Staff on Crossref

Highlights of a very busy year: our 2025 annual report

Ginny Hendricks — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As we finish celebrating our 25th anniversary, we can look back on a truly transformational year, defined by the successful delivery of several long-planned, foundational projects—as well as updates to our teams, services, and fees—that position Crossref for success over the next quarter century as essential open scholarly infrastructure. In our update at the end of 2024, we highlighted that we had restructured our leadership team and paused some projects. The changes made in 2024 positioned us for a year of getting things done in 2025. We launched cross-functional programs, modernised our systems, strengthened connections with our growing global community, and streamlined a bunch of technical and business operations while continuing to grow our staff, members, content, relationships, and community connections.

Read on for the highlights of a very busy year, grouped around our four strategic themes.

Strategic theme 1: Contribute to an environment where the community identifies and co-creates solutions for broad benefit

Enhanced tools and services

In October, we released an enhanced Participation Reports dashboard that shows metadata coverage across all 180 million records and provides individual member organisations with actionable gap reports to guide them to improve metadata completeness. The new tool provides more complete coverage of all members and resource types, now including funders and grants, with up to 11 best-practice metadata elements publicly tracked.

We launched support for journal articles in the New Metadata Manager record registration form (initially only for grants), which includes built-in reference and relationships deposit capabilities. In the New Metadata Manager, it’s now also possible to search for previously registered DOIs to edit your metadata records. In the coming years, we are planning to expand the new Metadata Manager to support all the many different content types that you can register with Crossref DOIs.

After a long break between regular updates, we have fixed our process for and just released v.1.63 of the Open Funder registry. With the updated process, we’re now able to resume more frequent updates to the registry (while of course still working towards the transition to ROR for funders).

Throughout 2025, we conducted a website information architecture review to improve the information we provide to our members and the wider community. Based on the recommendations from this review, we will be renewing our website and documentation in 2026.

Deprecations and modernisation

‘Old’ Metadata Manager is to be retired at the end of 2025, with users transitioning to the ‘New’ version or to our other helper tools for registering and updating DOIs. All users have been contacted during 2025 and received training on how to use the New Metadata Manager.

We also announced the deprecation of Co-access, which will end in 2026, bringing an end to the service that allowed duplicate DOIs for book content. Users of co-access have been informed and are in the process of transitioning to multiple resolution.

Together with Turnitin and our members, we are working to transition all subscribers to our Similarity Check service to a new version of iThenticate 2.0. We are happy to report that all platforms with integrations with us transitioned to 2.0 during 2025, and we will continue working with our members to get everyone transitioned during 2026.

Eating our own DOI dogfood

In June this year, we were particularly pleased to finally support the registration of DOIs for our own content, this very blog, through partnering with Rogue Scholar. Blogs are a growing format for scholarly discourse and our own blog is no different as it’s the main way that we share guidelines and best practices, as well as news and stories from the scholarly community. With a Crossref DOI for all blogs going back to 2006, we’re setting ourselves up to ensure better future preservation of the discussion and information about Crossref.

Community connections

We delivered 29 metadata health-check webinars over the course of the year, in French, Indonesian, Spanish, and English, reaching 2,166 participants with practical advice on identifying gaps in journal metadata using Participation Reports.

Crossref Accra took place in March as our first in-person event in a GEM country. We also held similar events in Ecuador and Türkiye with Crossref Quito in September and Crossref Ankara in November. At these three events, we welcomed key figures from each country’s library, government, publishing, and academic communities and we learned so much about the thriving communities there, and also that even more dedicated workshops on the specifics of metadata quality improvements would be appreciated.

Our metadata sprint in Madrid in April brought together community members to tackle specific problems collaboratively, with teams exploring coding, documentation, translation, and research using our open metadata. We’re already planning our next sprint in São Paulo for March 2026, and it will be held in three languages: Portuguese, Spanish, and English.

A strategic goal for Crossref is to grow research funders’ adoption of the Grant Linking System, and we produced the first in a series of interviews with funder members this year to highlight how and why Crossref DOIs are fulfilling goals to assess the reach and return of their research support for FWF (Austria), NWO (Netherlands), FCCN|FCT (Portugal), and Wellcome. This year, we welcomed more funders including Fonds de recherche du Québec (Canada) and Independent Research Fund Denmark as part of their national research platform NORA; we look forward to reporting on their experiences and outcomes next year and others as they work towards Crossref Grant DOI adoption.

We continued working closely with PKP and renewed our partnership to help drive better experience for OJS users registering metadata with Crossref. We also delivered a proportion of the metadata health-checks together to maximise the learning opportunities for our members using OJS; and we joined PKP’s Sprint in Oslo to help make improvements to OJS and OMP.

Crossref staff members serve on almost 50 committees, boards, and other community bodies alongside our own direct work. These include in the areas of research integrity, metascience, metadata and PID standards, open science policy or monitoring, development of new models (such as Diamond OA), editorial production, library and institutional publishing, and citation and other metadata analyses. We also work with other DOI Registration Agencies and support the sustainability of the DOI Foundation with an additional annual subsidy. Many DOI RAs are also Crossref Sponsors so that their members can access our unique reference matching service. While we often might advise, we also learn a huge amount from collaborating with the numerous systems and initiatives that make up the wider research community.

Our involvement with developing the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information led us to become the fiscal host and to participate in most of the working groups on open metadata. Of particular note this year was the Funding Metadata Working Group round table about moving forward the state of funding metadata, which we co-hosted with Barcelona Declaration colleagues, and three funding bodies, NWO (Netherlands), FWF (Austria), and ANR (France) as we heard from publishers and their vendors about challenges and how to overcome them to increase the quantity and quality of available open funding metadata.

All our community engagement activities have been enthusiastically supported and enriched by our indispensable Ambassadors and our group of now 130 Sponsors, organisations that help thousands of Crossref members with local language and technical support and lower cost access to our membership.

Strategic theme 2: A sustainable source of complete, open, and global scholarly metadata and relationships

Schema developments

The grant schema version 0.2.0 was released in January, adding support for ROR identifiers to identify funders and new funding types for in our taxonomy, including APC, BPC, and infrastructure. All of these funding types can be specified in the metadata of our grant-giving members alongside the existing types such as use of facilities or salary/training awards, etc.

Version 5.4 of our publications schema was released in March, marking our first update in many years and a great opportunity to learn how to do this and make the process more efficient. This release introduced typed references to denote the type of object referenced (dataset, blog, software, etc.), preprint status indicators, and version numbering.

Just last week, we also added a dedicated field for grant DOIs to our publications schema. This means it’s now possible to indicate in an article’s metadata which grant(s) funded the research using the persistent identifier. This is an essential step toward better alignment between grant funding and research, enriching the Research Nexus.

We also launched our new Metadata Advisory Group and they have already devised sub-working groups in three focus topic areas:

Multilingual metadata
Subjects and keywords
Relationships

Public data file

We released the 2025 public data file in March, containing metadata for (at the time) over 165 million research outputs from more than 22,000 organisations.

Inaugural Metadata Awards

In May, we launched the first-ever Metadata Awards to recognise members demonstrating excellence in metadata completeness and enrichment. Winners included Noyam Publishers (Ghana), GigaScience Press (Hong Kong), eLife (UK), American Society for Microbiology (USA), Universidad La Salle Arequipa (Peru), and Instituto Geologico y Minero de España (Spain). The awards will be held biennially going forward.

Metadata Matching project

In April, we launched the metadata matching project with the aim of building a more complete picture of the research nexus over time by automatically identifying missing relationships between entities across the scholarly record. The project’s goal is to modernise Crossref’s enrichment workflows by rebuilding them using modern software development and data science practices.

We are in the throws of developing a consolidated matching workflow that will eventually replace all existing production matching processes, with results exposed through the REST API. All new matching strategies will be rigorously evaluated, and the resulting data will be accompanied by clear provenance information. This project covers six matching tasks:

bibliographic reference matching
funder name matching
preprint matching
affiliation matching
grant matching
title matching

In the meantime, while work continues on integrating matching results into the REST API, we’ve been releasing standalone matching datasets for separate download and analysis. These include relationships between preprints and journal articles, relationships involving research organisations, and relationships between grants and research outputs.

Data infrastructure and Research Nexus participation dashboard

Staying on the data science front, we’ve established an internal data environment that combines all relevant data sources (scholarly metadata, logs and usage data, and external datasets) in their raw forms into a single place. This environment is supported by a suite of modern tools and data processing techniques, enabling data science experiments and analytics pipelines to run effectively at scale.

Building on this foundation, we plan to develop a series of dashboards to monitor the state of the scholarly record over time. These dashboards will feature both work-level and member-level statistics (for example, how many works of a given type have been registered, or how many members are registering grant IDs) as well as more detailed insights at the relationship level (for example, how many bibliographic references have been automatically matched, or how many times ROR IDs are included in funder assertions). Some of these statistics are already available in a public spreadsheet for now, pending the dashboard.

Retraction Watch integration

In 2023, Crossref acquired the Retraction Watch database to make it open data. Initially, this was done through sharing simple CSV files, but this year we have set up a pipeline to feed this information into our REST API, which means that Retraction Watch data is now fully available through the REST API, integrated with Crossref member-supplied retraction and correction metadata. This is the first example of Crossref integrating third-party metadata, and we’re learning a lot about how to best incorporate other datasets in future.

