News Release on Crossref

Collaboration with Knowledge Futures to build support for high-volume DOI registration

Travis Rich — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Cross-posted from the Knowledge Futures blog.

For many years, PubPub has made it possible for communities to assign DOIs to a range of outputs and component Pubs. Knowledge Futures and Crossref are building together to test the limits of what’s possible for high-volume, high-granularity DOI management. That means fast prototypes, real building, and learning through the process.

What this looks like

We’re starting by building. The goal is to get working prototypes in front of real use cases as quickly as we can, and let the technical, UX, operational, and infrastructure questions get answered through that process. What does it take to register and manage DOIs at a level of volume and granularity that goes beyond what most existing tools support? We’ll find out by trying.

A broader orientation for KF

This is also an example of where Knowledge Futures is headed more generally. We’re taking what we’ve learned from building publishing infrastructure and applying it across different parts of the scholarly communication ecosystem. Not siloed within PubPub development, but open to building more broadly and collaborating across organizational lines.

We’ve spent close to a decade learning what it takes to build and maintain reliable infrastructure for knowledge communities. That experience doesn’t have to live inside one product. We think working this way puts us in a stronger position as stewards of the things we maintain, and it opens the door to more collaboration across the ecosystem.

Aligned direction with Crossref

As Crossref adoption has skyrocketed, enabling DOIs for a vast range of research objects and organizations, they are looking to support these objects at scale and further upstream than traditional outputs. Alongside its fee remodelling effort begun in 2023, Crossref is backing this work with a $258k investment, partnering with Knowledge Futures to explore new models for the future of open research infrastructure.

Get involved

We’d love to hear your thoughts about high-volume, high-granularity DOIs. What’s your use case? What would it unlock for your community? Want to be involved in the design process? This collaboration with Crossref is just one piece of where we’re headed. If you’re curious about what we’re up to, or have something you’d like to share with us, get in touch. We’d love to tell you what we’re working on and hear what excites you too.

Renewed partnership: DOAJ and Crossref focus on equitable scholarly metadata and global support

Reyhana Mahomed — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We have renewed our partnership with DOAJ to focus on a new set of objectives that reflect both organisations’ commitment to improving sustainable and equitable services and infrastructure. This renewed collaboration focuses on improving the quality of scholarly metadata while expanding support for journals in low- and middle income- countries.

We have worked together since 2021, primarily to encourage the dissemination and use of scholarly research using online technologies, and regional and international networks, partners and communities. This partnership has helped to build local institutional capacity and sustainability within the global scholarly communication ecosystem. A continued partnership also reflects that we have a shared community; currently almost 90% of DOAJ journals are represented in Crossref.

Our renewed collaboration will support:

Article Metadata Enhancements: DOAJ will improve the ingestion, processing, storage, and display of article-level metadata. Improvements include:

Author affiliations and persistent identifiers
Open references
Expanded metadata harvesting

These enhancements are expected to benefit both direct users of DOAJ and downstream discovery, aggregation, and research analytics services that rely on DOAJ metadata.

Ambassador Programme: Our collaboration with DOAJ will support the continued development of DOAJ’s Ambassador programme. This global network of ambassadors primarily based in low- and middle-income countries:

Support journal editors in understanding and applying good practices in open access publishing
Organise and deliver workshops, webinars, and local events
Collaborate with regional partners and policymakers
Raise awareness of DOAJ and publishing standards within local scholarly communities

Crossref’s contribution will support ambassador travel and the organisation of workshops and events.

We value our longstanding collaboration with Crossref. As fellow open scholarly infrastructures, we share a commitment to strengthening the systems that support trusted, global research discovery. This new partnership enables DOAJ to move forward with important work around interoperability. Improving how infrastructures connect and exchange information is a priority for us, and this support helps ensure we can continue to serve the community in line with the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure—with openness, collaboration, and long-term sustainability at the centre.

