Members on Crossref

Can you help us to launch Distributed Usage Logging?

Kirsty Meddings — Mon, 02 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Update: Deadline extended to 23:59 (UTC) 13th March 2020.

Distributed Usage Logging (DUL) allows publishers to capture traditional usage activity related to their content that happens on sites other than their own so they can provide reports of “total usage”, for example to subscribing institutions, regardless of where that usage happens.

We are looking for a consultant to take the lead with DUL outreach, promoting the service and its benefits in order to solicit participation from publishers (receivers) and content-hosting platforms/scholarly collaboration networks (senders).

Crossref provides the infrastructure for DUL. The call for participation is being led by COUNTER and the selected consultant will be representing COUNTER, with additional support from Crossref

If you are interested in this opportunity, please download the request for information (RFI).

The RFI response deadline is 23:59 (UTC) 13 March 2020.

Leaving Crossref

Ed Pentz — Fri, 14 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Where does the time go…

In my blog post on January 14th about Crossref’s 20th anniversary I said, “The one constant in Crossref’s 20 years has been change”. It’s true that there has been constant change, but there has been another constant at Crossref –– me (and DOIs, to be fair). I started as Crossref’s first employee and Executive Director on February 1st, 2000, so I just marked my 20th anniversary with the organisation.

This milestone prompted me to reflect on where I am and where I’m heading. After 20 years leading the organisation, I’ve decided to leave Crossref. It’s time for a new challenge. I’m still very committed to the mission and very proud of my time at Crossref, the culture we’ve created and what the organisation has achieved. It’s been an honor serving as Executive Director and a pleasure working with so many great people over the years. And to be clear –– I’m not ill, being pushed or having a midlife crisis (yet).

It’s a difficult and emotional decision but I think the transition can be positive for me, the staff, the board, and the organisation. I’ll be working with the Crossref board, Chair, Treasurer and staff on the transition –– the plan is for me to be around through September or October to enable the recruitment and handover to a new Executive Director. There will be more information about the transition and recruitment process after the Crossref board meeting March 11-12 in London.

Crossref has a bright future and many opportunities to do new things. Crossref provides essential, open scholarly infrastructure and services that benefit its members and the wider scholarly research ecosystem –– and we’ve got a lot of interesting things in development and ambitious plans. To anyone who might be interested in being Crossref’s next Executive Director, I can honestly say it is fantastic, challenging, fun, and very fulfilling –– that’s why I’ve done it for 20 years.

What’s next for me? I don’t know but it’s something I’ll be thinking about over the coming months. I do know that working for a mission driven organisation and staying involved with scholarly communications and research –– a fascinating and worthy field –– will be top of my list.

Anyway - it’s back to work and full steam ahead for Crossref!

A Journey of a Crossref Ambassador in Latin America

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

English version –– Información en español

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spanish version

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A turning point is a time for reflection

Ed Pentz — Sat, 09 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Crossref strives for balance. Different people have always wanted different things from us and, since our founding, we have brought together diverse organisations to have discussions—sometimes contentious—to agree on how to help make scholarly communications better. Being inclusive can mean slow progress, but we’ve been able to advance by being flexible, fair, and forward-thinking.

We have been helped by the fact that Crossref’s founding organisations defined a clear purpose in our original certificate of incorporation, which reads:

“To promote the development and cooperative use of new and innovative technologies to speed and facilitate scientific and other scholarly research.”

As Crossref prepares to turn 20 in January 2020, it’s an opportunity to reflect on achievements and highlights from 2018-19 and also ponder the preceding decades. Change is a constant at Crossref but the organisation has never strayed from its initial defined purpose. Our services and value now extend well beyond persistent identifiers and reference linking, and our connected open infrastructure benefits our 11,000+ membership as well as all those involved in scholarly research. This expansion is exactly what was envisioned to meet the goal of “speeding and facilitating” research.

This year’s annual report is different from previous years’; it has been expanded into a ‘fact file’ so that we can invite comments on the path ahead, based on transparent access to data about our membership, activities, and finances. As we were pulling together the charts and tables for this annual report we noticed stark differences in where Crossref is today compared to years past.