Metadata API and services improvements

From 1 December 2025, we revised rate limits for the REST API to ensure system stability whilst maintaining free access to metadata for everyone. Changes were made to the rate limits for our ‘public’ and ‘polite’ APIs, while the limits for our Metadata Plus users stayed the same. We continue to make all metadata openly available to the whole community.

We also improved how information from our content system feeds into the REST API. A tool we call ‘pusher’—because it pushes information from the content system to the REST API—was rebuilt so that we now have a more reliable transfer of information between our two systems.

While adding to technical improvements, we’ve also worked to better understand the use of and streamline the service offering for paid options. We’ll share more about this year’s Metadata Plus consultation soon. And based on feedback, we have already retired the ‘Query Affiliate’ service, where a handful of organisations still paid us a fee to access our XML API, whereas no credentials have been required for some time.

Strategic theme 3: Manage Crossref openly and sustainably, modernising and making transparent all operations so that we are accountable to the communities that govern us

Infrastructure modernisation

One of our biggest projects of 2025—if not the biggest—was the move from our data centre into the cloud (AWS). For 25 years, Crossref had been running a physical data centre in Massachusetts, USA, but as part of modernising our systems, it was high time to move everything into the cloud. The move to AWS took several months, but we successfully completed this move to the cloud in July this year. We’re spending these last weeks of 2025 fully decommissioning our data centre, which means that we are removing all the equipment we had there and locking the door for the last time.

A part of the move to AWS included moving onto an open-source database solution, PostgreSQL. This reduced our reliance on closed, costly licensed solutions, while also aligning with our POSI commitment to open-source. Running our entire system in AWS provides a more stable, modern approach to our infrastructure, but it also is expensive. We expect to spend about 2 million USD on AWS fees next year, with the majority of this cost coming from REST API usage. Some of the improvements described above will help us manage those costs and better observe traffic patterns.

Our new cloud infrastructure is a bittersweet milestone: while we are happy to not have to rely on a physical presence to support a 24/7 global infrastructure, we also say a sad farewell to our much-loved and long-suffering Sys Admin, Tim Pickard, who has been with Crossref since 2002, and has contributed significantly and unwaveringly to keeping our system up and running in the data centre. Tim will be leaving Crossref at the end of the year; we’re grateful to Tim for all his years of dedication, and we will greatly miss his impressive Hawaiian shirt game on our all-staff calls.

After 25 years, it was also time to get serious about modernising our core content system, because even though it serves our community well, an older system with legacy code is a constant risk and frustration. We’ve therefore embarked on a multi-year modernisation project where we are replacing our old code piece by piece. We no longer want to have one big content system (a monolith), but are planning to identify different pieces of functionality and rebuild these as separate services (a modular, flexible, and robust approach). This year, we already managed to reconstruct some smaller pieces (for example, the ‘pusher’ mentioned above), and next year we will tackle larger projects, such as Metadata Matching and Authentication.

We continue to prioritise open, timely communication for planned or unplanned service interruptions and encourage everyone to monitor our status page at status.crossref.org. We’ll further hone our incident response processes in 2026, including openly posting incident reviews, and we’ll also centre system maintenance and documentation clarity in everything we do.

RCFS Projects

The Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability projects (RCFS) and the work of our Membership & Fees Committee resulted in deciding not to change some things (such as the basis for annual membership fees), but to change three things about our fees, as reported in July:

A new lower membership fee tier of 200 USD for members with annual revenues/expenses of under 1000 USD - so far, this includes around 3000 members. See below for more info.
A removal of volume discounts to reduce complexity in our billing code; they were little used, and those who did use these were fine with the loss of the discount.
A removal of the rule that only publishers of a title could register peer review reports (including comments and annotations) at the lower 0.25 USD fee for the first review; this lower fee is now available to any member to register any reviews of any other members’ works.

A new late-breaking addition to these fee decisions is the reduction of fees for members registering grants. As of January 1st 2026, there will be no fee for back-year (BY) grant registration, to encourage the faster adoption of older grants, which are more likely to have research outputs to be matched. This will be a two-year pilot to trial how a reduced fee incentivises adoption and boosts metadata connections, and could be extended to other record types as we monitor its success and sustainability. In addition, the 2 USD fee per current-year (CY) grant record is being reduced to 1 USD in line with the next-nearest fee, this is a permanent change for the foreseeable future.

Membership growth, efficiencies, and accessibility

In March, the board voted to update membership terms and bylaws to clarify processes for suspending and revoking membership, and to be more explicit about member practices that preserve the integrity of the scholarly record. A short-term Member Practices Working Group will be meeting in the first half of 2026 to draft these.

Crossref now serves 23,600 members across 164 countries, with continued growth particularly in Asia and Latin America. We’ve continued our ongoing member onboarding activities to support new members joining the community. We see around 230 new members join each month, and have welcomed 2,700 this year so far. We recently reported on how the shape of membership has evolved over our 25 years of operation.

From January 2026, we’re introducing a new lower membership fee tier of 200 USD for organisations with annual revenue or expenses of 1,000 USD or less, making membership more accessible to low-resourced organisations. Already, over 3000 members have been eligible to move into or join under that fee, and the idea is to monitor how this affects Crossref’s financial sustainability and potentially adjust the 200 USD annual fee down again in future years.

From 1 January 2026, the GEM program, which offers fee-free membership and content registration for all members from certain countries, will expand to include 18 additional countries, further reducing financial barriers to participation in the scholarly record, so we expect several hundred further members to join the existing 600 organisations in this category. More information about the GEM program expansion here.

As our membership base continues to grow, the Membership and Finance teams are constantly exploring ways to make shared processes more efficient. A key component in this work has been the efforts to automate several tasks within both teams to help us manage the additional work caused by our growth and allow our teams to focus more on providing the best quality service we can.

Our membership team continues to support our members, sponsors, service providers, metadata users and the wider community by email and through our community forum. The membership team includes staff members who focus on member support, and staff members who focus on technical support. During 2025 so far, we’ve received 36.8k member enquiries through our support system, a 17% increase from last year. This includes 22.6k inquiries related to general membership and 13k technical support enquiries. We’ve received 3.8k membership applications, and welcomed 2.7k new members.

Growth by the numbers

Crossref continues its steady revenue growth in 2025 due to the expansion of our membership base. With the addition of new members and the general growth of Crossref, comes an increase in the transaction-based tasks our Finance team handles.

So far in 2025 we have issued 14,833 invoices, which is a 9% increase since last year. We’ve seen an 11% increase in the number of payments received and applied, and a 12% increase in the amount of credit and debit memos applied over the same time last year. We have also seen a 42% increase in the number of billing-related tickets, totalling 20,723. A large segment of these tickets are related to fee updates associated with the new $200 membership tier.

Not all transactional work in Finance has increased as steadily, with increased revenue of 8% we have also seen a 14% increase in operating expenses. Through the strategic consolidation of vendors and use of financial tools, we have only seen a 1% increase in Accounts Payable invoices processed.

Organisational sustainability

Finance-wise, we’re doing well. We’re projecting to finish this year with revenue of 14,200,000 USD and expect revenue next year of 14,500,000 USD. We’re budgeting 2% growth in overall revenue, accounting for some of the changes to fees that will reduce our earnings on membership dues, but anticipating continued growth of content registration revenue.

Revenue and expenses trends

About 67% of our expenses come from personnel costs, and the other 33% include non-personnel costs like AWS, travel, legal fees, etc. As we continue to build out the team, we have ten new positions planned for the next year (recruitment for many of these is already underway or done). With additional staff roles and AWS expenses, we’re expecting expense growth of 16%. We post our financial statements and Form 990 filings on the financials page on our website.

Revenue per member size (by tier)

As the chart above shows, we still see ’the long tail’ of smaller members in the lowest fee category (275 USD) contributing more revenue than those in the largest category (50,000 USD) at 5.8 million USD versus 5 million USD.

Another aspect of sustainability is our impact on the world around us. And this year we were able to publish a second report on Crossref’s carbon footprint, having monitored and controlled for several carbon-heavy activities, primarily staff travel. Our reported emissions went up 40% from 2023 to 2024, due to more travel given our growth in staff and members, better recording our emissions (for example, with hotel stays), and including travel that we support for our partners, ambassadors and board members. In terms of travel spending, we are still well below 2019 when we were smaller, demonstrating that we are following through on not going back to the pre-pandemic norm.

We were one of the first open infrastructure organisations to adopt the POSI Principles and now have a few years’ experience in trying to meet them. Together with other adopters, we proposed updates and additions to the principles, based on real-world practice, and gathered a lot of community comment, resulting in the group publishing POSI v2 in October. We conduct a self-assessment every other year and we’ll be involving all our staff in the next self-assessment, due later in 2026.

Open governance through board election and annual meeting

We continued our commitment to being member-led and community-driven. This year’s anniversary Annual Meeting in October brought together members to discuss strategy, metadata developments, and hear the results of their voting in our board election. It comprised two half-days of online conferencing and several in-person satellite meetings spread across five continents, gathering close to 500 members of our community. It was a platform to reflect together on the past quarter of the century of building community infrastructure and connections underpinning the progress of scholarship, and to share plans for the future.

Each member has one vote, and together they elected the following organisations to serve a three-year term alongside the rest of the board:

Tier 1 candidates (electing one seat):

Rebecca Wambua, Distance, Open and e-Learning Practitioners’ Association of Kenya

Tier 2 candidates (electing four seats):

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

*returning board member

Congratulations to the remaining and incoming board members as we start their new term in January 2026. Have a look at all the outputs from our Annual Meeting.