– Joanna Ball, Managing Director of DOAJ

The collaborations with DOAJ so far only reaffirmed our shared goal to help make the global scholarly communications system more equitable wherever we can. Our joint projects aim to seek out and devise support for resource-constrained journals in multiple ways. DOAJ’s work is essential in helping journals to adopt good practice, while Crossref offers an open infrastructure to ensure all journals can be included and discoverable in the global scholarly record.

– Ginny Hendricks, Chief Program Officer at Crossref

About DOAJ

DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer reviewed journals. DOAJ deploys around one hundred carefully selected volunteers from the community of library and other academic disciplines to assist in curating open access journals. This independent database contains over 20,400 peer-reviewed open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts and humanities. DOAJ is financially supported worldwide by libraries, publishers and other like-minded organizations. DOAJ services (including the evaluation of journals) are free for all, and all data provided by DOAJ are harvestable via OAI/PMH and the API. See https://doaj.org/ for more information.

Contact: DOAJ - Joanna Ball, Managing Director - joanna@doaj.org.

About Crossref

Crossref is a non-profit organisation that runs an open infrastructure to link research objects, entities, and actions, creating a lasting and reusable scholarly record that underpins open science. Together with their 24,000 members in 166 countries, Crossref drives metadata exchange and supports nearly 2 billion monthly API queries, facilitating global research communication, for the benefit of society.

Contact: Crossref - Kora Korzec, Director of Community – kkorzec@crossref.org.

New tool to report on completeness of open research information globally

Kornelia Korzec — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Wednesday 22nd October 2025—Crossref, the open scholarly infrastructure nonprofit, today releases an enhanced dashboard showing metadata coverage and individual organisations’ contributions to documenting the process and outputs of scientific research in the open. The tool helps research-performing, funding, and publishing organisations identify gaps in open research information, and provides supporting evidence for movements like the Barcelona Declaration for Open Research Information, which encourages more substantial commitment to stewarding and enriching the scholarly record through open metadata.

Crossref’s Participation Reports now offer expanded features and provide full coverage of all members and all resource types registered with Crossref DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers)—over 175 million records representing a significant share of global research production from organisations in 164 countries. Each of Crossref’s 23,000 members has a dashboard to visualise their metadata contributions, display coverage of key information for scholarly works, and get actionable feedback via a gap report that specifies records that need enrichment, all helping to make more transparent the work that goes into creating and curating the scholarly record.

For any Crossref member—whether journal publisher, research funder, university, or museum—coverage of up to 11 key elements is public and visible to everyone, including: references, abstracts, ORCID iDs, affiliation strings, ROR IDs, Open Funder Registry IDs, funding award numbers, text-mining URLs, licence URLs, Similarity Check URLs (for text-based plagiarism checking) and the presence of a Crossmark policy, indicating the organisation’s commitment to declare corrections and retractions. These metadata elements provide greater context and visibility for research objects such as journal articles and preprints, grants and awards, books and book chapters, standards, datasets, conference papers and various ‘other’ content such as scholarly blogs, images, and even physical museum artefacts.

Mochammad Tanzil Multazam, Library Director of Universitas Muhammadiyah Sidoarjo, and Secretary of the Supervisory Board of Relawan Jurnals, says, “As a sponsoring organisation for several thousand small publishers across Indonesia, we support Crossref members to register complete metadata for their works. Despite time and resource constraints, this new actionable open report on key metadata elements will help drive improvements in the information they share for their publications. This has wide-reaching implications for the visibility of that research and trust among the community, and therefore has the potential to support Indonesian scholarship in the global context.”

Lena Stoll, Program Lead at Crossref, explains, “We are happy to have extended participation reports to cover more diverse record types, including grants, datasets, dissertations, and more, and to make it easier for our members to act on their ongoing improvements to enrich their records and build towards the vision of an open and more complete Research Nexus.”