The rate of membership growth has accelerated and we now have over 180 new members joining every month, leading to one of the most striking changes we found. The lowest three membership tiers now account for 46% of revenue (up from 25% in 2011) while the highest three tiers account for 36% (down from 56% in 2011).

Today, the typical Crossref member has just a few hundred registered content items.

One way we have been able to accommodate this growth efficiently is by collaborating with sponsors in different countries. Very small members can join via a local sponsor that is able to provide technical, financial, language, and administrative support. We now have more members joining via sponsors, who otherwise would largely not be able to join at all. While you’d need to be a millionaire by US standards to join directly from Indonesia in our lowest fee tier (calculated using Purchasing Power Parity), the sponsor program—supported often by government investment in science and education—has enabled Indonesian organisations to join Crossref in large numbers, supporting their aim to become one of the fastest-growing nations in open research, and to help that research be discovered.

Crossref has repeatedly stayed ahead of developments in the community

In 2007, when the Similarity Check working group discussions and pilot started, there was disagreement on the board about whether Crossref should provide such a service and whether it was a strategic priority for members. By the end of the pilot, when the decision came to launch a production service, it was seen as essential and a top priority. This conclusion has been borne out in recent research into the value of Crossref; Similarity Check is one of the services of most importance to members.

Adding preprints as a record type was controversial at the time. The board discussed the topic of “duplicative works” for about two years with strong opinions on all sides. The working group delivered a good set of policies and technical specifications and in the July 2015 board meeting there was a majority—but not 100%—agreement on the motion to approve. We implemented preprints as a record type just in time to accommodate the snowballing of preprint servers emerging from existing and new members.

Another example of a former—and current—area of contention is the approach to metadata. When Crossref first launched, there were lengthy discussions about what metadata we should collect. The initial focus was on the minimal set of metadata to enable reference matching in support of reference linking. In the beginning, neither article titles, lists of authors, references, nor abstracts were included in the minimal metadata set. We supported them as optional but most members opted out. However, the huge set of metadata that Crossref collects and disseminates now is seen as essential, providing a lot of value for members in terms of discoverability.

Today, Crossref enables metadata retrieval on a large scale—an average of more than 600 million queries per month—through a variety of interfaces, most notably the REST API (Public, Polite, and Plus versions). The metadata is used by thousands of organisations and services—both commercial and not-for-profit—increasing the discoverability of member content. In fact, members of all stripes have long initiated projects to expand the metadata Crossref is able to collect and disseminate: from facilitating text mining (through license and full-text URLs); to enabling better connections with and evidence of contributions (through Funder IDs, ORCID iDs, and soon CRediT roles and ROR IDs).

These are all examples of where Crossref has successfully “promoted the cooperative use of new and innovative technologies” and where we are meeting our mission to make scholarly communications a little bit better. As ever, we need to thank our brilliant staff for their unfailing resilience, balance, and diligence, in these times of dynamic change.

Considering the value and future of Crossref

Research is global, and supporting a diverse global community is a challenge. This year, we conducted our first wide-ranging investigation into what people value from Crossref. This involved telephone interviews with over 40 community members as well as an online survey of 600+ respondents.

The results of the value research are referenced throughout the annual report/fact file and are available online publicly. We will be discussing the insights in various forums and posing some questions, such as:

How should Crossref balance the different dynamics in the community?
Are the right members involved in key decisions?
Are the sustainability model we have and the fees we charge fair?
Which initiatives should be top or bottom priorities?

Director of MIT Press, Amy Brand, recently reflected that Crossref is currently at a crossroads, envisioning that:

“The Crossref of 2040 could be an even more robust, inclusive, and innovative consortium to create and sustain core infrastructures for sharing, preserving, and evaluating research information.”

But only if Crossref is not:

“held back, and its remit circumscribed, by legacy priorities and forces within the industry that may perceive open data and infrastructure as a threat to their own evolving business interests.”