Strategic theme 4: Foster a strong team—because reliable infrastructure needs committed people who contribute to and realise the vision, and thrive doing it

Team structure

We reorganised the team heading into 2025 because we had ambitious goals that required a more structured, collaborative approach. We reorganised the work around three strategic, mission-driven areas of focus described above. This was our first full year with the cross-functional program groups in place, and the activities reported here make it evident that our team members, both existing and new, are firing on all cylinders.

New staff and new roles

We welcomed eight new team members in 2025. In February, we welcomed our new Director of Programs & Services, Helena Cousijn, and a new member of the Technical Support team, Arley Soto. In March, we welcomed our new Community Manager for funders, Rocío Gaudioso Pedraza. In April, we launched our new Data Science team by welcoming Jason Portenoy and Alex Bédard-Vallée. In November, we welcomed our new DevOps Engineer, Thelma Laryea, and our new Program Technical Lead for the OSO program, Bharath Govindarajan. In December, we welcomed another member of the Technical Support team, Natali Giorgobiani.

We also had team members step up into new roles. Dominika Tkaczyk completed the new leadership team by taking on the Director of Technology role, Paul Davis has started his new role as Product Manager, and Michelle Cancel has taken on the Head of Human Resources role. And there’s more to come! As next year begins, two team members will step into Program Technical Lead roles: Carlos del Ojo Elias for the CRN program and Patrick Vale for the CCT program. Together with the Program Technical Lead for the OSO program and the Head of Infrastructure Services, these roles will complete the new structure of the technology team. This structure is more closely aligned with how our work is organised and will enable stronger coordination both within and across cross-functional programs.

Supporting a thriving global culture

As our team grows in different aspects within our new org structure to meet the needs of the community, we remain committed to supporting a thriving culture through training, conducting regular temperature checks, and organising our annual staff retreat. This year, we continued our work on psychological safety and introduced workshops on giving and receiving feedback and on consensus building. We were able to put some of this training into practice at our in-person all-staff event in Split, Croatia, where we all came together to build our roadmap.

We are ending the year with 51 staff in 14 countries and look forward to diversifying and evolving even further as a team in 2026—we’re currently hiring in UX, Communications, and Membership—and keep an eye on our jobs page for forthcoming opportunities in Software, DevOps, Metadata, and Operations!

Thank you to our community of members, partners, board, ambassadors, sponsors, metadata users, service providers, integrators—and of course our team—for making 2025 such a productive year. Together, we’re building a richer, more connected research ecosystem for the benefit of society. We can’t wait to continue the work together in 2026.

The Lammey Effect

Crossref — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We’re equally sad and proud to report that Rachael Lammey is moving on in her career to the very lucky team at 67Bricks. Her last day at Crossref is today, Friday 16th February. Which is too soon for us, but very exciting for her!

It’s hard to overstate Rachael’s impact on Crossref’s growth and success in her 12 years here. She started as a Product Manager where she developed that role into a broad and central function, and soon moved into the newly-formed community team as International Outreach Manager where she grew important programs such as Sponsors, Ambassadors, a series of ‘LIVE’ events around the world, and she went on to manage her own team and establish some of the most important strategic relationships that Crossref now feels fortunate to have.

Rachael was a significant part of the growth and adoption of new initiatives such as Crossmark, Similarity Check, the REST API, preprints, grants, data citation, and ROR. She's contributed to numerous organisations such as EASE, ALPSP, SSP, ISMTE, STM, and most recently co-Chaired the NISO working group on retractions and corrections.

As Head of Strategic Initiatives, and most recently, Director of Product, Rachael has shown dedication and leadership, supporting and strengthening not just her own teams but all of us across the organisation, encouraging us to do better while being one of the easiest people to work with.

The ‘butterfly effect’ is the notion that the world is deeply interconnected and that one small occurrence can influence a much larger complex system. Rachael embodies that notion, having created positive ripples and waves—and certainly many connections—in the scholarly record, in our organisation, and across the community.

Messages from colleagues

Rachael, I was saddened when I first heard the news that you were moving on to another opportunity. Your professionalism, work ethic, and positive attitude have been inspirational to work around. I have enjoyed the opportunities we have had to collaborate. As you move on to a new experience I wish you success and happiness in your future endeavors. Your presence will be missed at Crossref! Best Wishes.

– Ryan

I will miss you, Rachael. It has been great working with you for the few months that I have been at Crossref. I also cannot forget kayaking together with you and capsizing on the return to the shore, but almost professionally recovering. We would have made the best team this time around. I wish you all the best and many wins in your new role.

– Obanda

I feel like the luckiest human to have worked with Rachael over the last 4 years. She’s the perfect mix of smart and funny and knowing how to get things done. Rachael is a big part of what makes Crossref culture so special — I’ve never felt so supported in a role as when Rachael was my manager and for that I am very grateful. I will miss her wit and humor and her pragmatic approach to work and life!

– Sara

One of my first ‘Crossref LIVE’ events was with Rachael in Brazil in 2016. At the time, my role mostly focused on membership, and we had just started working more closely with ABEC, a large organisation in Brazil that sponsored quite a few members. Rachael managed the sponsor program then and thought this would be a good opportunity to collaborate with a sponsor on an event, and she asked me to join her. There is so much planning for these - venues, local partners, presentations, meetings - and she had all the details in order and made the event such a success. Rachael was supportive, encouraging, and I learned so much from working with her. The Brazil trip was such a positive experience that I realised I wanted to focus more closely on community engagement. Rachael encouraged me to do so.

She and I went on to partner on more LIVE events together. Our time in Indonesia was perhaps one of the most memorable for me - as well as our LIVE event, we had an unexpected tour of Yogyakarta with our Indonesian hosts, involving a tour of Prambanan Temple (see photo below), batik fabric shopping, visiting a few universities, and a stop at our hosts’ home. All the while trying not to let the winding car ride and traffic get the better of us. Our event the next day went perfectly, and I told her, half-jokingly, that the whole experience renewed my faith in humanity. Of note, we also drank the only bottle of wine available in the hotel bar.

Rachael was also my Crossref running buddy, and we spent quite a few miles together - in Brazil, NH, Maine, Oxford, and Spain. During our runs, topics ranged from Game of Thrones to Idris Elba to sportsing, but not so much about work. The next time I find myself in England, we will run a few more miles together, followed by a pint. Thank you for everything!

– Susan

Many have pointed out how talented, wise, or skilled you are and I certainly will not contradict a single word of it but that’s not what comes to mind first for me. Those traits, while true, pale in comparison to the person you are. Your positive, bright demeanor and the way everyone always feels better just being around you. I have dreaded some meetings from time to time. But whenever I’ve been involved in something with you, I’ve always left feeling better than when I started (no matter how grumpy I may have entered). You have been a consistent bright light in the Crossref constellation and you will truly be missed.

– Jon

Rachael! You are the best at cutting through all the bulls**t to get at what really needs to happen and why! Your knowledge is broad and deep, as is your institutional memory for all things Crossref and scholarly publishing. And your unflappability in pretty much any context is admirable and inspiring. We’ll miss you big time! Wishing you all the success at 67Bricks and otherwise.

– Shayn

Hey Rachael - I’m happy to be writing this note of Congratulations!! to you, particularly because it would be awkward to explain this bit of verklempt I’m feeling. Our interactions have been limited, but my impressions of you are of confidence, calm, capability, and collegiality. Thanks so much for your work with the Billing team. I’m sorry we are losing you, and am also so glad to know that you are out there at the forefront of inspiring others elsewhere, not only in the work you do, but also how you go about it.

– Laura

Hey Rachael, Just a big THANK YOU for helping me out all this time. I've had so many questions, and you've always been there to answer them. I always knew I could count on you. Thanks for those heartening chats when I needed a boost, and for including me in webinars and recordings - it really helped me improve. Remember that funny mistake I made on a recording when I called us 'Rochael'? We sure had a good laugh! I'm gonna miss those times and working with you. Can't wait to catch up with you over a drink the next time I'm in town. Wishing you all the very best and once again, thanks for everything!

– Rosa

I am happy we got to enjoy some delicious vegetarian/vegan meals and wine together. I guess I should also mention that I enjoyed recruiting, HR and business fun with you too. Thank you for being such a big part of Crossref for 12 years! Have fun conquering your new chapter. Congratulations!

– Michelle

Rachael! You will be missed. I have really enjoyed our chats and work together. I will miss our wide ranging talks about food, books, and your descriptions of all the sportsing, which I would admire because I can barely manage a short run. :-) Thanks so much for being you and let’s stay in touch! Congratulations on your new endeavor, you’re going to be great.

– Esha

When Rachel joined Crossref she brought a lot of enthusiasm and interest in learning about all that we were doing and also about what we could do. Her ideas and engaging leadership are wonderful for creating interest and drive to make projects happen. It has been wonderful to work with her over the 12 years here. I always look forward to seeing her and hearing what she has been doing outside of Crossref as well as inside. I will miss her but I know she will be doing great things wherever she may be.

– Tim

We’ve had a number of opportunities to reminisce, gassing each other up about how great it has been to work together, so I won’t do too much more of that here. But we will continue building on all of your contributions at Crossref and will carry forward your truth-telling and problem-solving approach to the work we do here. Best of luck with all the future has to offer, and we will certainly miss having you on the team.

