attend live, recordings are now available on our website. We’re excited to see how the ideas exchanged during this meeting spark progress across the scholarly ecosystem in the coming months.

2024 POSI audit

Lucy Ofiesh — Sat, 07 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Background

The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) provides a set of guidelines for operating open infrastructure in service to the scholarly community. It sets out 16 points to ensure that the infrastructure on which the scholarly and research communities rely is openly governed, sustainable, and replicable. Each POSI adopter regularly reviews progress, conducts periodic audits, and self-reports how they’re working towards each of the principles.

In 2020, Crossref’s board voted to adopt the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure, and we completed our first self-audit. We published our next review in 2022.

The POSI adopters have continued to review the principles, reflecting on the effects of adopting them and providing a revision to the principles in late 2023. We use the revised principles for this latest review.

Key

We use a traffic light system to indicate where we believe we stand against each of the 16 principles. Now with up/down arrows to show any significant movement, and an ‘i’ where there is something of note with narrative.

red indicates we are not fulfilling the principle.
yellow indicates we are making progress towards meeting the principle.
green indicates we are fulfilling the principle.
or means this is a new change, where we’ve moved ‘up’ the traffic lights, in comparison to the previous audit. We would use the same if ‘down’ ever happens too.
or means that something has changed of note and in comparison to the previous audit.

GOVERNANCE

Coverage across the scholarly enterprise
Stakeholder governed
Non-discriminatory participation or membership
Transparent governance
Cannot lobby
Living will
Formal incentives to fulfil mission & wind-down

What’s changed with governance

Stakeholder governed

We’ve been yellow and we’re still yellow, but it has been improving. In the past, we’ve reported that we are working towards this but we’re not there yet because we didn’t have representation on the board from certain types of members, specifically research funders and research institutions. In the incoming 2025 board class, we have both. Six out of our 16 board seats are held by universities, university presses, or libraries. We also look forward to adding a new research funder, the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), to the board in January.

None of this, though, is hardcoded into the structure of the board. We extend an open call for board interest; any active member can apply for consideration. The Nominating Committee prepares a slate with a diverse range of candidates and organisations, and it is then up to the membership to elect board members.

With only 16 board seats and >21,000 members in 160 countries, being fully stakeholder-governed is challenging. Further, there are important contributors to the community that we all rely on who are not eligible for board seats because they are not members, as defined in our by-laws, such as sponsors, service providers, and metadata users.

We don’t consider this principle fulfilled, and that’s a good thing to keep note of; we must keep aspiring to have a broader, more comprehensive representation of our evolving community. The board continues to discuss stakeholder representation.

SUSTAINABILITY

Time-limited funds are used only for time-limited activities
Goal to generate surplus
Goal to create financial reserves
Mission-consistent revenue generation
Revenue based on services, not data

What’s changed with sustainability

Goal to create financial reserves

This was yellow and is now green. In 2023, we met our goal of maintaining a contingency fund of 12 months of operating costs. We also topped up this fund in 2024 to keep pace with our growing operating expenses. The revisions for POSI 1.1 actually removed the specificity of a 12-month timeline, allowing each adopting organisation to set its own goal; in Crossref’s case, 12 months remains appropriate.

INSURANCE

Open source
Open data (within constraints of privacy laws)
Available data (within constraints of privacy laws)
Patent non-assertion

What’s changed with insurance

Open source

This was yellow and still is, but we’re making improvements. In September of this year we migrated our database off of a closed-source solution and onto PostgreSQL. This has improved the performance of the system and is an important step towards paying down technical debt and moving the system fully into the cloud.

Patent non-assertion

This was yellow and is now green. We confirm that we do not hold any patents, and we have a published policy on it that is available for inspection and reuse by anyone in the community.

In summary

These are the main changes of note for our 2024 POSI update. The summary is that we’ve maintained all our greens, and of the four principles that were yellow last time, two have moved to green (financial reserves; patent non-assertion) and two have remained yellow but seen some progress of note (stakeholder governed; open source).

Please let us have any comments or questions; by commenting here it will add a public record of the discussion on our community forum. Here is an image to share, if needed.

We continue to learn from the POSI adopters group—now numbering 23 organisations—and the group will soon share a draft of POSI v2 for community comment. We look forward to the ongoing discussions with this group, and others, to keep improving and holding ourselves to account.

Ed Pentz on building open scholarly infrastructure: a journey of collaboration and diplomacy

Ed Pentz — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Ed Pentz on building open scholarly infrastructure: A journey of collaboration and diplomacy

This article expands on Ed Pentz’s Miles Conrad Award lecture at NISO Plus 2024. Drawing on three decades in scholarly publishing — including 24 years as Crossref’s Executive Director — it explores the collaboration, diplomacy, and key inflection points that shaped open scholarly infrastructure, and reflects on the challenges and opportunities ahead.

Strategists

Understand why collaboration and diplomacy are the foundation of open infrastructure. How inflection points create windows for change — and why patience, trust-building, and non-profit governance are what make those changes stick.

Decision-makers

Learn the principles behind Crossref’s founding and longevity. Why collective action, mission-aligned sustainability, and the right governance model matter more than technology alone — with hard-won lessons from 24 years of building open infrastructure.

Practitioners

Trace the technical and organisational milestones from DOI-X to open metadata. From the first cross-publisher reference linking experiments to POSI, ROR, and fully open metadata for 180 million research outputs.

What this paper covers

Inflection points — the moments that catalysed major change: the World Wide Web, DOI-X, open access, and more
The founding of Crossref — why collective action, not technology alone, was the solution to cross-publisher reference linking
Key lessons — focus on the problem, build trust, develop a sustainability model, and be prepared to compromise
Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) — why governance and sustainability matter as much as technical standards
Diversity, equity, and inclusion — how these principles have shaped Crossref’s culture and the future of open infrastructure
Future challenges — AI, metadata quality, and the evolving landscape of scholarly communication

Read the full paper

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Meet the candidates and vote in our 2024 Board elections

Lucy Ofiesh — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

On behalf of the Nominating Committee, I’m pleased to share the slate of candidates for the 2024 board election.

Each year we do an open call for board interest. This year, the Nominating Committee received 53 submissions from members worldwide to fill four open board seats.

We maintain a balanced board of 8 large member seats and 8 small member seats. Size is determined based on the organisation’s membership tier (small members fall in the $0-$1,650 tiers and large members in the $3,900 - $50,000 tiers). We have two large member seats and two small member seats open for election in 2024.

We were pleased to see the diversity in candidates, with applicants from 24 countries. We also received three applications from research funders, which we specifically identified as a priority in the committee’s remit for this year. The committee was keen to prepare a diverse slate of organisation types, individual skills, and global representation.

The Nominating Committee presents the following slate.

The 2024 slate

Tier 1 candidates (electing two seats):

Katharina Rieck, Austrian Science Fund (FWF)
Lisa Schiff, California Digital Library
Ejaz Khan, Health Services Academy, Pakistan Journal of Public Health
Karthikeyan Ramalingam, MM Publishers

Tier 2 candidates (electing two seats):

Aaron Wood, American Psychological Association
Dan Shanahan, PLOS
Amanda Ward, Taylor and Francis

Please read the candidates’ statements

Every member has a vote

If your organisation is a voting member in good standing as of September 11th, 2024, you are eligible to vote.

The voting contact for your organisation will receive a ballot from eBallot, a third party election platform. You should receive your ballot by Wednesday, September 25th, and you will have until 15:00 UTC on October 29th to submit your ballot.

The election results will be announced at Crossref2024, our anual online meeting on October 29th, 2024.

If you have any questions about our election process, please contact me

Happy voting!

This year's call for expressions of interest to join our board

Lucy Ofiesh — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 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 January 2025. 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 Monday, May 27th, 2024

This is an exciting time to join the board, as we have a number of active projects underway: We are considering resourcing Crossref for a sustainable future and board members will be part of deciding any changes to our fees scheme and overseeing its implementation. We’re focusing on how our community and metadata can contribute to ensuring the integrity of the scholarly record. We’re broadening our metadata record to capture richer funding and institutional affiliations. We’re working towards a future where the scholarly record prioritizes relationships between research outputs to build a holistic research nexus. The board helps guide this work.

About the board elections

This year, we will elect two of the larger member seats (membership tiers $3,900 and above) and two 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 online election will open in September, with results announced at the annual meeting on October 29th, 2024. New members will begin their term in January 2025.

About the Nominating Committee

2024 Nominating Committee

James Phillpotts*, Director of Content Transformation and Standards, Oxford University Press, committee chair
Oscar Donde*, Editor in Chief, Pan Africa Science Journal
Rose L’Huillier*, Senior Vice President Researcher Products, Elsevier
Ivy Mutambanengwe-Matanga, Chief Operating Officer, African Journals Online
Adam Sewell, Chief Technology Officer, IOP Publishing

(*) indicates Crossref board member

What is the committee looking for this year

Demonstrate a commitment to or understanding of our strategic agenda or the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure;
Have expertise that may be underrepresented on the board currently;
Hold senior/director-level positions in their organisations;
Have experience with governance or community involvement;
Represent member organisations that are active in the scholarly communications ecosystem;
Demonstrate metadata best practices as shown in the member’s participation report

The board is also encouraging Crossref members who are research funders to apply.

Board roles and responsibilities

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. They do this by attending board meetings as well as joining more specific board committees.

Who can apply to join the board?

What is expected of board members?

Board members attend four meetings each year that typically take place in January, March, July, and November. Meetings have taken place in a variety of international locations and travel support is provided when needed. January, March, and November board meetings are held virtually, and all committee meetings take place virtually. Each board member should sit on at least one Crossref committee. Care is taken to accommodate the wide range of time zones in which our board members live.