Ludo Waltman, Scientific Director and Professor of Quantitative Science Studies at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University, comments, “As a representative of the researcher and metascience communities, this data is of great importance for us to analyse the trends and effects of global research activity. Crossref is one of the main driving forces in open infrastructure, and its commitment to supporting metadata completeness through this open reporting dashboard is a significant step for the open research information movement.”

Access Crossref Participation Reports and search for any Crossref member organisation.

Participation report for a typical Crossref member, Universidad La Salle Arequipa in Peru

About Crossref

Crossref runs an open infrastructure to link research objects, entities, and actions, creating a lasting and reusable scholarly record that underpins open science. Together with their 23,000 members in 164 countries, Crossref drives metadata exchange and supports nearly 2 billion monthly API queries, facilitating global research communication, for the benefit of society.

Crossref and PKP enter new partnership phase to support richer and more inclusive metadata

Kornelia Korzec — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Crossref and the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) have been working closely together for many years, sharing resources and supporting our overlapping communities of organisations involved in communicating research. Now we’re delighted to share that we have agreed on a new set of objectives for our partnership, centred on further development of the tools that our shared community relies upon, as well as building capacity to enable richer metadata registration for organisations using the Open Journal Systems (OJS).

Crossref is working towards the vision of a rich and open network underpinning global scholarship, making relationships between works, people, institutions, and actions visible, thanks to the thread of metadata – the research nexus. This vision depends upon participation of research communication organisations coming from all parts of the world, disciplines, and languages. Working with PKP towards making tools for metadata registration more comprehensive, accessible, and easier to use is a big step towards supporting our community to participate in the research nexus.

The renewed partnership has three main goals:

Developments to improve experience and support metadata registration workflows in OJS, bringing relevant functionalities together under the Crossref plug-in, and developing an OMP Crossref plug-in.
Joint community engagement in support of transitioning OJS users to the future Long-Term Support (LTS) version of OJS, which will enable richer metadata registration.
Creation of a PKP School self-paced training course for system administrators.

Crossref and PKP have a rich history of collaboration, including previous investment in tools development in 2020, which resulted in some vital improvements to Crossref metadata management in OJS and a more streamlined experience for Crossref members on the platform, as well as many collaborative community events and training.

We know that thousands of Crossref members use OJS to register their metadata. Many are based in resource-constrained institutions, so the training provided by Crossref and PKP will be key to building their capacity to participate in the research nexus. With OJS 3.5 empowering organisations to register richer metadata, we look forward to opening up more opportunities for members to enhance their participation.

At PKP, we’re excited to deepen our longstanding collaboration with Crossref, supporting our global community in amplifying the visibility and impact of their research through streamlined integration for robust metadata management. By working together on both technological innovation and capacity-building initiatives, we anticipate even greater outcomes that will strengthen open scholarship throughout the duration of this partnership and well into the future.” – said Kevin Stranack, PKP Director of Operations.

– Kevin Stranack, PKP Director of Operations

About Crossref

About PKP

Public Knowledge Project (PKP) seeks to improve the scholarly and public quality, reach, and diversity of academic research through the research, development, implementation, and support of innovative open source software to support scholarly publishing and communication.

News: Crossref and Retraction Watch

Ginny Hendricks — Tue, 12 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Crossref acquires Retraction Watch data and opens it for the scientific community

Agreement to combine and publicly distribute data about tens of thousands of retracted research papers, and grow the service together

12th September 2023 —– The Center for Scientific Integrity, the organisation behind the Retraction Watch blog and database, and Crossref, the global infrastructure underpinning research communications, both not-for-profits, announced today that the Retraction Watch database has been acquired by Crossref and made a public resource. An agreement between the two organisations will allow Retraction Watch to keep the data populated on an ongoing basis and always open, alongside publishers registering their retraction notices directly with Crossref.

Both organisations have a shared mission to make it easier to assess the trustworthiness of scholarly outputs. Retractions are an important part of science and scholarship regulating themselves and are a sign that academic publishing is doing its job. But there are more journals and papers than ever, so identifying and tracking retracted papers has become much harder for publishers and readers. That, in turn, makes it difficult for readers and authors to know whether they are reading or citing work that has been retracted. Combining efforts to create the largest single open-source database of retractions reduces duplication, making it more efficient, transparent, and accessible for all.