– Patrick P

Rachael - I will miss you. I’ve really enjoyed working with you, hanging out while traveling, and getting recommendations on good books to read. Crossref won’t be the same without you. I think you have worked in the most different areas of Crossref and on the most projects of anybody, ever. Your commitment, professionalism and humour helped make Crossref what it is today. Your sportsing is also very impressive. All the best.

– Ed

Not all heroes wear capes! Rachael defines that saying so much with her ethic of getting things DONE! I know she loves to get things done but the speed and quality in which that happens is second-to-none. Rachael will be massively missed at Crossref and 67Bricks don’t yet know what they have found. I enjoyed working with Rachael throughout my tenure at Crossref, she has helped me a huge amount in developing my programming skills and has always been encouraging throughout, especially with the ’toil-bashing’ which is substantial and overwhelming at times.

On a more personal note, she is a great drinking buddy and always motivates me to be more active… by making me feel lazy. The number of hours Rachael would work was crazy, but then I always thought that anyone who gets up that early to go for runs must be a little crazy! AIl the best in your future endeavors and don’t be a stranger.

– Paul

When I started at Crossref in March 2015—at the UKSG conference in Glasgow—Rachael was leading a workshop on text mining, showing off in full glory her ‘unicorn’ mix of skills from her technical knowledge of metadata and APIs to her facilitation techniques with a large group of people, clearly a community whose needs she knew inside out. Later that evening, Rachael took it upon herself to induct me in the ways of Crossref. One of the most important things she thought I should know was that we were all trusted and treated like adults - there was no micromanagement and I was to feel completely free to challenge the status quo.

After one of the first ‘LIVE’ events, in Vilnius, I realised that it was Rachael who had created and embodied that trusted vibe through her own approach. She has been entrusted with so many programs, projects, teams, and tricky situations. Almost every launch, release, announcement, or achievement at Crossref very likely had Rachael’s eye on it at some stage, certainly the ‘actually-getting-it-done’ stage. Our close working relationship over the last nine years grew into a great friendship and I’m not quite sure how I’ll feel when the reality sets in and she’s not here for a quick chat, always a reality check. Working with Rachael has been inspiring, exciting, reassuring, and hilarious (that dry 'Norn Iron' humour!). 67Bricks is so fortunate and I can’t wait to watch her help them go from strength to strength, just like she has done for Crossref. See you soon, Ranty Rachael, no doubt putting the world to rights over a bottle of Malbec and many eyerolls 🙄.

– Ginny

Although our time working together only overlapped the short span of two years, I appreciate how much of a champion you were for ROR and everything else you did at Crossref! I’m sure you’ll continue to do the same, among many other great things, in your new journey at 67 Bricks. You will be missed!

– Adam

Rachael, It has been wonderful working with you!! You are truly a special person. I always looked forward to when we chatted over slack, had a call together, or got to spend time together in person. You are sure to do amazing things on your next adventure. You will truly be missed!! I hope we can stay in touch! Good luck, Rachael!!! Fondly, Amy.

– Amy

I am happy I got to meet Rachael when I joined Crossref in December 2023. We spoke generally about the Products team at Crossref, the differences and similarities between the African and British culture and upcoming projects on automation. You were really patient towards explaining and providing great information on metadata and research. Thank you so much for always responding swiftly to my requests pertaining to Finance issues. I have no doubt that you would be missed at Crossref and would keep doing great things into the future!!! Congratulations Rachael.

– Patience

I will greatly miss working with you, Rachael; you have been a stalwart of reliability and enthusiasm during my time at Crossref and the organisation will not be the same without you. That said, of course, I wish you all the best of luck and success in your future endeavours!

– Martin

Rachael- Congratulations on this new opportunity, I am thrilled for you! I am also very sorry that our time at Crossref did not overlap much and I am grateful for all the chances I had of interacting with you (including being able to meet you in London recently)- you were always very helpful and kind to me. I am hopeful that our paths will cross again in the future. We will definitely miss you here, and I wish you all the best for all the exciting things ahead.

– Madhura

My third week at Crossref back in 2017 was at the annual meeting in Singapore, and not getting into the timezone and not sleeping for 4 days was eased by our visit to a rooftop nightclub on the penultimate night - just before you headed off to Indonesia for a series of meetings with members and sponsors. I still don’t know where you get all your energy!
I’m so sorry you’re leaving - I’ll really miss your honesty, your approach to getting things done, and of course seeing Rosie on our zoom calls. Looking forward to seeing what’s next for 67 Bricks - exciting times!

– Amanda B

Rachael, it’s been a pleasure to work with you. You’re always ready to help and ever full of information. We’ve only just got coordinated on the perennial challenge of timelines! You took things on and got them done, as you said. The world of schol comms won’t even know how much it has to thank you for, probably chiefly for seeing the Retraction Watch data acquisition through and opening it up for all. I will miss your honesty and energy, and the opportunity to challenge you again on the amount of food consumed in one sitting… I don’t think you’ll need luck in your next place, but I wish you that it is all you want it to be.

– Kora

I’m so glad to have met you in person over these couple of days in London shortly after I joined Crossref and it’s such a shame we didn’t have much time to work together more and spend more time (not working) together. Thanks for the introduction to the Scampi Fries - you’ve changed my life forever (for the best obviously)!

– Maryna

Thank you for your collaboration and friendship over the past decade! You will be missed. We've worked on a long series of abbreviations, acronyms, and portmanteaus! Thanks for organizing countless things, from conference satellites to conference rooms. Your long record as fire warden was unblemished. 67bricks will benefit from your singular drive and attention to detail. All the best!

– Joe

Rachael! One thing I admire most in a person is a facility with metaphor accompanied by the ability to see to the heart of a matter, and hoo boy do you have those qualities in spades. I remember so clearly your talk at the Crossref team meeting in Spain in 2023 in which you clarified the Big Picture for us all in an extremely enlightening way, and then, in a smaller but equally impressive achievement, casually mentioning in a Funder Registry meeting that funders should start “stretching and warming up” for the transition to ROR – boy did I latch on to that terrific image. I wish you all the best at 67 Bricks.

– Amanda F

Rachael, thank you so much for all the support, patience, honesty, and determination. I will certainly miss our chats, work-related and non-work related. I wish you all the best in your new ventures!

– Dominika

Rachael - thank you for your boundless patience, generosity, and sense of humour. I’m very grateful I got to learn the Crossref ropes (cropes?) from you. Looking forward to randomly running into you on the Bristol karaoke circuit in 10 years’ time and performing an epic duet of Dancing in the Dark together. There’s a joke in there somewhere about you being the boss.

– Lena

Rachael, Congrats on your new opportunity. You will be greatly missed here. Through the years we have only been at the same events in person a handful of times but I will always remember your amazing personality and sense of humor. I am thankful to have spent some time with you at 2020 PIDapalooza.

– Maria

Thank you, Rachael. Thank you. I know everyone is telling you that they’re sad to see you go (I am too; we all are). I keep thinking if I delay telling you that, maybe the day won’t come when you walk out the Crossref doors. But here it is. Just wanted to you to know that I appreciate you. I appreciate you pushing us forward. I appreciate you being an advocate for all things Crossref. We’ll all miss you. Best of luck at 67bricks!

– Isaac

On one of our first meet ups together, I drove us from the Lynnfield office to Logan airport in rush hour, and we managed to survive the Bostonian road rage in one piece. We spent the ride talking through the intricacies of a sponsoring organisation’s agreement. Rachael has been a safe set of hands and an encyclopedia of institutional memory for Crossref for 12 years.
Rachael is one of those people who’s as equally competent as she is a pleasure to work with. She’s an innate leader because people want to get behind her. She shows her depth of understanding while also inviting input from everyone in the room. I’ll miss our Zoom calls, our marathon Friday sessions, and our post-meeting pub visits.

– Lucy

Hello! Here’s to hoping your new workplace appreciates you as much as you were here – they’re lucky to have you. I only wish we had the chance to interact more. Many hugs!

– Luis

Rachael, I will really really miss you, professionally and personally (but you know this already !). I'll miss all our work, dog, book and putting the world to rights chats. You'll be brilliant whatever you do and wherever you go (67Bricks have no idea how lucky they are !). Just keep 'getting stuff done' and have fun 😀

– Fabienne

You will be sorely missed but can be very proud of what you’ve done during your time at Crossref, I’m sure you’ll continue to have a big impact. You’ve always been a pleasure to work with: efficient, supportive, and always with a sense of fun and enjoyment. That’s probably one of the things that drew me to Crossref even before we worked together as colleagues. Thanks for the support and positivity you’ve brought on many, many occasions and best wishes for the future!

– Martyn

Hey Rachael! I might have not had the chance to meet with you much while still around but I’ll definitely miss your jokes and the good vibes you were bringing to each call! Looking forward to taking over your place for board games when around Bristol ;) Wishing you a great start in the new place!

– Panos

ThunderCats are on the move. ThunderCats are loose. Says it all, really. Best of luck in your new endeavours.

– Mike

Crossref won’t be the same without Rachael and we wish her well on her way to even greater things.

Good luck, Lammey!

Ed Pentz accepts the 2024 NISO Miles Conrad Award

Rosa Morais Clark — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Great news to share: our Executive Director, Ed Pentz, has been selected as the 2024 recipient of the Miles Conrad Award from the USA’s National Information Standards organisation (NISO). The award is testament to an individual’s lifetime contribution to the information community, and we couldn’t be more delighted that Ed was voted to be this year’s well-deserved recipient.