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 our board and a brief personal statement about your interest and experience with Crossref.

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

2023 board election slate

Lucy Ofiesh — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’m pleased to share the 2023 board election slate. Crossref’s Nominating Committee received 87 submissions from members worldwide to fill seven 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 two large member seats and five small member seats open for election in 2023.

The Nominating Committee presents the following slate.

The 2023 slate

Tier 1 candidates (electing five seats):

Beilstein-Institut, Wendy Patterson
Korean Council of Science Editors, Kihong Kim
Lujosh Ventures Limited, Olu Joshua
NISC Ltd, Mike Schramm
OpenEdition, Marin Dacos
Universidad Autónoma de Chile, Dr. Ivan Suazo
Vilnius University, Vincas Grigas

Tier 2 candidates (electing two seats):

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Scott Delman
Oxford University Press, James Phillpotts
Public Library of Science (PLOS), Dan Shanahan
University of Chicago Press, Ashley Towne

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 10th, 2023, you are eligible to vote when voting opens on September 27th, 2023.

How can you vote?

Your organisation’s designated voting contact will receive an email from eBallot the week of September 25th with the Formal Notice of Meeting and Proxy Form with concise instructions on how to vote. The email will include a username and password with a link to our voting platform.

The election results will be announced at the LIVE23 online meeting on October 31st, 2023. Save the date! Incoming members will take their seats at the March 2024 board meeting.

Our annual call for board nominations

Lucy Ofiesh — Tue, 30 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Crossref Nominating Committee invites expressions of interest to join the Board of Directors of Crossref for the term starting in March 2024. The committee will gather responses from those interested and create the slate of candidates that our members will vote on in an election in September.

Expressions of interest will be due Monday, June 26th, 2023.

About the board elections

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 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 two of the larger member seats (membership tiers $3,900 and above) and five 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 on October 31st. New members will commence their term in March 2024.

About the Nominating Committee

2023 Nominating Committee:

Aaron Wood, American Psychological Association, chair*
Oscar Donde, Pan Africa Science Journal*
David Haber, American Society for Microbiology
Rose L’Huillier, Elsevier*
Marie Souliere, Frontiers

(*) indicates Crossref board member

What does the committee look for

demonstrate a commitment to or understanding of our strategic agenda or the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure;
have expertise that may be underrepresented on the board currently;
hold senior/director-level positions in their organisations;
have experience with governance or community involvement;
represent member organisations that are active in the scholarly communications ecosystem;
demonstrate metadata best practices as shown in the member’s participation report

Board roles and responsibilities

Crossref’s services provide a 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.

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.

Who can apply to join the board?

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 various international locations, and travel support is provided when needed. March and November board meetings are held virtually, and all committee meetings take place virtually. Each board member should sit on at least one Crossref committee. Care is taken to accommodate the wide range of timezones in which our board members live.

While the expressions of interest are specific to an individual, the seat that is elected to the board belongs to the member organisation. The primary board member also names an alternate who may attend meetings if the primary board member cannot. 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

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.

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.

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 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

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?

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.

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 contact me with any questions at lofiesh@crossref.org

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.

2021 Board Election

Lucy Ofiesh — Tue, 28 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The 2021 slate

Candidate organisations, in alphabetical order, for the Small category (three seats available):

California Digital Library, University of California, Lisa Schiff
Center for Open Science, Nici Pfeiffer
Melanoma Research Alliance, Kristen Mueller
Morressier, Sebastian Rose
NISC, Mike Schramm

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

AIP Publishing (AIP), Penelope Lewis
American Psychological Association (APA), Jasper Simons
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Scott Delman

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 20, 2021, you are eligible to vote when voting opens on September 29, 2021.

How can you vote?

On September 29, 2021, your organisation’s designated voting contact will receive an email with the Formal Notice of Meeting and Proxy Form with concise instructions on how to vote. You will also receive a user name and password with a link to our voting platform.

The election results will be announced at the LIVE21 online meeting on November 9, 2021. Save the date!

Our annual open call for board nominations

Lucy Ofiesh — Thu, 27 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Crossref’s Nominating Committee is inviting expressions of interest to join the Board of Directors of Crossref for the term starting in 2022. 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 25th, 2021.

Board roles and responsibilities

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.

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. In fact, this year the board has specifically included in the committee’s remit to “propose at least one name from a funder member for the current round of elections.”

There is a link at the bottom of this post to submit your expression of interest.

What is expected of board members?

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

About the election

This year we will elect two of the large member seats (membership tiers $3,900 and above) and three of the small 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 November board meeting and new members will commence their term in 2022.

About the nominating committee

The nominating committee will review the expressions of interest and select 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.

2021 Nominating Committee:

Liz Allen, F1000/Taylor & Francis, London, UK, committee chair
Melissa Harrison, eLife, Cambridge, UK
Andrew Joseph, Wits University Press, Johannesburg, South Africa
Abel Packer, SciELO, São Paulo, Brazil
Lisa Scott, New England Journal of Medicine, Boston, USA

How do you apply to join the board?

Please click here to submit your expression of interest or contact me.

Crossref’s Board votes to adopt the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure

Geoffrey Bilder — Wed, 02 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR

On November 11th 2020, the Crossref Board voted to adopt the “Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure” (POSI). POSI is a list of sixteen commitments that will now guide the board, staff, and Crossref’s development as an organisation into the future. It is an important public statement to make in Crossref’s twentieth anniversary year. Crossref has followed principles since its founding, and meets most of the POSI, but publicly committing to a codified and measurable set of principles is a big step. If 2019 was a reflective turning point, and mid-2020 was about Crossref committing to open scholarly infrastructure and collaboration, this is now announcing a very deliberate path. And we’re just a little bit giddy about it.

Here is a picture of me being “giddy.”

If you just want to see the principles that the board has endorsed, you can see them here:

https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.24343/C34W2H

But if you also want some background and want to understand some of the implications of Crossref adopting the principles, read on…

Warning - this is a long post.

Background and Origins

Some of you may be surprised that we’ve done this - simply because you always assumed we operated under these principles anyway. And we have. Mostly.

The “Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure” were largely inspired by a set of uncodified rules and norms that Crossref had been operating under for years. So how did we get to this circular situation where we are making a big announcement about adopting something we have largely been doing anyway?

Six years ago I met with Cameron Neylon and Jennifer Lin when they were still at PLOS and we decided that we wanted to write a blog post about…

Well, it doesn’t really matter.

We never finished writing that blog post because we got distracted by an issue that we kept seeing which was that services that the scholarly community depended on were increasingly taking directions that seemed antithetical to the community’s interests.

We were concerned because the scholarly community was becoming increasingly distrustful of infrastructure services. We wondered if there were any practices that we could point to that might mitigate the risk of infrastructure being co-opted and that would help build trust. Fortunately, we had two great models to look at:

Crossref, which had a set of informal rules and norms that it had followed since its founding (e.g., transparency of operations, being business-model neutral, one member one vote).
ORCID, an organisation that was spun-out of Crossref and which had adopted a written set of principles, based largely on codifying practices that they had seen at Crossref.

And so we wrote these practices up and added a few that we thought were missing. And we posted a different blog post to the one we had originally planned. It was titled “The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructures.” And the blog post became popular. And we did a bunch of talks about the Principles. And, much to our surprise, POSI has influenced the directions and policies of a number of organisations and initiatives since, including SPARC, Invest in Open Infrastructure, Open Data Institute, OA Switchboard, and others.

Elsewhere, community organisations and likeminded community members helped further develop the implementation of POSI through discussions at FORCE11 and through additional blog posts and books. Some, like Dryad and ROR, started to work to align their organisational structure to embrace POSI.

And this left Crossref in a strange position. Although we were largely the inspiration for these Principles - we ourselves had never codified and adopted them.

Motivations. Why Now?

Because it is the right thing to do for those that currently depend on Crossref

It is a healthy thing for the organisation to do. Adopting these principles strengthens Crossref’s governance. After twenty years, Crossref infrastructure has become critical to a broad segment of the community. As our membership profile changes, and as our broader stakeholder community expands, we need to explicitly evolve our governance to reflect stakeholders. And it would be irresponsible to continue to have our governance guided by a set of informal conventions. Particularly in the context of a global political period where we’ve seen the informal operating conventions and policy understandings of at least two major democracies ignored or discarded.

Because it could help make the creation of new, sustainable, open scholarly infrastructure easier and less expensive

There is a lot of new interest in open scholarly infrastructure. New infrastructure services and systems are being proposed almost every month. Many of them seek extensive advice and consulting from Crossref. A subset of these are incubated through Crossref. And a subset of these become Crossref services. Others are spun out as separate organisations (e.g., ORCID) or were specifically initiated as collaborations (e.g., ROR).

Our experience has been that the vast majority of work involved in these infrastructure projects was in establishing trust amongst the stakeholder community. We think that Crossref adopting the principles will help to address fundamental questions about accountability and sustainability that are inevitably raised when a new constituency approaches Crossref with an idea for collaborating on a new or existing infrastructure service. In short, adopting the principles will make future collaboration easier.

Adopting the Principles: Plus ça change

The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) proposes three areas that an Open Infrastructure organisation can address in order to garner the trust of the broader scholarly community: accountability (governance), funding (sustainability), and protection of community interests (insurance).

POSI proposes a set of concrete commitments that an organisation can make to build trust in each of these areas. There are 16 such commitments. Of these 16 commitments, Crossref is already completely or partially meeting the requirements of 15. And adopting the 16th commitment just formalises a direction Crossref has been heading toward for several years.

Critically, “adopting” POSI does not mean that we have to instantly meet all of the criteria. After all, when ORCID adopted its principles, it didn’t meet any of them. They were adopted to make a statement of intent. And they were publicly adopted so that the community could measure the organisation’s progress as well as to allow the community to detect if ORCID started to stray from its stated intentions.