We welcome this public commentary and encourage others in the community to respond and report what value Crossref offers as community-owned infrastructure, and how they’d like to see the organisation evolve.

More than ever, we need to have this discussion with a broad and representative group. So please, read the value research report and the annual report/fact file, and get ready to voice your opinions!

Phew - its been quite a year

Ed Pentz — Thu, 13 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

As the end of the year approaches it’s useful to look back and reflect on what we’ve achieved over the last 12 months—a lot! To be honest, there were some things we didn’t get done—or didn’t make as much progress with as we hoped—but that happens when you have an ambitious agenda. However, we also got some things done that we didn’t expect to or that weren’t even on our radar at the end of 2017—this is inevitable as the research and scholarly communications landscape is rapidly changing.

In my blog post from the beginning of the year, the key projects I highlighted were Metadata Plus, Event Data, organisation IDs, Grant IDs and Metadata 2020, and that richer metadata and more record types were key goals. We did make very good progress on all of these projects as reported below.

For 2018 we were operating in the framework of the four strategic themes, or areas of focus, developed by the board and staff. These are: 1) Simplifying and enriching our services; 2) Improving our metadata; 3) Expanding constituencies, and 4) Selectively collaborating and partnering. These themes will also be guiding us in 2019.

Simplifying and enriching our services

Upgrading our tools

Over the past year, we’ve been busy streamlining our processes, developing new tools and adding new services. A key new tool is Metadata Manager which supports the Content Registration service by offering a simpler, more user-friendly, non-technical way to register and update metadata. It provides lots of context-sensitive help, registers content immediately, in real time, and provides guidance on how to make corrections—thereby ensuring each deposit is successful. Metadata Manager currently supports journal deposits (we would have liked to add more in 2018) but we will be adding other record types in 2019.

Upgrading our services

Crossref metadata has always been open through a number of interfaces without restriction, but this year we introduced an option for extra support and functionality, through Metadata Plus. Metadata Plus provides guaranteed uptime, snapshots of the complete set of metadata and enhanced support for organisations (members or not) that want to use Crossref metadata in their own services and systems.

Improving the member experience: New membership terms

This year we began to redesign the member experience and have made a lot of improvements to the sign-up and onboarding process, the most significant of which is the new click-through membership terms, introduced in July for new members and coming into effect for existing members in March 2019, which is proving to be a huge time saver for both our members and our team.

Improving our metadata

Our objective this year was to better communicate what metadata best practice is, to equip our members with all the data and tools they need to meet this best practice, and to achieve closer cooperation from service providers.

Best practice tools: Participation Reports

Released in Beta in August this year, Participation Reports provides a dashboard that gives a clear picture of the metadata that each member provides. This is a useful visualization of metadata that has long been available via our public REST API. Members can see where the gaps in the metadata are and get information on how to fill those gaps.

Communicating metadata best practice: Data Citations

The importance of linking data with literature can’t be understated. Research integrity and reproducibility depend on it. We’re committed to exposing the links between the literature and the data or software that supports it, and earlier this year we partnered with DataCite to make this a reality. All the data citations coming in from Crossref and DataCite are being pulled into Event Data.

Equipping members with all the data: Event Data

Event Data reached technical readiness. Event Data captures and records “events” such as comments, links, shares, bookmarks, and references. It provides open, transparent, and traceable information about the provenance and context of every event.

Expand constituencies

Crossref currently has 15,000 members in 140 countries. With that comes the need to increasingly and proactively work with emerging markets as they start to share research outputs globally.

Ambassador program

The Crossref Ambassador program launched in January and now has a team of 16 trusted contacts who work within our communities (as librarians, researchers, publishers, and innovators) around the world. They share great enthusiasm and belief in our work. We provide them with training and support, and they help us improve education about global research infrastructure in general and the opportunities that are enabled through richer metadata.