During the NISO Plus conference this week in Baltimore, USA, Ed accepted his award and delivered the 2024 Miles Conrad lecture, reflecting on how far open scholarly infrastructure has come, and the part he has played in this at Crossref and through numerous other collaborative initiatives.

Established in 1965, the Miles Conrad Award gives recognition to those who’ve made substantial contributions to the information community over a lifetime. Named after the founder of the National Federation of Abstracting and Indexing Services (NFAIS)—an association that since merged with NISO—the award encourages innovation in content management and dissemination. Over the years, leaders and innovators who have significantly influenced the field of information exchange have been honored with the award. Ed has joined an illustrious group!

Ed’s leadership in collaboration and diplomacy has led to Crossref’s success in making research objects more accessible and useful to a wide global audience, including publishers, researchers, funders, societies, libraries, and more. Crossref’s founding purpose is stated as:

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

Acknowledging his privilege as a Western, university-educated, white man, which he comments has helped his career, Ed prioritises collaboration, open communication, teamwork, and equity in creating a positive, trusted environment that has brought together a diverse team of 49 colleagues from 11 countries. The organisation’s culture allows everyone to grow and contribute to the mission of a connected research nexus by including and developing solutions for community members across the globe.

Before his journey with Crossref, Ed held a number of roles at Harcourt Brace, including launching Academic Press’s first online journal. This experience led to his involvement with the DOI-X pilot project, which became the foundation for Crossref. Since its launch in 2000, under his leadership, Crossref has become an important component of the research ecosystem, an open scholarly infrastructure with nearly 20,000 members across more than 150 countries. Crossref is now the main source of >155 million records about all kinds of research objects and this open metadata registry is relied upon by thousands of tools and services across the whole research system.

Ed’s influence is also evident throughout the wider world of open scholarly infrastructure; aside from establishing Crossref, he co-founded ROR and was a founding member of ORCID, where he also served as board Chair. Further, he has engaged with the community by holding various advisory positions, including the DOI Foundation, the Digital Object Naming Authority (DONA), and the Coalition for Diversity in Scholarly Publishing (C4DISC).

Ed also emphasised that the long-term success of community initiatives lies in patience and the ability to agree on high-level principles of purpose and governance, which oil the wheels of collaboration, encourage participation, and enable more progressive change that builds and lasts over time. He says, “to solve collective problems it takes collaboration and diplomacy, bringing together a group of stakeholders, balancing their different concerns, building trust, and reaching consensus.”

The adoption of the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI), along with (so far) 14 other organisations, was a key turning point for Crossref, Ed said, and one which has already paved the way for more openness of key metadata for the community, including references and retractions, as well as closer partnerships with many of the other POSI adoptees, given their shared understanding and experience.

Referencing the current “peak hype” around artificial intelligence (AI), Ed points to the challenge of research integrity and the “growing field of science sleuthing” as a forthcoming area that Crossref and open metadata may help tackle at scale, including through Crossref’s Integrity of the Scholarly Record (ISR) Program and—of course—community-wide collaboration.

In concluding his talk, Ed describes his hopes and dreams for scholarly communications in the future. He would like to see more balance in diversity in the leadership of open scholarly infrastructure, extended integrations among the various foundational infrastructures, and a fully connected system where the scholarly record is inclusive globally.

Ed, on behalf of all your proud colleagues at Crossref, thank you and congratulations!

Perspectives: My thoughts on starting my new role at Crossref

Johanssen Obanda — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

My name is Johanssen Obanda. I joined Crossref in February 2023 as a Community Engagement Manager to look after the Ambassadors program and help with other outreach activities. I work remotely from Kenya, where there is an increasing interest in improving the exposure of scholarship by Kenyan researchers and ultimately by the wider community of African researchers. In this blog, I’m sharing the experience and insights of my first 4 months in this role.

Right before joining Crossref, I was working as Stakeholder Manager with AfricArXiv, a community-led digital archive for African research communication. I transitioned to working with Crossref to take up a more challenging role, so I can apply the community-building and social innovation skills I gained over the last five years in my profession.

What surprised me the most here is realising that such a robust infrastructure is being administered by a relatively small team. I wondered how the team keeps the services running and builds new solutions for the community. However, I am impressed by the collaborative culture, positive and healthy work environment, and great systems.

I work within the Community Engagement and Communications team, where we collaboratively address members’ questions and challenges, plan events, create helpful content for our community and keep in touch with them. We help grow our community and create a better experience using our products and services.

My main focus has been the Ambassador programme, which started in 2018 and currently comprises 48 Ambassadors globally. The Ambassadors are our trusted contacts who support and engage our communities locally to make scholarly communications better. Through one-on-one virtual interaction with most of them, I noted that there was little interaction among the Ambassadors. Most of our Ambassadors want to connect more, both face-to-face and online. In the coming months, we aim to design our meetings together with the Ambassadors to encourage better exchange and relationships.

I value Crossref’s insistence on diversity, equity and inclusion, and I enjoy contributing to those activities. Working with my colleagues in the outreach team to organise webinars and activities for the Global Equitable Membership (GEM) programme has been an exciting experience. I particularly enjoyed engaging with our Ambassadors Shaharima Parvin and Jahangir Alam from Bangladesh, and Binayak Pandey from Nepal, in organising the initial webinars for the GEM program in their countries. I feel it is one of the ways of creating more in-depth connections between our communities and our Ambassadors while making it possible for more institutions to be part of Crossref and contribute to scholarly communication.

I have made a few webinar presentations online and recently did one in-person poster presentation in South Africa at the Sustainability, Research and Innovation conference. I gained more confidence interacting with the wider Crossref community and a deeper understanding of Crossref’s services. I look forward to more opportunities to discuss Crossref’s mission with the community and to collaborate with like-minded organisations, contributing to joint initiatives, such as the upcoming Better Together webinar series with ORCID and DataCite, and the Forum for Open Research in MENA events.

I experienced the challenges of working remotely in many ways. A couple of days, there was no power, other days the internet connection was painfully slow, and hopping from one restaurant to another was something I had to deal with from time to time, with the hopes of finding quiet most times to have a good meeting with my colleagues, until I had more dependable work station. On the positive side, coordinating meeting times with colleagues, taking on tasks asynchronously and collaborating in real-time across different tools are making me more agile, patient and empathetic with myself and my colleagues.

I am driven by the impact I want to contribute in my career working with Crossref, which is to build an inclusive research ecosystem where researchers across the globe can easily access scientific knowledge and make meaningful connections. And I feel confident about my colleagues, our systems and infrastructure and my capabilities to be part of a thriving community and organisation.

Martin Paul Eve is joining our R&D group as a Principal Developer

Geoffrey Bilder — Fri, 26 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’m delighted to say that Martin Paul Eve will be joining Crossref as a Principal R&D Developer starting in January 2023.

As a Professor of Literature, Technology, and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London- Martin has always worked on issues relating to metadata and scholarly infrastructure. In joining the Crossref R&D group, Martin can focus full-time on helping us design and build a new generation of services and tools to help the research community navigate and make sense of the scholarly record.

Martin himself explains the logic of this move on his own blog, so I won’t attempt to do the same here other than to say:

praxis makes perfect.

(mic drop)

Created with DALL·E, an AI system by OpenAI with the the prompt: ‘A bookwheel in the style of the 16th-century illustration by Agostino Ramelli and where the books are replaced by open laptops’

How I think about ROR as infrastructure

Amanda French — Fri, 08 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The other day I was out and about and got into a conversation with someone who asked me about my doctoral work in English literature. I’ve had the same conversation many times: I tell someone (only if they ask!) that my dissertation was a history of the villanelle, and then they cheerfully admit that they don’t know what a villanelle is, and then I ask them if they’re familiar with Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do not go gentle into that good night.” So far, everyone has heard of it – it’s a very well-known poem indeed. I then explain that “Do not go gentle into that good night” is a villanelle, and that a villanelle is a poetic form something like a sonnet. So far, everyone also knows what a sonnet is, which is why I use that as a comparison, even though a villanelle isn’t all that much like a sonnet, in my opinion. They’re both poetic forms, however, with a particular standard number of lines and a particular standard rhyme scheme, so in that sense they certainly are alike.

Oddly enough, I think my early background in the study of poetic form is very much of a piece with my new role here at Crossref as Technical Community Manager for ROR, the Research Organization Registry. Both poetic form and metadata are invisible to most people, but both are valuable infrastructure. Both poetic form and metadata involve generally-accepted practices and standards that differ between different groups of people and change over time. Both writing formal poetry and creating rich metadata can seem burdensome and rigid to some people, but to my mind, both are generative. A solid underlying foundation allows for all kinds of creativity to flourish on the surface.

That might be part of why as soon as I heard about ROR I understood its tremendous potential. As someone who’s worked in digital humanities and scholarly communication for over fifteen years, I’ve long appreciated the value of clean, standard, comprehensive metadata in general. For instance, I explained the origin and value of the Dublin Core metadata standard to many a history scholar in the Omeka workshops I often taught at THATCamp. Later, while overseeing the institutional repository at Virginia Tech University Libraries, I learned even more about both the importance and the difficulty of creating, acquiring, and providing good metadata. When the pandemic began in 2020, I learned more than I ever wanted to know about messy data as Community Lead for The COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic.