Adopting the principles is akin to adopting a mission statement or a vision statement. It is an aspirational guide, not a description of the status quo.

Having said that, the principles are more concrete than a mission or vision statement, and this makes them easier to measure.

It is also important to note that the criteria are designed to balance each other. So, for example, one would not want to change the governance or business model to better support the mission if doing so would also threaten the sustainability of the organisation.

And finally, meeting a commitment is an ongoing process - it is not a one-off event. The organisation needs to keep measuring their performance against the principles in order to make sure that they have not inadvertently regressed.

Implications

Before adopting the principles, we did a candid self-audit to see which ones we thought we currently met and which ones we still needed to work on.

The three areas and sixteen commitments that are proposed in POSI are all designed to ensure that an infrastructure can not be co-opted by a particular party or interest group.

And the last area, “Insurance,” is the backstop that makes sure that, if some in the community feel that the infrastructure organisation has gone in a radically wrong direction, they can recreate the infrastructure as it was when they were comfortable with it, and they will not be hindered by practices or policies that lock them into the existing organisation.

This “insurance” is very much inspired by Crossref. Crossref itself was built, in part, to make sure that publishers were not locked into platforms and that journals and societies were not locked into publishers. Using the indirect Crossref DOI linking mechanism ensures that content can move between platforms and publishers without breaking vital citation links. Moving between platforms or publishers is never easy. And it isn’t cheap. But using Crossref DOIs for citation links at least makes it possible.

Crossref has an extra insurance level as well. It is built on the DOI and Handle infrastructure. If Crossref were to take a direction that some of its members found unacceptable, those members could join another DOI Registry agency more amenable to them. It wouldn’t be easy. It wouldn’t be cheap. But it would be possible.

And this knowledge helps keep Crossref grounded and attuned to the needs and concerns of its members. We know that our members are not “trapped” with us. We don’t take lightly the trust placed in us. And we know that there is trust still to build with various corners of our community. And it is this knowledge that helps keep us from developing the disdainful, take-it-or-leave-it, attitude that can be the cliché characteristic of infrastructure organisations.

So the fundamental, overarching goal of POSI is to set out principles that ensure that the stakeholders of an infrastructure organisation have a clear say in setting its agenda and priorities and that, in extremis, the stakeholders can leave and create an alternative infrastructure if the original organisation becomes unresponsive, hostile, or disappears.

As we look at how Crossref currently maps to the principles, please keep in mind three things:

If we have marked something as green, that doesn’t mean we think we do this perfectly. It simply means that we already have internal processes that focus on this commitment and we have evidence that these processes have thus far been working.
The fact that something is green and has “thus-far been working” does not mean that we should rest easy. We could regress. Our processes need to be able to detect and address regressions.
The commitments are supposed to be balanced. So we don’t want to do something to turn something green if it has an irreversible impact on another commitment. So, for example, we should not address a shortfall in the contingency fund by generating revenue in a way that ultimately hurts Crossref’s mission.
The implication of #3 above is that it may take us some time to meet all of the commitments. But again, the community can measure our progress against meeting the commitments.

So how does Crossref currently meet POSI?

Governance

🟢 Coverage across the research enterprise.
🟢 Non-discriminatory membership
🟢 Transparent operations
🟢 Cannot lobby
🟢 Living will
🟢 Formal incentives to fulfil mission & wind-down
🔴 Stakeholder Governed

Sustainability

🟢 Time-limited funds are used only for time-limited activities.
🟢 Goal to generate surplus
🟡 Goal to create 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)

Governance

If an infrastructure is successful and becomes critical to the community, we need to ensure it is not co-opted by particular interest groups. Similarly, we need to ensure that any organisation does not confuse serving itself with serving its stakeholders. How do we ensure that the system is run “humbly”, that it recognises it doesn’t have a right to exist beyond the support it provides for the community and that it plans accordingly? How do we ensure that the system remains responsive to the changing needs of the community?

– POSI

In the area of governance, Crossref clearly meets six of the seven criteria listed. We will discuss these first.

🟢 Coverage across the research enterprise

it is increasingly clear that research transcends disciplines, geography, institutions and stakeholders. The infrastructure that supports it needs to do the same.

– POSI

Crossref includes members who publish in the STM, HSS and Professional spheres. There are still some gaps in our coverage (e.g., monographs, law), but this is not through policy or lack of trying.

Crossref has members in 139 countries and has agreements with people in 150 countries. However note that geographic diversity is not the same as language diversity. Although we have members in many countries, the vast majority of our registered content is still in English. This does not reflect the trends in research outputs. We still need to do a lot of work to support non-English publications and non-English speaking members. But we have already identified this as a priority and are working on a number of initiatives to better support research communication in languages other than English.

🟢 Non-discriminatory membership

we see the best option as an “opt-in” approach with a principle of non-discrimination where any stakeholder group may express an interest and should be welcome. The process of representation in day to day governance must also be inclusive with governance that reflects the demographics of the membership

– POSI

It is first worth noting that “non-discriminatory” does not mean that we cannot have standards, obligations, and rules that all members of Crossref have to adhere to. It simply means that said rules are clear and that we apply them uniformly.

Crossref has always had catholic membership criteria. Although we have until now historically defined ourselves as a primarily “publisher” organisation, we define “publisher” loosely as anybody who produces content that commonly references or is referenced by scholarly literature. Historically, this has included NGOs, IGO’s, standards bodies, institutional archives, and professional publishers. More recently it has expanded to include preprint archives and funders.

The requirements for joining Crossref are few. We admit any applicant who:

Agrees to the obligations of membership.
Can pay the fees.

In practice we have historically had a policy of rejecting individuals as members. But even this is probably a pointless distinction as many of our members are “organisations” consisting of one person.

And fundamental to Crossref’s governance is that a member’s influence in the governance of Crossref is not tied to the level of financial investment they make in the organisation. All members have the same single vote. All board members have one vote.

Recently, we have also made changes to our governance and election process. The first to introduce contested elections for the board. The second to ensure that board membership was proportionally balanced amongst the membership tiers. Even as recently as 2017, when the Board established a Governance Committee, the idea of weighting votes to membership tiers was roundly rejected - on principle.

This is not to say that we can relax on this point. For example, as more funders and institutions join Crossref, we will need to make sure that our governance reflects that. We talk about this more in the section on governance.

Some will also point out that our fees are themselves a form of discrimination as they can still be an insurmountable barrier to some in the community. We understand this and, without trying to make light of or dismiss the situation, we are also confident that we are constantly looking at ways to lower the barrier-to-entry for joining Crossref. Our fees have gone steadily down since we were founded and we are constantly reviewing them to try and make them more equitable. We have created a category of sponsoring organisations to defray the costs of membership. We collaborate closely with organisations like PKP to try and build tools and services that make participation in Crossref easier and less expensive.

🟢 Transparent operations

achieving trust in the selection of representatives to governance groups will be best achieved through transparent processes and operations in general (within the constraints of privacy laws).

– POSI

Crossref has transparent finances and a transparent governance process. Much of this is simply a byproduct of the regulations governing non-profits with tax exempt status in the US and our specific registration as a non-profit membership association in New York State.

Until fairly recently, the obvious exception to this was Crossref’s use of pre-picked slates in board elections, but we have since improved this with an open election process.

🟢 Cannot lobby

the community, not infrastructure organisations, should collectively drive regulatory change. An infrastructure organisation’s role is to provide a base for others to work on and should depend on its community to support the creation of a legislative environment that affects it

– POSI

Crossref has never lobbied. Partly this is a byproduct of our commitment to be business-model neutral as most lobbying efforts in the industry seem to center around promoting the views held by members who share a business model.

But also, Crossref has never lobbied on its own behalf. We have always relied on our members and the community to point out and promote Crossref if there is any area of legislative policy that the Crossref infrastructure could help with.

🟢 Living will

a powerful way to create trust is to publicly describe a plan addressing the condition under which an organisation would be wound down, how this would happen, and how any ongoing assets could be archived and preserved when passed to a successor organisation. Any such organisation would need to honour this same set of principles

– POSI

Crossref has two relationships that require us to set out plans for an orderly wind-down.

The first is a condition of our incorporation as a non-profit in the state of New York. This explicitly includes a provision that requires us to hand over our operations and responsibilities to a successor non profit organisation that has a similar constituency and mission. The NY State Attorney General reviews and approves any major changes to ensure this requirement is met.

The second is a condition of our being members of the DOI Foundation, which includes provisions for us to hand over management of DOIs to another registration agency should Crossref ever wind-down. It is worth noting that we have already seen this clause invoked for other registration agencies that have wound down and who have, as part of the DOI Foundation provisions, handed responsibility for their DOIs to Crossref.

This is not to say that we are perfect on this score. We do not, for example, have any single place that outlines the steps that would need to be taken in order to execute the requirements laid out by our obligations to the state of New York and the IDF.

🟢 Formal incentives to fulfil mission & wind-down

infrastructures exist for a specific purpose and that purpose can be radically simplified or even rendered unnecessary by technological or social change. If it is possible the organisation (and staff) should have direct incentives to deliver on the mission and wind down.”

– POSI

Crossref has a track record of periodically reviewing our services and decommissioning those that are no longer needed - either because they have fulfilled their specific mission or because there is simply waning interest in them (arguably, the same thing).

Again, this is not to say we are perfect on this score. We also have, by our last count, about 30 specialised, overlapping APIs- many of which are used by just a handful of users. These have escaped our normal scrutiny because they never had the status of a formal service and had not been through our product management process.