Funders and grant identifiers

I’m very happy to report that the Crossref board approved grants as a new record/resource type to be rolled out in 2019 - we made faster progress on this than expected. The proposal for grant identifiers was developed by staff in collaboration with the Crossref Funder Advisory Group and the Membership and Fees Committee. This means that funders will be joining Crossref and registering a standard set of metadata and a persistence identifier - a DOI - for their grants.

Collaborate and partner

So that our alliances with others have the greatest impact, we have aligned our strategic plans for scholarly infrastructure with others. Some of these alliances are led or driven by Crossref and with others we are involved but not leading.

ROR

We are working with the California Digital Library, DataCite and Digital Science as the Steering group for ROR - the Research Organization Registry - which is a new, community-led project that is developing an open, sustainable, usable, and unique identifier for research organisations based on the work done by the organisation Identifier Working Group in 2017 and 2018.

Metadata 2020

Metadata 2020 is a collaboration that advocates richer, connected, and reusable, open metadata for all research outputs, which will advance scholarly pursuits for the benefit of society. Over 140 volunteers—including publishers, librarians, researchers, platforms/tools, and other stakeholders—from 86 organisations, are working in six project groups. The projects are very strategically focused, looking at key issues like researcher communications, incentives, and shared best practices.

I can’t close off the year without mentioning the incredible milestone we reached this September when the 100th million content item was registered with Crossref. This was made possible by our members’ and the wider community’s commitment and contribution, so once again, thank you.

Roll on 2019!

Are you having an identity crisis?

Amanda Bartell — Fri, 23 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

We work with a huge range of organisations in the scholarly communications world—publishers, libraries, universities, government agencies, funders, publishing service providers, and researcher services providers—and you each have different relationships with us.

Some of you are members who create and disseminate your own content, register it with us by depositing metadata, and help steer our future by voting in our annual board elections. Some of you don’t vote in our board elections but do play a vital role by registering content on members’ behalf.

And some of you make use of the metadata provided by our members and so perform a key service by getting their published works out into the world, but don’t vote in our board elections.

After a recent review we realized our Member Types weren’t completely clear, and may in fact have led to a bit of confusion. With this in mind, we put some thought into their revision and have now given them the clarity they were missing. Over the course of this year we’ll be checking that everyone is in the right group and getting the appropriate support based on your Member Type.

Former Member Type name	New Member Type name
Publisher	Member
Sponsoring Publisher	Sponsoring Member
Represented Member	Sponsored Member
Sponsoring Entity	Sponsoring organisation
Sponsored Member	Sponsored organisation
Affiliate	Metadata User
Service Provider	(No change to Member Type name)

So, what’s different?

The changes we’ve made help to differentiate if you’re a voting member (and therefore have a say in our future direction), or not. If you are a voting member, you’ll now have the word “Member” in your title—and if you’re not—you won’t, as the diagram below indicates.

Where there are two organisations with a sponsorship arrangement in place (with a sponsoring party and a sponsored party), one of you will always be the voting party, and the other will be non-voting. These partnerships will therefore always contain one “Member” and one “organisation”.

We’ve also stopped using the word “Publisher” in our Member Types as not all our members consider themselves to be publishers — sometimes you’re libraries, funders, scholars, repositories, etc. As it says in one of our truths “Come one, come all: we define publishing broadly. If you communicate research and care about preserving the scholarly record, join us.”

How do you know if you are a voting member?

Voting members fall into three Member Types: Members, Sponsoring Members and Sponsored Members.

This means you are organisations who create and disseminate content, and therefore contribute to the scholarly record. Some of you register your content directly with us and some via a third party, but the key thing is that you’re adding to our metadata records, and as such can have a say in the future direction of Crossref. Voting members can also take metadata out of our system — and many of you do — however, your key relationship with us is as a member who is contributing to the scholarly record.

It also means you have obligations to keep your records up-to-date, and maximize links with other Crossref members.

What’s the difference between the voting categories?

Members
As a Member (formerly known as Publishers), you create and disseminate content, register your own content with us (usually under a single prefix), and are able to vote in our board elections. You pay an annual fee based on your publishing revenue, plus Content Registration fees for all new DOIs.