Data and metadata are, let’s admit it, very hard to keep clean and consistent as they travel through multiple systems, and that’s why it’s important to regularize as much as we can through automatic means such as APIs that use agreed-upon standards. Scholarship is a network of networks, and common identifiers like DOIs and ORCIDs enable the interchange of information in those networks about scholarly outputs and scholars, and thus they enable scholarship itself. What could be more important than that?

But the organisations that employ, fund, and publish scholarly researchers have had a hard time keeping track of everything “their” researchers have given to the world. That’s the problem that ROR, “a community-led registry of open, sustainable, usable, and unique identifiers for every research organisation in the world,” can help solve. In an ideal world, universities might use ROR IDs to track the research their faculty have produced, certainly, but they might also discover which universities their faculty’s co-authors most often come from. Funders might use ROR IDs to identify the research outputs that have benefited from their funds, certainly, but they might also analyze whether they are funding enough researchers from institutions in rural areas. Publishers might use ROR IDs to offer affiliation searching in their own public interfaces, certainly, but they might also create internal reports on compliance with institution-level transformative Open Access agreements. Once something like ROR is widely adopted, the vision of the Research Nexus becomes closer to reality: “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.” ROR is all about the “organisations” part of that alluring vision.

If you’re curious about ROR and want to learn more (hey, that rhymes!), you might want to watch the highly informative presentation from September 2021 “Working with ROR as a Crossref Member”, in which you’ll learn several interesting things, including the following:

ROR itself is not an organisation, but an initiative supported jointly by Crossref, DataCite, and the California Digital Library;
Crossref members cited institutional affiliation identifiers as one of their top priorities in 2019, second only to abstracts;
The specifics of how one recent ROR integrator, the open access journal publisher Hindawi, used the ROR API to create a typeahead widget in its manuscript submission system that replaces user-supplied free text with a standard institution name and a ROR ID behind the scenes, helping them to generate useful internal reports about institutional payments; and
Crossref supports the submission of ROR IDs in its XML content registration process and makes ROR IDs available in its API.

I’m also enthusiastically inviting you to get in touch with me if you’d like to learn more about ROR or if you’d like to tell me about your previous experience with ROR. And if you don’t get in touch with me, please be aware that I might well reach out to you – I’m eager to hear what you hope for from ROR, but also what you’re skeptical about. For, after all, I learn by going where I have to go – don’t we all?

Seeing your place in the Research Nexus

Kornelia Korzec — Wed, 22 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Having joined the Crossref team merely a week previously, the mid-year community update on June 14th was a fantastic opportunity to learn about the Research Nexus vision. We explored its building blocks and practical implementation steps within our reach, and within our imagination of the future.

Read on (or watch the recording) for a whistlestop tour of everything – from what on Earth is Research Nexus, through to how it’s taking shape at Crossref, to how you are involved, and finally – to what concerns the community surrounding the vision and how we’re going to address that.

Summary of presentations

Click on image above to access the presentation.

The idea is simple in principle: scholarly records ought to be transparent – available to examine and learn from for all. Much of scientific production and communication these days has a heavy digital footprint so the Nexus is nothing but simply connecting the loose strands, right? Yet, as the scholarly record is a reflection of the continuous progress made by multiple actors within the context of scientific structures and processes, bringing the Nexus to life is a little short of simple.

“What we think of as metadata is expanding, and the notion of ‘record types’ is changing” – said Ginny Hendricks. A great majority of scholarly ‘objects’, whether they are data sets, research articles, monographs, or others, undergo many processes (including review, publication, licensing, correction, derivation) and influence knowledge and practice over time.

Making that progress visible and discoverable will allow for tracing the development of ideas and changes in our thinking over time. Transparency of the complete scholarly records will help to understand the impact of science funding and changing policies. It can support a more robust and comprehensive assessment of research, and contribute to improving integrity within as well as public trust in sciences.

The Research Nexus concept was first introduced by Jennifer Lin in 2017 as “Better research through better metadata”. Important adaptations to the model were needed to break it out of the content-specific schema. Ginny also pointed out that the concept is shared among the scholarly infrastructure community, citing a report from 2015 by OCLC Research on conscious coordination for stewardship of the evolving scholarly record.

Patricia Feeney has given us reasons for optimism in building a robust Nexus. She’s shown areas of greatest growth in metadata reported to Crossref and shared a public roadmap of types of information we’re asked to enable in the future. We’re seeing a true boom of datasets and peer review reports registrations, and the relationship metadata for our records is improving too. At the dawn of defaulting to open references, 44% of records we hold have associated references and that is growing. Provision of the newly enabled affiliation information (ROR IDs) is on the rise, as is the funder information. Some conversations and questions followed highlighting the need for further guidance in these areas.

To make a case for enriching metadata records, Martyn Rittman demonstrated examples of traceability of research influence on realities outside academia. He captured recent examples of data citations and other references present not just between scholarly papers, but also in policy documents and popular media. These allow for greater discoverability of literature – but also show the public influence and impact of the research and the work’s context in our wider society.

While Martyn shared our blue-skies aspiration to streamline Crossref’s APIs to offer insight to all these relationships with a single service, Joe Wass grounded those ambitions in the reality of technical work underway. His team’s attention is divided between three main areas. They continue to maintain and de-bug our existing infrastructure. They are developing self-service solutions for members. Finally, they are mapping and planning improved infrastructure, evaluating technology against the Research Nexus vision.

Bringing it back to the source (of metadata), Rachael Lammey offered a very practical guide to key activities enabling Research Nexus that all members can take on now. She highlighted the benefits of collecting and registering data citations, ROR IDs, and grant funding information. She went on to talk about challenges of subject classification (at a journal level) that our research and development efforts are focusing on at the moment.

Summary of discussions

Publishing has changed dramatically and our members recognise increasing opportunities for transparency of the scholarly record. Breaking the distant vision of Research Nexus down into actionable chunks made it more relatable for call participants. Many reflected on seeing their place in it properly for the first time. Yet, challenges remain and many were brought to the fore in the discussions.

The reliability and usability of the technology for registering metadata with Crossref needs to improve. We need to do better in supporting multi-language and multi-alphabet information. Not just developing systems anew, but also streamline the way content is registered and annotated, and continue to disambiguate the competing identifiers. Different record types, chiefly books, present specific challenges in this regard. Finally, making all that metadata accessible and usable is key to enabling insights from the rich data we collectively make available.

Technology is important, but won’t overcome the barriers that exist in the mindsets. Siloed thinking means that publishers may not be sensitive to benefits that improved relationship metadata could have for colleagues working on assessment, even within the same institutions. Greater guidance or best practices for new identifiers, such as ORCID, ROR, grants, would allow more publishers to get on board with the changes. Researchers often don’t help the cause either – many don’t realise the role and benefits of metadata for their work and are reluctant to provide rich information related to it, perceiving it as a bureaucratic burden.

In a nutshell, I learnt that – while the concept of Research Nexus is pretty complex – we’re all already participating in making it a reality. I’m grateful to the call participants for sharing their challenges and ideas so generously. It means we can work to address those. I’ll be sure to follow-up on requests for support and clearer guidelines about citing data, recording ROR IDs and grants information in the metadata, and we’ll engage our community on complex topics of record updates (corrections, retractions and versions). Be sure to keep in touch with the conversations on the Community Forum. I’ll see you there!

Announcing our new Head of Strategic Initiatives: Dominika Tkaczyk

Geoffrey Bilder — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR

A year ago, we announced that we were putting the “R” back in R&D. That was when Rachael Lammey joined the R&D team as the Head of Strategic Initiatives.

And now, with Rachael assuming the role of Product Director, I’m delighted to announce that Dominika Tkaczyk has agreed to take over Rachael’s role as the Head of Strategic Initiatives. Of course, you might already know her.

We will also immediately start recruiting for a new Principal R&D Developer to work with Esha and Dominika on the R&D team.

What does this mean for R&D?

Before I talk about what Dominika’s move means in practice, I just want to take a moment to thank Rachael for the time she spent working with us. Over the past year, she has injected a massive amount of energy into the group and rebuilt the team’s momentum. This is exactly what we asked her to do.

Rachael’s first task was to repatriate her two R&D colleagues, who we had loaned to work on other urgent projects. Dominika was the technical lead on the port and relaunching of the REST API. Esha was the technical lead for the ROR initiative. In addition, Rachael has been working with Esha, Dominika, Paul Davis, and me on several shorter-term strategic projects that are shaping our overall development strategy.

Exploring and implementing a new approach to building content registration front ends. This approach is schema-driven and bakes in localization and accessibility support from the start. The new approach is currently the basis for the grant registration tool that our Product & Tech teams are now testing with our new funder members.
Exploring and ultimately rejecting a “pull-based” approach to registering metadata, where Crossref would harvest structured metadata from member landing pages instead of asking members to deposit it with us via XML. You are not really doing R&D unless some of your ideas fail. In this case, we quickly discovered that the logistics of crawling our members’ websites, combined with the sparsity of structured metadata in landing pages, made a pull-based approach fragile and impractical.
Exploring the use of ML techniques to fill gaps in the journal classification data that is currently in the REST API. Gaining new data science badges in the process.
Exploring alternative approaches to building community-extendable reporting tools using standard data science tooling and techniques.
Exploring how we can help reduce support toil by using data science tools like notebooks to create new support tools and self-serve UIs for information frequently requested by members that can otherwise prove difficult to get using our existing tools.
Looking at extending the matching technology previously developed by labs to try and better match funder grant-information research outputs.