Product Director Rachael Lammey says, “Crossref is focused on documenting and clarifying the scholarly record in an open and scalable form. For a decade, our members have been recording corrections and retractions through our infrastructure, and incorporating the Crossmark button to alert readers. Collaborating with Retraction Watch augments publisher efforts by filling in critical gaps in our coverage, helps the downstream services that rely on high-quality, open data about retractions, and ultimately directly benefits the research community.”

The Center for Scientific Integrity and the Retraction Watch blog will remain separate from Crossref and will continue their journalistic work investigating retractions and related issues; the agreement with Crossref is confined to the database only and Crossref itself remains a neutral facilitator in efforts to assess the quality of scientific works. Both organisations consider publishers to be the primary stewards of the scholarly record and they are encouraged to continue to add retractions to their Crossref metadata as a priority.

“Retraction Watch has always worked to make our highly comprehensive and accurate retraction data available to as many people as possible. We are deeply grateful to the foundations, individuals, and members of the publishing services industry who have supported our efforts and laid the groundwork for this development,” said Ivan Oransky, executive director of the Center for Scientific Integrity and co-founder of Retraction Watch. “This agreement means that the Retraction Watch Database has sustainable funding to allow its work to continue and improve.”

Please join Crossref and Retraction Watch leadership, among other special guests, for a community call on 27th September at 1 p.m. UTC to discuss this new development in the pursuit of research integrity.

Supporting details

Crossref retractions number 14k, and the Retraction Watch database currently numbers 43k. There is some overlap, making a total of around 50k retractions.
The full dataset has been released through Crossref’s Labs API, initially as a .csv file to download directly: https://api-labs-crossref-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/data/retractionwatch?name@email.org (add your ‘mailto’). Edit: 2024-10-10: The full dataset is available in a git repository at https://gitlab.com/crossref/retraction-watch-data.
The Crossref Labs API also displays information about retractions in the /works/ route when metadata is available, such as https://api-labs-crossref-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/works/10.2147/CMAR.S324920?name@email.org (add your ‘mailto’). If you don’t have a .json viewer, please see below for screenshot.
Crossref is paying an initial acquisition fee of USD $175,000 and will pay Retraction Watch USD $120,000 each year, increasing by 5% each year.
The initial term of the contract is five years. ~~The full text of the contract will be made public in the coming fortnight.~~ EDIT 2023-09-26: Here is the signed agreement.
There will be a community call on 27th September at 1 p.m. UTC (your time zone here). Please register.
An open FAQ document is available to collect questions to be answered at the webinar.
This announcement will always be accessible via Crossref DOI https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.13003/c23rw1d9; please use this persistent link for sharing.

About Retraction Watch and The Center for Scientific Integrity

The Center for Scientific Integrity is a U.S. 501(c)3 non-profit whose mission is to promote transparency and integrity in science and scientific publishing, and to disseminate best practices and increase efficiency in science. In addition to maintaining and curating the Retraction Watch Database, the Center is the home of Retraction Watch, a blog founded in 2010 that reports on scholarly retractions and related issues in research integrity.

About Crossref

Crossref is a global community infrastructure that makes all kinds of research objects easy to find, assess, and reuse through a number of services critical to research communications, including an open metadata API that sees over 2 billion queries every month. Crossref’s >19,000 members come from 151 countries and are predominantly university-based. Their ~150 million DOI records contribute to the collective vision of a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organisations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society.