Sponsoring Members
As a Sponsoring Member (formerly known as a Sponsoring Publisher), you do everything a standard member does, but as well as registering your own content under your own DOI prefix, you also register content on behalf of other, smaller publishers (ideally using separate DOI prefixes so the metadata is accurate and can be reported on separately and relied upon downstream).

When you vote, you vote on behalf of the organisations that you sponsor. You pay an annual fee based on your publishing revenue/expenses plus the publishing revenue of your sponsored organisations, and you also pay Content Registration fees for all new metadata records registered. You look after deposit billing for the organisations you sponsor, and provide technical and language support for them.

Some of our larger members may be thinking that you should be in this Member Type - and you’re probably right! During the course of 2018 we’ll be working with you to transition you over to Sponsoring Membership. If you are a Member who is thinking of becoming a Sponsoring Member, please get in touch.

Sponsored Members
As a Sponsored Member (formerly known as a Represented Member), you create and disseminate content, but you don’t register your content directly with us—this is done by your Sponsoring organisation. Because of this it’s you, the one who creates and disseminates the content and thus contributes to the scholarly record, who can vote.

How do you know if you are a non-voting member?

If you haven’t spotted yourself yet, you may be one of the non-voting organisations we work with — these fall into four Member Types: Sponsoring organisations, Sponsored organisations, Service Providers and Metadata Users.

As a non-voting organisation, you may still register content with us, but you either don’t create and disseminate the content yourselves, or you’re already represented by a voting organisation. Non-voting organisations also include those whose only relationship with us is to make use of our metadata.

What’s the difference between the non-voting categories?

Sponsoring organisations
As a Sponsoring organisation (formerly known as a Sponsoring Affiliate), you don’t create and disseminate content yourself, but you do register content with us on behalf of your Sponsored Members — preferably using distinct DOI prefixes for each member. You also often look after their administrative, technical, billing and language support needs. You’ll pay us an annual fee based on the publishing revenue of all your members, and Content Registration fees for all new DOIs. You might charge the members you work with for this service. You also provide support and promotion of our services and activities.

Sponsored organisations
As a Sponsored organisation (formerly known as a Sponsored Member), you do create and disseminate content yourself, but you don’t register your own content. This is done by a Sponsoring Member, and as they have the member vote, you can’t have one too. For this reason, we’ve removed the word “Member” from your title, to make your voting position clearer. Of course, your Sponsoring Member needs to represent your needs too when voting, so make sure you make them known!

Service Providers
As a Service Provider you work closely with our members to collect and/or host and/or deposit metadata on their behalf. Unlike a Sponsoring organisation however you don’t get involved with administrative, technical, billing or language support for the members you work with, but you’re a key partner in helping them deposit quality metadata and contribute effectively to the scholarly record. During 2018 we’ll be working more closely with you to help you collaborate with us more effectively.

Metadata Users
Metadata Users (formerly known as Affiliates), you are the organisations who don’t register content with us, but you do make use of it through our free and open APIs and search interfaces, or our paid-for Metadata Plus service, giving you access to a premium version of both the REST API and OAI-PMH. Of course all members can get metadata out of our systems as well, but if the only thing you do with us is get metadata out, then you’re a Metadata User.

Don’t know which Member Type you are?

We’re hoping these new names make it clearer, but if you’re still confused, please get in touch with our membership specialist

No longer lost in translation

Christine Cormack Wood — Tue, 30 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

More than 80% of the record breaking 1,939 new members we welcomed in 2017 were from non-English speaking countries, and as our member base grows in its diversity, so does the need for us to share information about Crossref and its services in languages appropriate to our changing audience.

So, early last year we started translating our service videos into six other languages: French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. However, the process of translating from one language to another is not always straightforward—but it is super important—as some things can get seriously lost in translation…

||||

In order to avoid such translation tragedies we created a foolproof process to get the text of the service videos translated and ready for production. (I am, I realize, exposing myself here—see what I did there? —by using a word like foolproof.)