And this is just a sample of projects Rachael helped promote and prioritize. It is the nature of many of the larger R&D projects that you don’t see the immediate results until long after they’ve been conceived and put into motion. This means that Rachael has been working on some things over the past year that are not yet public.

But, with any luck, we may see some significant new developments in how Crossref collects and distributes information about significant updates to the scholarly record- including retractions and withdrawals. We are also likely to see more work to promote data citation amongst our members. And finally, we are likely to see an attempt to create a community-managed and open research classification taxonomy. Of course, as is the case with research projects, there is no guarantee that any of these nascent ideas/projects will make it into a production service. Still, if even one of them does, it will become as vital a part of open scholarly infrastructure as DOIs, ORCIDs, or ROR IDs are now.

And we will have Rachael and the hard work of the R&D group, important cameos from others, and community input to thank for giving them the initial push to realization. So that’s a pretty good track record for just a year in the R&D group.

Passing the torch

And this is a track record I’m confident that Dominika can match as she takes over Rachael’s role.

Soon after Dominika joined the Crossref R&D team, she started to expand her activities to include more production engineering practice, team leadership, and community outreach. She has also worked extensively with support and outreach- providing them with data science consulting and mentoring in software development. Her new role as the Head of Strategic Initiatives will continue this trend. She will spend less time prototyping software and analyzing data and more time liaising with our members and the broader community to understand their needs and design R&D projects to test approaches to meeting those needs. This means a lot more liaising with other Crossref teams, speaking with our members and the wider community, and participating in working groups and conferences.

It also probably means a lot less programming and analysis. But programming and building prototypes are critical to the R&D team. And so the first thing we will do is start recruiting for a new Principal R&D Developer to continue working along with Esha on conducting experiments and developing POCs.

I’m looking forward to the next year. With Rachael taking the role of Product Director and Dominika taking over as the Head of Strategic Initiatives, we are well-positioned to make profound technical and conceptual improvements to Crossref’s services while simultaneously working with the community to line up our next strategic priorities.

Rethinking staff travel, meetings, and events

Ginny Hendricks — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

As a distributed, global, and community-led organisation, sharing information and listening to our members both online and in person has always been integral to what we do.

For many years Crossref has held both in-person and online meetings and events, which involved a fair amount of travel by our staff, board, and community. This changed drastically in March 2020, when we had to stop traveling and stop having in-person meetings and events. Due to the hard work and creativity of our team and the support of our Ambassadors and Sponsors, we were able to move to exclusively online meetings and events and maintain connections with colleagues, members, and much of the scholarly research community.

Online meetings have benefits compared to in-person ones; they have a much lower carbon footprint, and they can be more inclusive because people don’t have to find the time and money to travel. But there are limitations to online meetings; individual connections made in person do become harder to maintain, and new connections are more difficult to make and grow online. Sometimes just by sitting with someone, meeting their team and drinking their tea, free-flowing conversation leads to real progress.

But with over 17,000 members in 150 countries, our small staff can’t be everywhere, and we need to consider the personal as well as the environmental impacts.

When we started work on the 2022 budget last year, our staff and board took the opportunity to think about our approach, with the goal of not going back to ‘normal’. So we asked ourselves, now that we have a better sense of what works and what doesn’t, how can we make our travel and in-person meetings have a greater impact on our goals, while also traveling less and reducing our impact on the environment?

We decided that in the context of our mission and values, we had to take into account three key areas:

The environment and climate change
Inclusion
Work/life balance.

We developed an updated strategy for in-person and online meetings from 2022 onwards along with a set of recommendations and commitments to reduce our carbon footprint. The commitments were approved by the board at its November 2021 meeting.

Our plan for online and in-person meetings

Online events will generally be aimed at broad groups, in multiple timezones, to inform, update, and test general ideas and assumptions at scale. In contrast, in-person events will be smaller, focusing on deep learning, co-creation, and collaborating through various formats such as workshops, roundtables, or sprints, ideally working toward a specific outcome. These smaller in-person meetings will be scheduled alongside other community events so there will be fewer trips on the whole but each trip more consolidated.

Each in-person meeting will have stated goals such as recruiting and onboarding a new Sponsor, bringing our Ambassadors together to build relationships and share best practices, or getting experts together in a room to help decide important polices, improve some code, or plan new initiatives. At the moment, we are not planning ‘hybrid’ events as we don’t believe they will help meet our goals.

While online meetings and webinars provide a breadth of interactions, in-person meetings can provide greater depth and opportunities for more meaningful engagement and purposeful discussion, and it is this depth that we have missed over the last two and a half years. Therefore, we are identifying focus countries where we plan on engaging more with local community groups. Each country-level engagement plan includes outreach and communications activities and some in-person meetings.

Factors and aims for selecting focus countries

Inclusion is important for us and we are committed to supporting the needs of our community members worldwide. We aim to combine meaningful conversations with informational activities. We want to provide time in the day for technical problem solving and/or a more strategically focused session, both of which have worked well in the past. We hope to learn more about trends in our selected focus countries, including the challenges our members face, local publishing norms, barriers to participation in Crossref, and understand and help to adapt government policies.

We consider a number of factors when selecting countries with which to focus our activities:

Where we have a relatively large number of members.
Where we are seeing an increase in new members joining.
Where we have not undertaken engagement activities in at least 3 years.
Where we have good contacts to collaborate with, i.e., a national funder, a sponsor or ambassador, a government body, or another organisation aligned with our mission.
Where we have very few members but where research output is high according to other sources, in order to understand and overcome barriers to participating in Crossref.
Where we can consolidate multiple engagement activities in one trip, for example run a LIVE (informational) meeting or workshop, develop relationships with a key Sponsor, or discuss national research policy with government representatives.
Where we can coordinate our engagement efforts alongside other local community events.

Our environmental commitments

In line with rethinking how we engage with our members and making sure we do so in the most sustainable, inclusive, and impactful way, we are making the following commitments:

Crossref staff will think strategically and consider environmental, inclusion, and work/life balance issues when they plan travel. We will make the most of in-person events by focusing on those that involve interaction, such as listening and learning from our members and users, deepening relationships, co-creating, and forming new alliances
We will travel less and have fewer face-to-face meetings going forward compared with 2019 as a baseline year. The 2022 travel and events budget was reduced by 40% and set at 60% of the 2019 budget. Travel and in-person events for the first half of 2022 have been limited so we will make this same commitment for 2023 still using 2019 as the baseline.
Crossref will track the carbon footprint of staff travel to meetings and events. We will regularly review the data and find ways to reduce the environmental impact.
Combine stakeholder visits with event trips and vice versa whenever possible (if you do 1 plane trip to a location 1000 miles away instead of 2 trips, you reduce your impact by 0.5t)
As previously planned before the COVID-19 pandemic, the Crossref LIVE Annual Meetings will remain online only and will be held in different time zones. Having them in different time zones will enable global sharing of updates with a lower environmental impact.
Crossref board meetings will be reduced from three in-person meetings per year to one face-to-face and two online meetings per year.
Fewer staff will attend fewer in-person conferences and will combine them with other travel.
For Crossref staff meetings, it is important for our distributed staff to meet face-to-face as a whole organisation and as teams. We will plan for one all-staff in person meeting per year (at which there can also be team meetings). Additional team meetings will be based on the reduced travel and meetings budget. Where possible, team meetings will be combined with other meetings (e.g. conferences or other community events).
While trips that combine meetings may mean longer time away from home, we will still try to avoid staff having to travel or be away on weekends. We will also:
- Avoid short-haul flights (under 2.5 to 3 hours) where trains are available.
- Book hotels within walking distance of the event locations (if safe) in order to reduce taxi use.
- Use public transport and trains (if efficient and safe).
- Select hotels that have good sustainability plans in place, seeking out ‘green’ hotels where (if available and within budget).
- Prioritize locations where the fewest number of staff have to travel or travel the shortest distances.

Reporting

From now on, we will:

Track staff travel incl. the number of trips, miles flown, and the carbon impact.
Estimate the carbon footprint of our two offices, staff home working, our data center, and our cloud infrastructure.
Track all Crossref-hosted events - in-person and online and review annually (what went well, what can be improved, how to further reduce carbon footprint) as part of the budgeting process.

Many organisations are now rethinking how to go about travel, conferences, meetings, and work in general. The pandemic may have been the trigger for a big shift in the ways we work and interact, and not all of it was welcome or should continue; however, sometimes it takes a big event to give us the space to sit back, reflect, and change things for the better going forward. As always, we’ll evaluate these approaches over time.

All of this means we may be declining some in-person meetings (and when we do, please don’t take it personally) but we still look forward to engaging with our community in a purposeful way.

This feels like a good time to give a shout-out to all our Ambassadors and Sponsors around the world who are very important for insight and engagement, and we will continue to partner with them for both online and in-person meetings.

Announcing our new Director of Product: Rachael Lammey

Ed Pentz — Thu, 12 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Unfortunately, Bryan Vickery has moved onto pastures new. I would like to thank him for his many contributions at Crossref and we all wish him well.

I’m now pleased to announce that Rachael Lammey will be Crossref’s new Director of Product starting on Monday, May 16th.