Enquiries

For Retraction Watch/Center for Scientific Integrity: Ivan Oransky, ivan@retractionwatch.com
For Crossref: Ginny Hendricks, ginny@crossref.org

A screenshot of an example Labs API metadata record with a Retraction Watch-asserted retraction

Introducing our new Global Equitable Membership (GEM) program

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

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

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

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

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

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

Existing Crossref members in GEM-eligible countries

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

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

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

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

DOAJ and Crossref sign agreement to remove barriers to scholarly publishing for all

Ginny Hendricks — Mon, 21 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

22 June 2021, London, UK and Boston, MA, USA — The future of global open access publishing received a boost today with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and Crossref. The MOU formalizes an already strong partnership between the two organisations and furthers their shared pursuit of an open scholarly communications ecosystem that is inclusive of emerging publishing communities.

Both organisations aim to encourage the dissemination and use of scholarly research using open infrastructure, online technologies, regional and international networks, and community partners - all supporting local institutional capacity and sustainability around the world.

“DOAJ is delighted to be formalizing today’s agreement with Crossref, an organisation we are already closely aligned with. Together we stand a greater chance of encouraging an open, fair, and fully inclusive future for scholarly publishing,” said Lars Bjørnshauge, DOAJ Founder and Managing Director.

The agreement will enable content from journals indexed on DOAJ to be more easily identified through the use of Crossref metadata. The MOU also covers the exchange of a variety of services and information and greater coordination of technical and strategic requirements between DOAJ and Crossref. Included too is the development of outreach and training materials, coordination of service and feature development, as well as research studies to explore the overlaps and gaps in the journals and metadata covered by each organisation.

“As academic-led journals continue to grow in number and geographic reach, it’s important we support this community more effectively. Our partnership with DOAJ means we can share strategies, data, and resources in order to lower barriers for emerging publishers around the world,” said Ginny Hendricks, Crossref’s Director of Member & Community Outreach.

About DOAJ

DOAJ is a community curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer reviewed journals. DOAJ deploys more than one hundred carefully selected volunteers from among the community of library and other academic disciplines to assist in the curation of open access journals. This independent database contains over 15,000 peer-reviewed open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts and humanities. DOAJ is financially supported worldwide by libraries, publishers and other like-minded organisations. DOAJ services (including the evaluation of journals) are free for all, and all data provided by DOAJ are harvestable via OAI/PMH and the API. See doaj.org for more information.

About Crossref

Crossref makes research objects easy to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse. We’re a not-for-profit membership organisation that exists to make scholarly communications better. We rally the community; tag and share metadata; run an open infrastructure; play with technology; and make tools and services—all to help put research in context. Visit crossref.org for further information.

Please contact louise@doaj.org or feedback@crossref.org with any questions.

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.

Making peer reviews citable, discoverable, and creditable

Ginny Hendricks — Mon, 11 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

A number of our members have asked if they can register their peer reviews with us. They believe that discussions around scholarly works should have DOIs and be citable to provide further context and provenance for researchers reading the article. To that end, we can announce some pertinent news as we enter Peer Review Week 2017 : Crossref infrastructure is soon to be extended to manage DOIs for peer reviews. Launching next month will be support for this new resource/record type, with schema specifically dedicated to the reviews and discussions of scholarly content.

Not disimilar to other registered resources (datasets, working papers, preprints, translations, etc.) publication peer reviews are important scholarly contributions in their own right and form a part of the scholarly record. In addition to the members who have been registering them, many more are looking to better handle these contributions and give recognition to this process which is so critical to maintaining scientific quality.

Here are a few examples of existing Crossref DOIs for peer reviews: https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.1016/j.engfracmech.2015.01.019 and https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.5194/wes-1-177-2016 and https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.14322/PUBLONS.R518142.

We are extending our infrastructure to support all members who make these scholarly discussions available to readers. To accommodate a wide range of publisher practices, this will include a range of outputs made publicly available from the peer review history, across any and all review rounds, including referee reports, decision letters, and author responses. Members will be able to include not only scholarly discussions of journal articles before but also after publication (e.g. “post-publication reviews”).

Central to this new feature of the Crossref Content Registration service is the special set of metadata dedicated to supporting the discovery and investigation of peer reviews as it is linked up to the article discussed. The peer review schema will provide a characterization of the peer review asset (for example: recommendation, type, license, contributor info, competing interests) as well as offer a view into the review process (e.g. pre/post-publication, revision round, review date).