But still, Crossref has long made it a habit to question its own existence. At virtually every board annual strategy meeting we ask the question “will technology X make Crossref unnecessary?” We need to continue with the attitude that the best thing we could do for our members is to make ourselves unnecessary.

🔴 Stakeholder Governed

a board-governed organisation drawn from the stakeholder community builds more confidence that the organisation will take decisions driven by community consensus and consideration of different interests.

– POSI

Overall, Crossref meets most of the Governance requirements with the notable exception of broader stakeholder involvement.

Of course, the key to this is how you define “stakeholder.”

Some may dispute this and argue that Crossref “stakeholders” are “publishers” because they are the parties that invested in creating Crossref.

But this narrow definition of “stakeholder” - focusing solely on those who have “invested”- is not widely held. In fact, common phrases like “stakeholder economy” and “stakeholder capitalism” describe the exact opposite- systems that don’t just focus on the “investor”, but which instead balance benefits to the investor with benefits to employees, the broader community, society, and the environment.

It is this latter, broader definition of “stakeholder” that is used in POSI.

And just in case anybody still thinks that people other than publishers don’t consider themselves “stakeholders’ in the Crossref infrastructure, we simply point to this, recently tweeted by Brea Manuel, a researcher, in celebration of their publication in Nature Reviews Chemistry (read it, and learn how to recruit and retain a diverse workforce):

Sustainability

Financial sustainability is a key element of creating trust. “Trust” often elides multiple elements: intentions, resources, and checks and balances. An organisation that is both well meaning and has the right expertise will still not be trusted if it does not have sustainable resources to execute its mission. How do we ensure that an organisation has the resources to meet its obligations?

– POSI

In the area of sustainability, Crossref clearly meets four of the five of the criteria listed and is most of the way to meeting the fifth.

🟢 Time-limited funds are used only for time-limited activities

day to day operations should be supported by day to day sustainable revenue sources. Grant dependency for funding operations makes them fragile and more easily distracted from building core infrastructure.

– POSI

Crossref has never supported production activities based on grants. Indeed Crossref’s delivery on this point is what inspired the approach taken in this principle. This distinguishes Crossref from many grant-funded infrastructure initiatives which either barely stay afloat or disappear altogether. Even those that survive often do so by pursuing solutions that align with their funder’s interest over their user’s needs.

🟢 Goal to generate surplus

organisations which define sustainability based merely on recovering costs are brittle and stagnant. It is not enough to merely survive, it has to be able to adapt and change. To weather economic, social and technological volatility, they need financial resources beyond immediate operating costs.

– POSI

Crossref has always attempted to generate a surplus. Crossref has generated surpluses since 2002 - so for 18 years of its 20 year existence.

🟡 Goal to create contingency fund to support operations for 12 months

a high priority should be generating a contingency fund that can support a complete, orderly wind down (12 months in most cases). This fund should be separate from those allocated to covering operating risk and investment in development.

– POSI

Crossref currently has a contingency fund that would support operations for 9 months. Although this may be standard for industry, it seems prudent to extend this in the case of infrastructure organisations, particularly when they are membership organisations. First, the very fact that something is infrastructure implies that the systemic effects of its failing ungracefully could have industry-wide repercussions. Second, the decision-making process of a membership organisation whose governance is voluntary is inherently slower. It has taken Crossref Board 9 months, for example, just to discuss the ramifications of adopting POSI.

Given our recent financial performance, we expect Crossref could comfortably increase the contingency fund to support 12 months of operations within the next 2-3 years.

🟢 Mission-consistent revenue generation

potential revenue sources should be considered for consistency with the organisational mission and not run counter to the aims of the organisation.

– POSI

Crossref has a good track record of periodically reviewing our services and fees and adjusting them to better support Crossref’s mission. The role of the Membership & Fees Committee in advising the Board has been critical. The very first example of this was in the early days of Crossref when we dropped matching fees because they were disincentivising members from linking their references. Crossref was also quick to recognise that, in order to support global research and reach smaller publishers in lower income countries, we had to develop a sponsoring mechanism to help defray the costs and ameliorate the technical complexity of participating in Crossref. Most recently we have taken the decision to drop fees for Crossmark as it was clear they had become a barrier to our members distributing retraction and correction notifications in a machine actionable format.

🟢 Revenue based on services, not data

data related to the running of the research enterprise should be a community property. Appropriate revenue sources might include value-added services, consulting, API Service Level Agreements or membership fees

– POSI

Crossref does not charge for or resell its members’ data. Doing so would restrict dissemination and reduce the discoverability of our members’ content. Instead our revenue comes from a combination of membership fees and service fees. The DOI registration is a member service that generates the bulk of our revenue. But our SLA-backed APIs are becoming increasingly popular as members and others seek to integrate Crossref metadata into their production workflows and services.

Insurance

Even with the best possible governance structures, critical infrastructure can still be co opted by a subset of stakeholders or simply drift away from the needs of the community. Long term trust requires the community to believe it retains control. Here we can learn from Open Source practices. To ensure that the community can take control if necessary, the infrastructure must be “forkable.” The community could replicate the entire system if the organisation loses the support of stakeholders, despite all established checks and balances. Each crucial part then must be legally and technically capable of replication, including software systems and data. Forking carries a high cost, and in practice this would always remain challenging. But the ability of the community to recreate the infrastructure will create confidence in the system. The possibility of forking prompts all players to work well together, spurring a virtuous cycle. Acts that reduce the feasibility of forking then are strong signals that concerns should be raised. The following principles should ensure that, as a whole, the organisation in extremis is forkable.

– POSI

Crossref clearly meets two of the four Insurance requirements. And the remaining two can be met easily with some clarification and time.

The “governance” section of POSI is designed to ensure that an infrastructure organisation is beholden to the broader stakeholder community and that it can not be co-opted by a particular party or special interest. And the “sustainability” section of POSI is designed to ensure that the infrastructure organisation takes the financial steps to ensure it can weather sudden changes in the financial or technical environment. But the last section, “insurance” is designed to protect stakeholder interests in case either “governance” or “sustainability” fail.

The term “forkable” comes from the Open Source software community where it is used to indicate when a software community’s interests diverge and they decide to split a project into several projects, with each new project focusing on a particular sub-community’s interests.

One of the immediate worries that people have when they first hear of the concept of “forkability” is that it will encourage the creation many variations of a project based on frivolous criteria. But this simply does not happen. Forking a project is never easy and takes a lot of effort. It is only done successfully when a critical mass of the community becomes unhappy with the direction a project is taking and is willing to take on the substantial burden of running an entirely separate project. Without such a critical mass, the fork just withers and has virtually no effect on the original project.

And the reason for this is simple, the mere knowledge that a project is “forkable” forces project maintainers to balance the interests of the community so that no sizable subgroup grows dissatisfied enough to fork the project.

Forkability encourages reponsivness to the community by making sure that the community is not “locked-in.”

Crossref itself was founded, in part, to prevent lock-in. Use of the DOI in linking citations makes it easier for publishers to move platforms, and for journals and societies to move between publishers.

And Crossref itself is architected in part to ensure that lock-in is not possible. Crossref is just one of several DOI registration agencies. Members unhappy with Crossref, can move to another DOI registration agency and their citation links will continue to work. But there are things we could do to make this even easier.

🟢 Available data (within constraints of privacy laws)

It is not enough that the data be made “open” if there is not a practical way to actually obtain it. Underlying data should be made easily available via periodic data dumps.

– POSI

Crossref provides public APIs that allow users to access Crossref metadata. We are planning to eventually release yearly public data files. We already did this once when we released a public data file in support of COVID-19 research. This in no way prevents the provision of data through paid Service Level Agreement tiers that provide guarantees of regularity, availability or reliability for those that need it. Existing Metadata Plus customers primarily use data that is available through the open API or existing dumps, but value additional services that support their use-cases.

🟡 Patent non-assertion

“The organisation should commit to a patent non-assertion covenant. The organisation may obtain patents to protect its own operations, but not use them to prevent the community from replicating the infrastructure.

– POSI

Crossref has never registered a patent. But the DOI Foundation, with significant support from Crossref, had to respond to (and then monitored) a set of patent applications that, if successful, the DOI System would infringe on. The applications were filed more than 15 years ago and haven’t been successful so these applications aren’t a current concern. As a result of this, the DOI Foundation adopted a patent policy in 2005 that covers all Registration Agencies and protects the DOI System. We may want to register protective patents in the future in order to enable us to defend ourselves against patent trolls.

The problem with patents is that they could be used by an organisation to prevent the infrastructure forking. One technique that has been used by major companies to assure communities that they will not be affected by patents, is to make a patent non-assertion covenant. For example, IBM, Microsoft and Google have made non-assertion statements in order to assure the open source and standards communities that they participate in that they will not co-opt an open source project or open standard by asserting patents on code or processes they contribute.

Though Crossref has never registered a patent, issuing a patent non-assertion covenant would help assure stakeholders that we would not use patents in the future to prevent the community from forking the system.

🟡 Open source

All software required to run the infrastructure should be available under an open source license. This does not include other software that may be involved with running the organisation.

– POSI

All code for new initiatives since 2007 has been released under an open source MIT license. The legacy Content System code could be open sourced within 12-18 months with no extra effort.

If some Crossref stakeholders wanted to “fork” Crossref or leave for another DOI registration agency, their biggest hurdle would be trying to recreate the twenty years worth of rules and algorithms we use for processing and matching metadata. Without access to the source code of the system, it would be almost impossible for these to be reverse engineered.

Similarly, without access to the source code of our system - it is difficult to ensure that Crossref is, indeed, non-discriminatory in the way it works with member content. It would be possible, for example, for Crossref to modify its matching algorithms to deliberately favour or deprecate some members’ content.