First we produced the videos in English, setting the content to animation and sound (AKA audio visual or A/V to us marketing types), then we brought in a translation company to turn the English content into the six other languages. So far so good. However, as the above examples demonstrate, the meaning of words can get lost in translation. Also, what Crossref does isn’t the easiest thing in the world to translate (are there words for metadata delivery and full-text XML in Japanese?), so we added another stage to the process.

Next, we sent the translated scripts and their English counterparts to some very helpful international members who, as part of the scholarly research community, understand the complexities of our work and are therefore qualified to check that the text had remained in context.

Unfortunately, it hadn’t, as the text came back from them heavily edited. After round two of the editing process, the revised text was applied to the videos—but just to be 100% sure, we sent the completed videos back to our helpful international members for a final run through.

Multiply this painstaking process by 48 videos, throw numerous time zones into the mix and you can see why it took us nearly 12 months to complete them.

And so, it is with great pleasure that today we launch all eight of our service videos in six languages, just click the links below, and enjoy! Découvrez-les! ¡Que los disfrutes! Aproveite! 请欣赏! どうぞお楽しみください！ 즐거운 시간 되세요!

			View videos by language
English	French	Spanish	Brazilian Portuguese	Simplified Chinese	Japanese	Korean
English	français	español	português do Brasil	简体中文	日本語	한국어로

We’d like to thank the following for their help in checking the video translations: Fabienne Meyers from IUCAP for the French versions, our very own resident translator Vanessa Fairhurst for the Spanish versions, Edilson Damasio from the University Library of Maringá for the Brazilian Portuguese versions, Guo Xiaofeng from Wanfang Data for the Chinese versions, Nobuko Miyairi from ORCID for the Japanese versions and Junghyo from Nurimedia and Jae Hwa Chang at infoLumi for the Korean versions.

A year in the life of Crossref

Ed Pentz — Tue, 23 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

We are delighted to report that last year Crossref welcomed a record-breaking 1,939 new members and, because our member base is growing so rapidly in both headcount and geography—with the highest number of new members joining from Asia—we thought it was a good time to reiterate what Crossref is all about, as well as show off a little about the things we are proud to have achieved in 2017.

What is Crossref?

We are an organisation that runs a registry of metadata and DOIs of course, but we are much more than that—staff, board, working groups, and committees as well as a broad range of collaborators, users, and supporters in the wider scholarly communications community. Increasingly, our community includes new contributors like scholars, funders, and universities. Together, we are all working toward the same goal—to enhance scholarly communications. Everything we do is designed to put scholarly content in context so that the content our members publish can be found, cited, used, and re-used.

Here’s how we did that over the past year:

We rallied the community

Rallying the community is all about working together to forge new relationships and pave the way for future generations of researchers—in 2017 we were closely involved with the launch of Metadata 2020; a collaboration that advocates richer, connected, and reusable metadata for all research outputs.

We tagged and shared metadata

To make sure that our APIs continue to have real, genuine utility, we introduced a new service called Metadata Plus in 2017 so that platforms and tools can leverage the power of our rich, immense database to increase the value and discoverability of content.

We played with new technology

To keep pace with changes in the industry and stay true to our mission, we often play with new technology with the goal of offering a bigger and better infrastructure. In 2017 we formed a working group and an advisory group for two new identifiers that will see this infrastructure increase; organisation IDs which became ROR, and Grant IDs which became the Crossref Grant Linking System.

We made new tools and services

Combining our own knowledge and experience with input from the wider community, in 2017 we were able to launch in Beta a new and exciting tool called Event Data. Event Data provides a record of where research has been bookmarked, linked, recommended, shared, referenced, commented on etc, beyond publisher platforms—which is a great example of putting scholarly research in a wider context.

So, while richer metadata (including more record and resource types) remains our focus 2018 and beyond, we also hope that as we become a bigger and more global community we can move beyond the basics and work together to make sure that DOIs, are not the be-all and end-all when they are, in fact, just the beginning.