Our custom support for peer reviews will ensure that:

Readers can see provenance and get context of a work
Links to this content persist over time
The metadata is useful
They are connected to the full history of the published results
Contributors are given credit for their work (we will ask for ORCID iDs)
The citation record is clear and up-to-date.

As with all the content registered with Crossref, we will make peer review metadata available for machine and human access, across multiple interfaces (e.g. REST API, OAI-PMH, Crossref Metadata Search) to enable discoverability across the research ecosystem. This metadata may also support enrichment of scholarly discussion, reviewer accountability, publishing transparency, analysis or research on peer reviews, and so on.

To reflect the nature of this special content, we will bundle the fees for peer review content fees into the cost of registering the article for members who publish the journal article and its peer reviews. No matter how many reviews are associated with a paper, there will be a fixed fee for the full set.

Peer review infrastructure will arrive at Crossref in one month, and we are excited to engage our members who want to assign DOIs to peer reviews or migrate previously registered review content to the new schema. A special thanks to the members so far who have given feedback and advice to develop the schema: BMC, The BMJ, Copernicus, eLife, PeerJ, and Publons.

Please contact our membership specialist if you’d like to know more.

What are there 80 million of?

Ginny Hendricks — Fri, 08 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

As of this week, there are 80,000,000 scholarly items registered with Crossref!

By the way, we update these interesting Crossref stats regularly and you can search the metadata.

The 80 millionth scholarly item is [drumroll…] Management Approaches in Beihagi History from the journal Oman Chapter of Arabian Journal of Business and Management Review, published by Al Manhal in the United Arab Emirates.

There have been loads of changes since Wiley registered “Designer selves: Construction of technologically mediated identity within graphical, multiuser virtual environments” with the DOI http://dx.doi.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(1999)50:10<855::AID-ASI3>3.0.CO;2-6), which happens to have been Crossref’s first official DOI (after many prototype deposits).

In the beginning, most of our new members came from the United States and Europe. Now, lots of our members and affiliates come from other parts of the world.

Ed Pentz was Crossref’s first (and only) employee in February 2000. Now it takes 30 of us to manage the 80 million records and over 5,300 participating organisations and to work on projects like Crossref Event Data, ‘early content registration’ , and all the new stuff you’ll be hearing about later this year.

Maybe in the context of social media services (e.g. Facebook users) 80,000,000 does not seem like such a big number. But 80,000,000 is an important milestone. Just think —

There are also 80 million microbes in a 10 second kiss [Microbiome, 2014, 2:41, Kort et al].

And after 80 million years of extinction events, we’re all still here!

What else is 80 million? Tell us in a tweet using #Crossref80mil. There may be a prize!

Crossref has 80 million registered content items

The logo has landed

Ginny Hendricks — Wed, 11 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The rebranding of Crossref was top priority when I joined in May in a new role called “Director of Member & Community Outreach”. Since then I’ve been working to understand the array of services, attributes, and audiences we have developed; to answer the questions “What do we do, for whom, and why?”

As Crossref prepares to celebrate turning fifteen at our annual meeting next week, I am thrilled to present our new brand identity with key messages and logo. And along with “thrilled” you may also detect “nervous excitement”.

Over the last few months we have reviewed earlier research and talked with a number of members, affiliates, and academics. Turns out we’re the plain talkers of the industry, the do-ers, the scrappy people who get stuff done, chivvy others along, and in some cases we are—dare I say it—the voice of reason!

While balancing differing views within the scholarly community, we’re all about making connections – literally and figuratively. We help bring together people and metadata in pursuit of an excellent research communications system for all. And, to mirror one of Ed Pentz’s new catchphrases, we are “keeping it real”; with down-to-earth language.