If we want to assure the community that we are managing our member metadata fairly and if we want to provide even better insurance to our members and the broader stakeholders, we should make all of our code open source.

The legacy so-called “CS” (content system) is in the process of being refactored. The only reason we cannot open source this immediately is that we still need to make some security changes to it. These security changes are being done as part of a current refactoring project and should be completed without any extra effort within 12-18 months. After that, we can open source the code.

🟡 Open data (within constraints of privacy laws)

For an infrastructure to be forked it will be necessary to replicate all relevant data. The CC0 waiver is best practice in making data legally available. Privacy and data protection laws will limit the extent to which this is possible.

– POSI

Achieving this simply requires us clarifying copyright and license information and that this will not have any effect on the metadata registered in Crossref by our members.

First we should outline the current copyright status of a Crossref metadata record.

The fundamental issue is that what we colloquially call “Crossref metadata” is actually a mix of elements, some of which come from our members, and some of which come from third parties and some of which comes 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 grant Crossref the right to do things with some classes of metadata and not do things with other classes of metadata - regardless of copyright.

Let’s start with the easiest case. Crossref already has two services with CC0 metadata:

The Open Funder Registry
Event Data

Obviously, the POSI open data provision would not change anything for either service.

The next easiest case is private data. Crossref collects PII (usernames, passwords IP addresses, etc.). This would remain private. And we will continue to manage it in conformance with GDPR. It would not be affected by the open data provision of POSI.

Next let’s look at what most people probably think of as “Crossref metadata”- that is, the basic bibliographic metadata that Crossref has collected from its members since its founding (titles, authors, volumes, issues, etc). For the record- this does not include abstracts.

Since 2000 Crossref has stated that it considers this basic bibliographic metadata to be “facts.” And under US law (Crossref is registered in the US) these facts are not subject to copyright at all. If this data is not subject to copyright at all, there is no way Crossref can “waive the copyright” under CC0. This metadata would not be affected at all under the open data provision of POSI.

More recently, some of our members have been submitting abstracts to Crossref. These are copyrighted. In the case of subscription publishers, the copyright usually belongs to the publisher. In the case of open access publishers, the copyright most often belongs to the authors. In both cases, Crossref cannot waive copyright under CC0 because the copyright is not ours to waive. However, we are allowed to redistribute the abstracts with our metadata because that is part of the terms and conditions we have with our members. We already have language that notes the distinct copyright status of the abstracts in our metadata, but, ideally, we should extend our schema to make that information available in a machine actionable form as well. In short, the copyright status of abstracts would not be affected at all by the open data provision of POSI.

Crossref also has its Reference Distribution Policy that the board adopted in 2017 - limited and closed references are not distributed by Crossref and this won’t change. [EDIT 6th June 2022 - all references are now open by default with the March 2022 board vote to remove any restrictions on reference distribution].

And this leaves us with the one thing that would be affected by the open data provision of POSI- data that is created by Crossref itself as a byproduct of our services. By law, this data is under Crossref’s copyright unless we explicitly waive it. This data includes things like, participation reports, conflict reports, member IDs and Cited-by counts (just the counts, not the references) and any aggregations of our otherwise uncopyrighted data that might, by aggregating it, be subject to sui generis database rights. At the moment, although we distribute this data freely and without restriction, we have no explicit copyright attached to it. All we would be seeking to do is explicitly say that data generated by Crossref will be distributed CC0. Again, at first it would be enough to just specify this in human readable form, along with our other copyright information. But, eventually, we would want to include this information in machine actionable form in the metadata itself.

To summarise:

Metadata type	Example	Current Copyright	Change under POSI
Already CC0	Open Funder Registry, Event Data	CC0	None
Private	Log files, user IDs	Private	None
Bibliographic	Title, authors, volume, issue	Facts	None
Closed references		Facts - but no distribution under the reference distribution board policy from 2017	None
Limited references		Facts - but no public distribution under the reference distribution board policy from 2017	None
Open references		Facts	None
Crossref-generated data	Participation data, reports, extracts	Copyright Crossref	CC0

[EDIT 6th June 2022 - all references are now open by default with the March 2022 board vote to remove any restrictions on reference distribution].

No member metadata will be affected by our adopting the open data provision of POSI. The only data that would be affected is data generated by Crossref itself.

However, the adoption of this principle would likely have an effect on our decisions about future services. For example, under this principle we would not launch any new services where the data was not freely reusable or the copyright of the data was not CC0.

Conclusion and Next steps

So again we face the paradox- We are announcing something that is simultaneously insignificant and important. It is insignificant in that we are simply saying that we will continue to do what we have largely been doing since Crossref was founded. But it is important because, in codifying what we have been doing, we are also confirming that these principles actually worked. That they were essential to building the trust that allowed us to function over the past twenty years, and they will continue to be essential in the future- as we look to work with existing organisations to strengthen current infrastructures, and work with new stakeholders to develop new infrastructures.

So much of the work in building scholarly infrastructure is about building trust. We would love to see other organisations and services adopt POSI as well. Doing so would help us to collaborate more efficiently by allowing us to confirm from the outset that our fundamental values align. And having a set of verifiable commitments that we can point to will also help build the community’s trust in our respective organisations and services.

And this brings us to an important point. Although POSI might have been inspired by Crossref, POSI is not a “Crossref thang” and it never has been. The movement to create open scholarly infrastructures and to define and clarify the ground rules within which they operate has become a much broader community concern.

To this end, we’ve worked with some sibling infrastructure organisations—such as Dryad and ROR—as well as the original authors of POSI to create a website where we could host the list of principles independent of the original blog post and independent of any single organisation:

openscholarlyinfrastructure.org

Minimally, this provides a place for anybody who wants to link to or cite POSI - either because they are endorsing them, or because they are simply discussing them.

If we see enough activity of this type, then the site could evolve to become a register of those organisations and services who have formally adopted POSI and a place where they can link to their self-assessments against the principles.

The community promoting, discussing and applying POSI has long since grown beyond the original authors of the POSI blog post. And it is also much larger than any single organisation. Our hope is that this website encourages that growth.

And, of course, in addition to the external outreach and coordination, Crossref still has internal work to do in addressing the outstanding issues that were raised in our own self-assessment above. We need to increase our contingency funds. We need to publish a patent non-assertion covenant. We need to open source our core software. And we need to clarify our metadata license information and make it explicit that Crossref waives copyright (using CC-0) for any metadata generated by Crossref. And, finally, as Crossref expands and starts working with different stakeholders, we will need to adjust our governance and the composition of our board accordingly. We will, of course, post updates here as we make progress on addressing these areas.

2020 marked Crossref’s 20th birthday. What a grim year to have an anniversary. But we are, at least, ending it on a little bit of a high. We are delighted that the issue of open scholarly infrastructure has become so prominent in the community. And we are eager to help strengthen and extend this infrastructure. The decision by Crossref’s board to adopt POSI is the equivalent of Crossref finally adopting a written constitution. And it is a fitting launch to our next twenty years.

2020 Board Election

Lucy Ofiesh — Mon, 28 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This year, Crossref’s Nominating Committee assumed the task of developing a slate of candidates to fill six open board seats. We are grateful that in the midst of a challenging year, we received over 70 expressions of interest from all around the world, a 40% increase from last year’s response. It was an extraordinary pool of applicants and a testament to the strength of our membership community.

There are six seats open for election (two large, four small), and the Nominating Committee is pleased to present the following slate.

The 2020 slate

Candidate organisations, in alphabetical order, for the Small category (four seats available):

Beilstein-Institut, Wendy Patterson
Korean Council of Science Editors, Kihong Kim
OpenEdition, Marin Dacos
Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO), Abel Packer,
The University of Hong Kong, Jesse Xiao

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

AIP Publishing, Jason Wilde,
Oxford University Press, James Phillpotts,
Taylor & Francis, Liz Allen

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 14, 2020, you are eligible to vote when voting opens on September 30, 2020.

How can you vote?

On September 30, 2020, your organisation’s designated voting contact will receive an email with the Formal Notice of Meeting and Proxy Form with concise instructions on how to vote. You will also receive a user name and password with a link to our voting platform.

The election results will be announced at LIVE20 virtual meeting on November 10, 2020.

Calling all prospective board members

Lucy Ofiesh — Thu, 21 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

English version –– Información en español –– Version Française

The Crossref Nominating Committee is inviting expressions of interest to join the Board of Directors of Crossref for the term starting in 2021. 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 19, 2020.

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.

As an example, in 2019 the board decided to remove fees for the Crossmark service. This involved a strategic review of the service and its alignment with the mission by the Membership & Fees committee; followed by a review of the financial implications of removing the fee; and ultimately, a vote by the full board to remove the fee starting in 2020.

I’m interested but busy! What is expected of board members?

Starting in 2020, following travel restrictions as a result of COVID-19, the board introduced 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.

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

About the election

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

The board maintains a balance of seats, with eight seats for smaller publishers and eight seats for larger publishers, in an effort to ensure that the diversity of experiences and perspectives of the publishing community is represented in decisions made at Crossref. This year we will elect two of the larger publisher seats and four of the smaller publisher seats.

The election takes place online and voting will open in September. Election results will be shared at the November board meeting and new members will commence their term in 2021.

About the nominating committee

2020 Nominating Committee:
Melissa Harrison, eLife, Cambridge, UK, committee chair
Scott Delman, ACM, New York, NY
Susan Murray, AJOL, Grahamstown, South Africa
Tanja Niemann, Erudit, Montreal, Canada
Arley Soto, Biteca, Bogotá, Colombia

How to submit an expression of interest

Please click here to submit your expression of interest or contact me with any questions at lofiesh [at] crossref.org.

Versión en español

El Comité de Nominación de Crossref está invitando a expresiones de interés a unirse a la Junta Directiva de Crossref para el período que comienza en 2021. El comité recopilará las respuestas de los interesados y creará la lista de candidatos que nuestra membresía votará en una elección en septiembre. Las expresiones de interés vencen el viernes 19 de junio de 2020.

La función de la junta directiva de Crossref es proporcionar supervisión estratégica y financiera de la organización, así como orientación para el Director Ejecutivo y el equipo de liderazgo del personal, con responsabilidades importantes como:

Establecer la dirección estratégica para la organización;
Proporcionar supervisión financiera; y
Aprobar nuevas políticas y servicios.

La junta es representativa de nuestra base de miembros y guía al equipo de liderazgo del personal sobre las tendencias que afectan las comunicaciones académicas. La junta establece direcciones estratégicas para la organización mientras supervisa los cambios e implementación de políticas. Los miembros de la junta tienen la responsabilidad fiduciaria de garantizar operaciones sólidas. Los miembros de la junta hacen esto asistiendo a las reuniones de la junta, además de unirse a comités de la junta más específicos.

Como ejemplo, en 2019 la junta decidió eliminar las tarifas de servicio de Crossmark. Esto implicó una revisión estratégica del servicio y su alineación con la misión del comité de Membresía y Tarifas; seguido de una revisión de las implicaciones financieras de eliminar la tarifa; y, en última instancia, un voto de la junta completa para retirar la tarifa a partir de 2020.

Los servicios Crossref proporcionan infraestructura central para las comunicaciones académicas. La junta directiva de Crossref ayuda a dar forma al futuro de nuestros servicios y, por extensión, impacta el ecosistema académico más amplio. Estamos buscando miembros de la junta para contribuir con su experiencia y perspectiva.

¡Estoy interesado pero ocupado! ¿Qué se espera de los miembros de la junta?

Los miembros de la junta asisten a tres reuniones cada año que generalmente tienen lugar en marzo, julio y noviembre. Las reuniones se han llevado en una variedad de ubicaciones internacionales y se brinda apoyo para viajes cuando es necesario.

A partir de 2020, después de las restricciones de viaje como resultado de COVID-19, la junta introdujo un plan para convocar al menos una de las reuniones de la junta virtualmente todos los años, y todas las reuniones del comité tienen lugar virtualmente. La mayoría de los miembros de la junta formen parte del menos un comité Crossref. Se tiene cuidado de acomodar la amplia gama de zonas horarias en las que viven los miembros de nuestra junta.

Aunque las expresiones de interés son específicas de un individuo, el asiento elegido para la junta pertenece a la organización miembro. El miembro primario de la junta también nombra a un suplente que puede asistir a las reuniones en caso de que el miembro de la junta principal no pueda.

Se espera que los miembros de la junta se sientan cómodos asumiendo las responsabilidades anteriores y que se preparen y participen en las discusiones de la reunión de la junta.

Las reuniones de la junta se llevarán a cabo en inglés, por lo que los posibles miembros de la junta deben sentirse cómodos leyendo material en inglés y en inglés conversacional.

Sobre las elecciones

La junta se elige mediante la política de “un miembro, un voto” en la que cada miembro de Crossref tiene un voto para elegir representantes en la junta de Crossref. Los términos de la junta son de tres años, y este año hay seis asientos abiertos para la elección

La junta mantiene un equilibrio de asientos, con ocho asientos para editoriales más pequeñas y ocho asientos para editoriales más grandes, en un esfuerzo por garantizar que la diversidad de experiencias y perspectivas de la comunidad editorial esté representada en las decisiones tomadas en Crossref. Este año elegiremos dos de los asientos de editor más grandes y cuatro de los asientos de editor más pequeños.

La elección se realiza en línea y la votación se abrirá en septiembre. Los resultados de las elecciones se compartirán en la reunión de la junta de noviembre y los nuevos miembros comenzarán su mandato en 2021.

Sobre el comité de nominaciones

El comité de nominaciones revisará las expresiones de interés y seleccionará una lista de candidatos para la elección. Esta lista presentada excederá el número total de asientos disponibles. El comité considera declaraciones de interés, tamaño organizacional, geografía, género y experiencia.

Comité de nominaciones 2020:
Melissa Harrison, eLife, Cambridge, UK, committee chair
Scott Delman, ACM, New York, NY
Susan Murray, AJOL, Grahamstown, South Africa
Tanja Niemann, Erudit, Montreal, Canada
Arley Soto, Biteca, Bogotá, Colombia

Cómo presentar una expresión de interés

Por favor haga clic aquí para enviar su expresión de interés o contáctame si tiene alguna pregunta lofiesh [at] crossref.org.

Version Française

Appel à tous les membres potentiels du conseil d’administration

Le comité de nomination de Crossref invite les personnes qui seraient intéressées à se porter candidates pour l’élection au conseil d’administration de Crossref, pour le mandat commençant en 2021. Le comité de nomination rassemblera les réponses des personnes candidates et élaborera une liste des candidats, pour lesquels nos membres pourront voter lors des élections au conseil d’administration, en septembre. Les candidatures doivent être déposées au plus tard le vendredi 19 juin 2020.

Le rôle du conseil d’administration de Crossref est d’opérer une supervision stratégique et financière de l’organisation, et de conseiller le directeur exécutif ainsi que l’équipe de direction du personnel. Les principales responsabilités du conseil d’administration sont les suivantes :

Fixer l’orientation stratégique de l’organisation
Assurer la surveillance financière
Approuver de nouvelles politiques et de nouveaux services

Le conseil d’administration est représentatif de nos adhérents et guide l’équipe de direction du personnel en ce qui concerne les tendances affectant les communications savantes. Le conseil d’administration établit des orientations stratégiques pour l’organisation, tout en assurant le contrôle des changements et de la mise en œuvre des politiques. Les membres du conseil ont la responsabilité fiduciaire d’assurer son bon fonctionnement. Les membres du conseil d’administration s’acquittent de cette responsabilité en assistant aux réunions du conseil d’administration et en participant à des comités, plus spécifiques, du conseil d’administration.

A titre d’exemple, en 2019, le conseil d’administration a décidé de supprimer les frais liés au service Crossmark. Ceci a impliqué un examen stratégique du service et de son alignement avec la mission de Crossref, par le comité des adhésions et frais, puis un examen des implications financières de la suppression des frais, et, finalement, un vote par l’ensemble du conseil d’administration pour supprimer les frais à partir de 2020.

Les services de Crossref fournissent une infrastructure centralisée pour les communications savantes. Le conseil d’administration de Crossref aide à façonner l’avenir de nos services et, par extension, a un impact sur l’écosystème universitaire plus large. Les futurs membres du conseil d’administration sont recherchés particulièrement pour leur expérience et leur point de vue.

Je suis intéressé mais très occupé! Qu’attend-on des administrateurs?

Les membres du conseil d’administration assistent à trois réunions par an qui ont généralement lieu en mars, juillet et novembre. Les réunions se déroulent dans des lieux divers, à l’échelle internationale, et une assistance financière est octroyée, en cas de besoin, pour le voyage.

À partir de 2020, à la suite des restrictions de voyage causées par la COVID-19, le conseil a présenté un plan pour convoquer au moins une des réunions du conseil en téléconférence chaque année, et toutes les réunions des comités auront lieu en téléconférence. La plupart des membres du conseil d’administration siègent à au moins un comité de Crossref. Nous souhaitons préciser que nous prenons soin de prendre en compte le large éventail de fuseaux horaires dans lesquels vivent les membres de notre conseil d’administration.

Bien que les manifestations d’intérêt émanent d’une personne, le siège pourvu au conseil appartient à l’organisation membre dans son ensemble. Le membre titulaire du conseil d’administration nomme également un suppléant, qui pourra assister aux réunions en cas d’empêchement du membre titulaire du siège au conseil d’administration.

Il est attendu que les membres du conseil d’administration puissent dédier aux responsabilités présentées ci-dessus le temps qui leur est raisonnablement dû, ainsi qu’à la préparation et à la participation aux discussions des réunions du conseil.

À propos de l’élection

Le conseil d’administration est élu selon une politique de «un membre, une voix» dans laquelle chaque membre de Crossref dispose d’une seule voix pour élire les représentants au conseil d’administration de Crossref. Le mandat du conseil d’administration est de trois ans et, cette année, six sièges sont à pourvoir lors de des élections de septembre prochain.

Le conseil d’administration maintient un équilibre des sièges, avec huit sièges pour les petits éditeurs et huit sièges pour les grands éditeurs, afin de garantir que la diversité des expériences et des perspectives de la communauté de l’édition soit représentées dans les décisions prises à Crossref. Cette année, sont à pourvoir deux sièges de grands éditeurs et quatre sièges de petits éditeurs.

Le vote aura lieu en ligne et s’ouvrira en septembre. Les résultats de ce scrutin seront communiqués lors de la réunion du conseil d’administration de novembre et les nouveaux membres commenceront leur mandat en 2021.

À propos du comité de nomination

Le comité des candidatures examinera les candidatures et sélectionnera une liste de candidats aux élections. Le nombre de candidats proposés dépassera le nombre total de sièges à pourvoir. Le comité prend en compte les déclarations d’intérêt, la taille de l’organisation, la géographie, le sexe et l’expérience des personnes pour sa sélection.

Comment exprimer une manifestation d’intérêt

Veuillez cliquer ici pour envoyer votre candidature ou contactez-moi pour toute question à lofiesh [at] crossref.org.

Crossref annual report 2019: the fact file

Crossref team — Tue, 31 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The Fact File: Crossref Annual Report 2019

Crossref’s 2018–19 Annual Report — a figures-first summary of the year. Membership, content registration, retrieval, services, governance, and finances, all laid out as facts rather than narrative. Registered with DOI 10.13003/y8ygwm5.