Crossref Key Messages

New logos and names for all our products will come soon (in some cases it’ll be a ‘de-brand’ rather than a re-brand!). We’ll gradually phase in the new identity over the next month or two, starting with our annual meeting, and with a complete website relaunch following in 2016. We will contact all of our members and partners in the coming weeks with information about using the new logo, using a content delivery network (CDN) so that sites can reference the correct file.

Why rebrand?

We have not rebranded because we plan on doing something different but rather to better express the things we already do. Our ‘problem’ was that often people didn’t know Crossref was behind initiatives like CrossCheck, Crossmark and FundRef. Our products had become unlinked from the organisation. And since we’re all about linking things together, that just made no sense.

We needed an icon to give more flexibility across the web that a word mark cannot do alone. The icon is made up of two interlinked angle brackets familiar to those who work with metadata, and can also act as arrows depicting Metadata In and Metadata Out, two themes under which our services can generally be grouped.
Sentence case helps to avoid splitting the word; we do not want to tempt the Cross and the Ref to divide again. So that lowercase R you see in the middle of our name is indeed an official change. (Hopefully we can change the habit!)
The palette gives a nod to the history of Crossref with red & dark grey, but brings in contemporary colors for a fresh palette that is distinctive in our industry (we researched a lot - everyone has circles, and traditional shades abound). Our aesthetic embodies classic Swiss design principles and is minimalist in keeping with our straight-talking personality.

So, in the words of Board Chair, Ian Bannerman, it’s time for Crossref to step forward.

About Crossref

I’m looking forward to revealing more of the story at our annual meeting next week!

Crossref Citation Plugin (for WordPress)

Crossref — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

OK, after a number of delays due to everything from indexing slowness to router problems, I’m happy to say that the first public beta of our WordPress citation plugin is available for download via SourceForge. A Movable Type version is in the works.

And congratulations to Trey at OpenHelix who became laudably impatient, found the SourceForge entry for the plugin back on February 8th and seems to have been testing it since. He has a nice description of how it works (along with screenshots), so I won’t repeat the effort here.

Having said that, I do include the text of the README after the jump. Please have a look at it before you install, because it might save you some mystification.

Description

A WordPress plugin that allows you to search Crossref metadata using citations or partial citations. When you find the reference that you want, insert the formatted and DOI-linked citation into your blog posting along with supporting COINs metadata. The plugin supports both a long citation format and a short (op. cit.) format.

Warnings, Caveats and Weasel Words

Please note the following about this plugin:

We are releasing this as a test. It is running on R&D equipment in a non-production environment and so it may disappear without warning or perform erratically. If it isn’t working for some reason, come back later and try again. If it seems to be broken for a prolonged period of time, then please report the problem to us via sourceforge.
There is currently a 20 item limit on the number of hits returned per query. This might seem arbitrary and stingy, but please remember- we are not trying to create a fully blown search engine- we’re just trying to create a citation lookup service. Of course, if, after looking at how the service is used, it looks like we need to up this limit, we will.
If you look in the plugin options (or at the code), you will see that the system includes an API key. At the moment we have no restrictions on use of this service, but have included this in case we need to protect the system from abuse.
The bulk of the functionality we have developed is actually at the back-end. This plugin is just a lightweight interface to that back-end. You can examine the guts of the plugin in order to easily figure out how to create similar functionality for your favorite blog platform, wiki, etc. If you do create something, please let us know. We’d love to see what people are building.
We are continuing to experiment with the metadata search function in order to increase its accuracy and flexibility. Again, this might result in seemingly inconsistent behavior. Did we mention that this is a test?
Please note that this API is not meant for bulk harvesting of Crossref metadata. If you need such facilities, then please look at our web site for information about our metadata services.
The data currently behind the plugin is *just* a December 2007 snapshot of our our complete journal article metadata. We have not added books or proceedings yet. We will do so soon and we will start updating the metadata weekly.

We welcome your ideas for tools that we can provide to help researchers. Please, please, please send comments, requests, queries and ideas to us at:

citation-plugin@crossref.org