Strategists

See the shape of the year at a glance. Headline numbers across membership, content registration, retrieval, services, and finances — the year in figures rather than narrative.

Decision-makers

Understand the year’s governance and finances. Board composition, member meetings, fee structure, and the financial position underpinning Crossref’s services in 2018–19.

Practitioners

See what members did with the infrastructure. Registration volumes by record type, retrieval activity, and the practical services members drew on through the year.

What the Fact File covers

Membership — total members, new joiners, breakdown by country and type
Content registration — DOIs registered, by record type, with year-on-year comparison
Retrieval activity — API queries and metadata distribution at scale
Services — Similarity Check, Cited-by, Crossmark, Funder Registry uptake
Governance — board composition, member meetings, working groups
Finances — revenue, expenditure, and the financial position at year end

Read the report

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2019 election slate

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

2019 Board Election

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

2019 Election Slate

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

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

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

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

The 2019 slate includes: seven candidates for five available seats

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

eLife, Melissa Harrison
The Royal Society, Stuart Taylor

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

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

Take a look at the candidates’ organisational and personal statements

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

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

How can you vote?

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

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

Express your interest in serving on the Crossref board

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is expected of a Crossref Board member?

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

Board members must:

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

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

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

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

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

About the election and our Board

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

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

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

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

The role of the Nominating Committee

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

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

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

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

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

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

Updates to our by-laws

Lisa Hart Martin — Thu, 29 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Good governance is important and something that Crossref thinks about regularly so the board frequently discusses the topic, and this year even more so. At the November 2017 meeting there was a motion passed to create an ad-hoc Governance Committee to develop a set of governance-related questions/recommendations. The Committee has met regularly this year and the following questions are under deliberation regarding term limits, role of the Nominating Committee, implications of contested elections, and more.

The full motion to create the committee is:

The ad hoc Governance Committee should discuss and make specific recommendations (including where necessary proposing appropriate by-law amendments) about (i) the timing of the annual election of members and whether the newly elected Board can take office a fixed period after the election results are finalized; (ii) the role and responsibilities of the Nominating Committee and its relationship to the Board; (iii) the implications of having contested Board elections; (iv) the election of officers, Executive Committee members, and committee chairs, and v) options and required changes for board members to represent specific constituencies (e.g. based on membership types).

The Governance Committee members are:

Paul Peters (Hindawi and Board Chair)
Scott Delman (ACM and Board Treasurer)
Chris Shillum (Elsevier and Executive Committee member)
Mark Patterson (eLife)
Ed Pentz (Crossref Executive Director)
Lisa Hart (Crossref Finance & Operations Director)
Emily Cooke (Pierce Atwood, legal counsel).

The committee’s goal was to try to maintain and increase transparency; consider practicality and impact of any changes and ensure continuity and balance.

At the March meeting the committee provided an overview of the issues they had discussed. There was consensus to accept the committee’s recommendation to address all of the governance matters comprehensively at the July 2018 meeting.

Discussions resulted in two changes to our by-laws:

1. Membership eligibility

To provide clarity around membership qualification, we resolved to amend Article I Section 1 by replacing the text in its entirety with the following text:

Membership in Crossref shall be open to any organisation that publishes professional and scholarly materials and content and otherwise meets the terms and conditions of membership established from time to time by the Board of Directors, and to such other entities as the Board of Directors shall determine from time to time.

2. Start date of board terms

We also resolved to amend Article V Section 4 to replace the phrase “on the day after” with the phrase “during the next calendar quarter immediately following”. This allows the Board to meet directly ahead of Crossref’s Annual Meeting and Board election (from 2019) instead of directly after.

The first change captures the fact that we have a very broad community beyond what is seen as traditional publishers, who themselves do not solely identify as publishers anymore. It reflects how our membership has evolved, and also includes organisations that publish that aren’t publishers (universities, government agencies, etc.)

The second change was a practical one. As Crossref had its first contested election in 2017, and in 2018 as well, it seemed unreasonable to have a brand new Board meet the day after the election, especially when there is potential for officers to not be re-elected. The old by-laws were very specific about holding the Board meeting the day after the election. With this change, starting with the March meeting, the new Board will have a full calendar year of meetings, which seems more practical, and we will establish a process for the election of officers.

During that meeting we deliberated the following questions/recommendations raised by the committee:

Development of a policy on canvassing/campaigning by candidates in Board elections;
Development of policies on nominations to the positions of Chair, Treasurer, Executive Committee members, the Nominating Committee Chair, and the Audit Committee Chair;
Analysis of how best to achieve balance and representation on the Board going forward (designated seats and/or a binding Board remit to the Nominating Committee);
Analysis as to whether to impose term limits on board members;
Analysis as to how best to handle independent nominations to the Board (eliminate the option, or improve the process); and
Review of our governing documents’ provisions on vacancies, to confirm that the Board follows the required steps on the filling of vacancies.

At the November 2018 Board meeting—following Crossref LIVE18—there were two more amendments to the bylaws:

3. Removal of independant nominations

To remove Art. V II Sec. 3 on independent nominations. This change reflects the consensus that there is no need for independent nominations with the introduction of contested elections.

4. Membership start date of record

To amend Art. I Sec. 2 to amend language dealing with record date of membership. This is a practical change following the July 2018 introduction of new membership terms which are click-through online terms and don’t need counter-signatures.

The new Board will resume the discussion on designated seats at our March 2019 meeting.

2018 election slate

Lisa Hart Martin — Fri, 17 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

With Crossref developing and extending its services for members and other constituents at a rapid pace, it’s an exciting time to be on our board. We recieved 26 expressions of interest this year, so it seems our members are also excited about what they could help us achieve.

From these 26, the Nominating Committee has put forward the following slate.

The 2018 slate: seven candidates for five available seats

African Journals OnLine (AJOL), Susan Murray, South Africa
American Psychological Association (APA), Jasper Simons, USA
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Scott Delman, USA
California Digital Library (CDL), Catherine Mitchell, USA
Hindawi, Paul Peters, UK
Sage, Richard Fidczuk, USA
Wiley, Duncan Campbell, USA

Read the candidates’ organisational and personal statements

Candidates were chosen based on the following criteria:

Follow the guidance from the Board to provide a slate or seven or fewer.
Maintain the current balance of the board with respect to size of organisations.
Improve balance in other areas, with respect to gender and geography.
Also consider types of organisations and sector, as well as engagement with Crossref and its services.

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

If your organisation is a member of Crossref on September 14, 2018 you are eligible to vote when voting opens on September 28, 2018 (affiliates, however, are not eligible to vote).

How can you vote?

On September 28, 2018, your organisation’s designated voting contact will receive an email with a link to the formal Notice of Meeting and Proxy Form with concise instructions on how to vote. An additional email will be sent with a username and password along with a link to our online voting platform. It is important to make sure your voting contact is up-to-date.

Want to add your voice?

We are accepting independent nominations until November 7, 2018. organisations interested in standing as an independent candidate should contact me by this date with a list of ten other Crossref members that endorse their candidacy.

The election itself will be held at LIVE18 Toronto, our annual meeting, on 13 November 2018 in Canada. We hope you’ll be there to hear the results.

Do you want to be on our Board?

Lisa Hart Martin — Wed, 18 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Do you want to effect change for the scholarly community?

The Crossref Nominating Committee is inviting expressions of interest to serve on the Board as it begins its consideration of a slate for the November 2018 election.

The key responsibilities of the Board are:

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

Some of the decisions the board has made in recent years include:

Introduction of the Metadata APIs Plus service (to provide a paid-for premium service for machine access to metadata);
Updating the policy on open references (to increase links so that more readers can access content);
Establishing the OI Project (to create a persistent organisation Identifier);
Inclusion of preprints in the Crossref metadata; and
Approval to develop Event Data (which will track online activity from multiple sources).

What is expected of a Crossref Board member?

Board members should be able to attend all board meetings, which occur three times a year in different parts of the world. If you are unable to attend in person you must be able to attend via telephone.

Board members must:

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

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

If you are a Crossref member, are eligible to vote, and would like to be considered, you should complete and submit the expression of interest form with both your organisation’s statement and your personal statement before 18 May 2018.

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

About the election and our Board

The election opens online in September 2018 and voting is done by proxy online, or in person, at the annual business meeting during ‘Crossref LIVE18’ on 13th November 2018 in Toronto, Canada. Election materials and instructions for voting will be available to all Crossref members online in September 2018.

The role of the Nominating Committee

The selection of the slate (which is likely to exceed the number of open seats) is based on the quality of the expressions of interest and maintaining the balance and diversity of the board—especially in areas of organisational size, gender, geography and sector.

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

Mark Patterson, eLife (Chair);
Chris Shillum, Elsevier;
Amy Brand, MIT Press;
Vincent Cassidy, The Institution of Engineering & Technology (IET); and
Claire Moulton, The Company of Biologists.

Our board needs to be stay truly representative of Crossref’s global and diverse membership of organisations who publish. Please submit your statements of interest or reply to me with any questions to me at lhart@crossref.org.

Scenario planning for our future

Ed Pentz — Mon, 28 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Crossref is governed by a board of directors that meets in person three times a year in March, July and November. At the July meeting the board typically spends a significant amount of time on strategic planning in addition to its usual activities such as financial oversight, approving investment in new services based on staff and committee recommendations, reviewing and approving policies and fees for new and existing services and generally making sure Crossref is healthy and well run.

This year we worked with a facilitator to look farther into the future than normal using a technique called scenario planning to map out “strategic agendas” for the next five years. Scenario-based strategic planning doesn’t try to predict the future but allows us to be flexible in planning by looking at a range of different possible eventualities. This is particularly useful for Crossref because scholarly research and communications is changing rapidly and we operate in a very complex environment.

To prepare for the meeting our facilitator, Susan Stickely, prepared 12 “critical uncertainties” - impactful issues that could go either way and that will affect how Crossref works, its mission and even whether it needs to exist. To develop the critical uncertainties Susan interviewed Crossref staff, board members, general members and scholarly communications community influencers and we held a preparatory group exercise at the March board meeting. The critical uncertainties are:

Scholarly Communication Landscape: Increasing diversity? Or publishing disintermediated?
Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence: Supporting? Or obsoleting the researcher and publishers?
Policy and Regulation: Limiting? Or visionary?
Financing of Scholarly Communication: Shrinking Pool? Or Expanding Pool?
Rise of Pre-print, New Content Sources: New, non-traditional? Or De-formalizing?
Tracking and Privacy: Increased Privacy? Or Loss of Privacy?
Cybersecurity: Secure? Or Vulnerable, Insecure?
Publisher Sustainability: Slow Progress? Or Fast Progress?
Impact of Open: Open or Closed? Or Slow to Change?
Source of Prestige and Recognition: New Source? Or Publisher, Institution?
Quality and Accuracy of Content: High? Or Low?
Geopolitical Stability and Stance: Stable, Unified? Or Unstable, Fragmented

In addition, from the interviews Susan was able to summarize Crossref’s distinctive competencies as:

Having a reputation as a trusted, neutral one-stop source of metadata and services
Managing scholarly infrastructure with technical knowledge and innovation
Convening and facilitating scholarly communications community collaboration

To be successful Crossref will need to continue to invest in, apply, and evolve these distinctive competencies and strategic dilemmas and challenges.

Over a day and half of discussions and breakout sessions the board and staff drew up a number of scenarios and created a draft strategic agenda for Crossref. Over the next couple of months we’ll be working on refining the strategic agenda and will be presenting the results to members in the next couple of months.

One theme that emerged is for Crossref to engage more with funders and build on the work with done with them in creating the Crossref Funder Registry. We have started a new Funder Advisory Group and, among other things, are working with them on a prototype for a new registry of grant identifiers.

In the regular board session the board approved three recommendations from the Membership and Fees Committee:

To approve the recommendations with respect to volume discounts for current deposits of posted content (i.e. preprints).
To create a new “peer review report” record type with a specific metadata schema and a bundled fee of $1.25 to be charged for a content item and all the reports associated with it.
To update the metadata delivery offering to have a single agreement that covers all metadata APIs/delivery routes, to adopt a single (updated) fee structure, and to remove case-by-case opt-outs for metadata.

Item number 3 involves a number of big changes - for example the removal of the case-by-case opt outs requires a change to the main Membership Agreement - so we will be sending out more information to members and Affiliates in September and October about the changes and our implementation plans.

You can see the full history of the motions from every Board meeting on our website.

Another major issue that the board discussed is the upcoming election for the board of directors. In order to broaden participation and be inclusive there was a new process this year. The Nominating Committee put out a call for expressions of interest for candidates to be on the slate for the election. We had a great response and there were 25 expressions of interest reviewed by the Nominating Committee who came up with a slate of nine excellent candidates for the six seats up for election. This is the first time that there are more candidates than seats on the slate so it’s particularly important for members to vote this year. See the recent blog post about the election process and the slate for more details.

The next board meeting is in November in conjunction with Crossref LIVE17 in Singapore.

2017 election slate

Lisa Hart Martin — Thu, 17 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Slate of 2017 board candidates announced, and it’s going to be exciting

Crossref is always evolving and the board knows it must evolve with us so we can continue to provide the right kind of services and support for you, as members of the research community.

This year two things happened for the first time: we used our updated bylaws see article VII, section 2 agreed by the board last year, to allow more candidates than available seats; and secondly, to issue an open call for expressions of interest. Many members of the current board felt it was vital to move to this more transparent process.

With Crossref developing new services for new types of members at a rapid pace, it’s an exciting time to be on the board of directors. With 25 expressions of interest it seems we’re not the only ones who think so!

From these 25 applications, the Nominating Committee has proposed the following nine candidates to fill the six seats open for election to our board of directors:

American Institute of Physics (AIP), Jason Wilde, USA
F1000 Research, Liz Allen, UK
Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers (IEEE), Gerry Grenier, USA
The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), Vincent Cassidy, UK
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press (MIT Press), Amy Brand, USA
OpenEdition, Marin Dacos, France
SciELO, Abel Packer, Brazil
SPIE, Eric Pepper, USA
Vilnius Gediminas Technical University Press (VGTU Press), Eleonora Dagiene, Lithuania

Read the candidates’ organisational and personal statements

Candidates were chosen based on the following criteria:

That board representation should be reflective of membership
A balance of types and sizes of organisations
That all committee choices and recommendations were unanimous

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

If your organisation is a member of Crossref on September 15 2017, you are eligible to vote when voting opens on September 28 (affiliates, however, are not eligible to vote).

How can you vote?

On September 28, your organisation’s designated voting contact will receive an email with a link to the formal Notice of Meeting and Proxy Form with concise instructions on how to vote. An additional email will be sent with a username and password along with a link to our online voting platform. It is important to make sure your voting contact is up-to-date.

Want to add your voice?

We are accepting independent nominations until 7 November 2017. organisations interested in standing as an independent candidate should contact me by this date with the endorsements of ten other Crossref members.

The election itself will be held at LIVE17 Singapore, our annual meeting, on 14 November 2017. We hope you’ll be there to hear the results.

Crossref receives SOC accreditation for data integrity and security

Lisa Hart Martin — Wed, 21 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

We are delighted to announce that Crossref has been awarded the Service organisation Control (SOC) 2® accreditation after an independent assessment of our controls and procedures by the American Institute of CPA’s (AICPA).

The SOC 2® accreditation is awarded to service organisations that have passed standard trust services criteria relating to the security, availability, and processing integrity of systems used to process users’ data and the confidentiality and privacy of the information processed by these systems.

The AICPA’s assessment also reviewed our vendor management programs, internal corporate governance and risk management processes, and regulatory oversight.

Find out more about the SOC accreditation structure

Want to be on our Board?

Lisa Hart Martin — Fri, 28 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Do you want to affect change for the scholarly community?

Our Nominating Committee is inviting expressions of interest to serve on the Board as it begins its consideration of a slate for the November 2017 election.

Key responsibilities of the Board are setting the strategic direction for the organisation, providing financial oversight, and approving new policies and services. Some of the decisions the board has made in recent years include:

Establishing The OI Project to create a persistent organisation Identifier;
Inclusion of preprints in the Crossref metadata; and
The approval to develop Event Data which will track online activity from multiple sources.

Any member can express interest in serving on the Board

We are seeking people who know about scholarly communications and would like to be part of our future. If you have a vision for the international Crossref community, we are interested in hearing from you. Crossref members that are eligible to vote, and would like to be considered, can express their interest together with statements of interest from you and from your organisation. The form should be completed and sent to us before 01 June 2017.

The role of the Nominating Committee

The Nominating Committee meets to discuss change, process, criteria, and potential candidates, ensuring a fair representation of membership. The Committee is made up of three board members not up for election, and two non-board members.

Current Nominating Committee members:

John Shaw, Sage (Chair)
Mark Patterson, eLife
Paul Peters, Hindawi
Chris Fell, Cambridge University Press
Rebecca Lawrence, F1000 Research

About the election and our Board

We have a principle of one member, one vote; our board comprises a cross-section of members and it doesn’t matter how big or small you are, every member gets a single vote. Board terms are three years, and one third of the Board is eligible for election every year. There are six seats up for election in 2017. The board meets in a variety of international locations in March, July, and November each year. View a list of the current Crossref Board members and a history of the decisions they’ve made (motions). The election opens online in late September 2017 and voting is done by proxy online or in person at the annual business meeting during Crossref LIVE in November 2017. Election materials and instructions for voting will be available to all Crossref members online in late September 2017. The board needs to be truly representative of Crossref’s global and diverse membership of organisations who publish.

Please express interest using the form, or email me with any questions.

One member, one vote: Crossref Board Election opens today, September 30th

Lisa Hart Martin — Fri, 30 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Watch for two important emails on September 30th – one with a voting link and material, and one with your username and password.

Running Crossref well is a key part of our mission. It’s important that we be as neutral and fair as possible, and we are always striving for that balance. One of our stated principles is “One member, one vote”. And each year we encourage each of our members-standing at over 6000 today-to participate in the election of new board members.

It is hard to believe that November 2nd will be Crossref’s 17th annual meeting and our 16th annual Board of Directors election. How time flies, and oh, how we have grown!

Crossref’s Truths, taken from our forthcoming new website.

I am hoping that we can rally the membership to participate in this important process!

Candidates will be elected at Crossref LIVE16 for three-year terms to fill five of the 16 Board seats whose terms expire this year. The slate of candidates was recommended by the Nominating Committee, which consisted of three Board members not up for re-election, and two Crossref members that are not on the Board.

This year, Jasper Simons, APA; Paul Peters, Hindawi; Jason Wilde, AIP; Chris Fell, Cambridge University Press; and Rebecca Lawrence, f1000 served on the Nominating Committee. The Committee met to discuss the process, criteria, and potential candidates, and put forward a slate which was required to be at least equal to the number of Board seats up for election. The slate may or may not consist of Board members up for re-election.

Crossref members are welcome to run as independent candidates, as long as they have ten member endorsements sent to lhart@crossref.org with the intent to run. We sent a notification of the process in advance (this year on August 26th), so any nominations could be included in the voting materials that will be sent via email on September 30th.