Rachael’s skills and experience are perfectly suited for this role. She has been at Crossref since 2012 and has deep knowledge and experience of all things Crossref: our mission; our members; our culture; and our services.

In all her roles at Crossref Rachael has demonstrated how community-focused product development can be done.

Starting as a Product Manager for Similarity Check and Crossmark, she then led community discussions on text and data mining and taxonomies, introduced our support of preprints, and led the very successful ORCID Auto-update integration. She initiated our important partnership with the Public Knowledge Project including scoping and overseeing the joint plugin development work over the years. She helped to grow the Sponsors program, establish the LIVE informational events, oversaw the founding of our ambassador program, engaged more research funders and institutions, and became a go-to person for data citation expertise in our community.

In her brief time in our Research & Development team, she helped to kick off that group’s reinvigoration and has engaged with numerous new community and technical initiatives. Such relationships—together with her knowledge of our systems and API—have enabled her to be a key driver in the development and adoption of ROR and grants - two of the highest strategic priorities of recent years.

Rachael says:

“Alignment in planning and focusing on delivering outcomes will be my initial priorities. I’m conscious that we have a lot in play and I want to support the product team in their existing and ambitious goals while working with the leadership team and our very diverse community to focus and prioritise our development roadmap. I’m really grateful for this opportunity and I am looking forward to working with our members, users, and other open infrastructure organisations in this new capacity”.

Our staff and the board are very enthusiastic about Rachael’s appointment and we know our community will be too. Please join us in congratulating Rachael!

More new faces at Crossref

Lindsay Russell — Thu, 21 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Looking at the road ahead, we’ve set some ambitious goals for ourselves and continue to see new members join from around the world, now numbering 16,000. To help achieve all that we plan in the years to come, we’ve grown our teams quite a bit over the last couple of years, and we are happy to welcome Carlos, Evans, Fabienne, Mike, Panos, and Patrick.

Our Software Development team has seen the most growth with the addition of Carlos, Mike, Panos, and Patrick; collectively, they bring specialist skills that are helping us to pay down technical debt, modernize our underlying infrastructure, and prepare for a consistent front-end experience. As a member of the Product team, Fabienne has a fresh take on our Similarity Check service, steering the upgrade to iThenticate v2. And Evans brings a scientific researcher perspective to our Member Experience team along with experience as a member who’s worked with our tools.

And now some words from each of them.

Carlos Del Ojo Elias

I am a computer scientist with a master’s degree in Bioinformatics. Previously I used to work as a security auditor. I’ve got experience in research and software development both in academia and industry. It’s very exciting for me to join Crossref as a Senior software developer on the technology team. My current project involves working on the authentication and authorization subsystems, exploring state-of-the-art technologies in order to improve our services. I have always enjoyed contributing to the open-source community, so it is a pleasure for me to work in an organisation that promotes the principles of openness and transparency of software and data.

Evans Atoni

I am a member of the Technical Support team having joined Crossref just a few weeks ago. I’m passionate about advancing open access and POSI. Helping our members sort through knotty technical queries and building relations with them to service their very diverse needs is what I’m most excited about in my role. In my spare time, I enjoy anything outdoors, family time, and traveling. I work remotely from Nairobi, Kenya.

Fabienne Michaud

I joined Crossref in April 2021 as a Product Manager for scholarly stewardship which includes the content comparison tool Similarity Check and I am thrilled to be a member of such a lovely, supportive and international team. I have a background in teaching and have worked in academic, research, and not-for-profit libraries in the UK for over 20 years in academic liaison, customer services, and management roles. These experiences have given me a user-centered approach and a drive to find collaborative, reliable, and pertinent technological solutions to support the research and scholarly community. Since starting at Crossref and, through my work with the Similarity Check Advisory Group, I have developed a good understanding of the current ethical issues facing the publishing sector (such as paper mills and other manipulations of the publication process) and a particular interest in how AI and automation tools can play a part in addressing these challenges.

Mike Gill

I’ve been a software developer for twenty years, having studied software engineering at university. During my career, I have worked mostly in the banking and engineering industries so this is my first time working in scholarly publishing. I confess that before joining Crossref I wasn’t aware that the community existed so I was excited to see how I could ply my trade in this new (to me!) field. The role also appealed as, having primarily been a team leader/line manager in my recent career, this was an opportunity to be hands-on again and work with modern languages such as Kotlin. In the end, though, what really sealed it for me was reading on the Crossref website that ‘we take the work seriously but not necessarily ourselves’ which basically sums me up. So I knew I’d be in good company and that has proven to be the case!

Panos Pandis

I joined Crossref as a Senior Software Developer in 2020, in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. Moving to Crossref has been a much-needed breath of fresh air. I’m a big fan of open-source, and at Crossref, it just feels like home. Even more so after our recent commitment to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI). My main focus at the moment is Crossref’s Event Data service. I’m fascinated by the potential of Event Data and the broad audience I get to support and communicate with through the project. So if you spot me in a room, feel free to ask me anything about Clojure/Kotlin, Event Data, obscure technology, or kombucha recipes.

Patrick Vale

I’m delighted to have joined Crossref as the first Frontend Developer. My role covers the inauguration of a scalable framework in which we can build future User Interfaces, and generally making people’s lives easier as they interact with our products and services - if a human uses it, I’m interested! It’s my intention to provide a platform on which we can quickly iterate to build and adapt our interfaces to suit the rapidly changing needs of our community. It’s been a pleasure to learn about the impact Crossref has across the scholarly spectrum; and to work with a team of open, practical, and downright friendly colleagues is a privilege. Outside of work, I enjoy cycling, growing things, and most recently, avoiding two small cats while moving from anywhere to anywhere around the house.

Your contributions have been impactful and it will be fun to see all that you will surely contribute to our road ahead!

A tribute to our Kirsty

Crossref — Wed, 16 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Our colleague and friend, Kirsty Meddings, passed away peacefully on 10th December at home with her family, after a sudden and aggressive cancer. She was a huge part of Crossref, our culture, and our lives for the last twelve years.

Kirsty Meddings is a name that almost everyone in scholarly publishing knows; she was part of a generation of Oxford women in publishing technology who have progressed through the industry, adapted to its changes, spotted new opportunities, and supported each other throughout. We hope this post will do justice to her memory in our profession.

Kirsty’s early career

After completing her degree in English and Spanish American Literature at Warwick University, Kirsty started her career in scholarly communications and publishing at Blackwell’s Information Services. She was there for a year before joining CatchWord, an online journal start-up, in 1998, as Electronic Publisher and Account Manager and in 1999 was promoted to the new role of Library Relations Manager.

CatchWord was acquired by Ingenta and Kirsty moved into product management working on integrating the CatchWord and Ingenta platforms and launching IngentaConnect in 2004. Ingenta became Publishing Technology in 2005 and Kirsty was Product Development Manager working with engineering, business development, and users on developing online products and services. She was also involved in a range of community initiatives including COUNTER, KBART, and ICEDIS.

Joining Crossref

Kirsty’s professional headshot

She was an early pioneer in electronic and online publishing - an innovator who understood scholarly publishing, technology, libraries, and people - a powerful combination. And Crossref was quick to offer her a role.

In Kirsty’s introduction to Crossref she was described by the recruiter as:

An experienced and highly capable individual with a solid background in product development, marketing and customer service issues related to the supply of scholarly electronic content from publishers to library and end user audiences. A good communicator and team worker with sound technical understanding and an excellent grasp of publishing industry issues.

This adequately captures Kirsty’s impressive professional achievements, but not her personality. Kirsty was a Product Manager at Crossref for 12 years and was a valued and loved friend and colleague. Committed to Crossref—its values and people—she was funny, human, and always asked tough questions.

She joined us on October 27th, 2008 as our first Product Manager and the third UK employee. In her time at Crossref, Kirsty made a major impact, working on a range of important projects and services - particularly new, innovative services. Not long after she started at Crossref, she wrote a “day in the life” profile for the journal Serials that perfectly captures what it was like in 2009 at Crossref Oxford (there were three of us in Oxford and only ten total staff at Crossref): Meddings, K., 2009. Mini-profile: a day in the life of a product manager. Serials, 22(1), pp.5–6. DOI: http://doi.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.1629/225

Her own biography, on her staff page, states:

Kirsty Meddings has been involved in a diverse set of initiatives that have kept her busy since 2008. She has spent most of her career in scholarly communications, in a variety of marketing and product development roles for intermediaries and technology suppliers. She speaks conversational geek and competent publishing, and is working towards fluency in both.

See? Funny!

Professional achievements

Kirsty started out working on CrossCheck, now Similarity Check, the plagiarism screening service that launched in 2008. The service was in need of some attention and better organisation - Kirsty got stuck in, whipped it into shape and it has gone on to be one of Crossref’s most widely-adopted services. This article that Kirsty wrote for ISMTE’s publication, EON, remains useful nearly 10 years after it was written! Kirsty successfully managed the partnership with Turnitin (starting as iParadigms), the technical provider for Similarity Check, for many years. Colleagues there are mourning her loss too.

Kirsty was instrumental in launching Crossmark, which became a production service in 2012. After a few changes of hands, she resumed work on the service in recent years, and announced the removal of Crossmark fees to better support uptake in 2020.

The addition of clinical trial information to the Crossref metadata was a community-driven initiative, developed from the concept of threaded publications. There were/are lots of moving parts in this initiative, and in many ways it was one of the precursors to the idea of the Research Nexus: linking via metadata and relationships to provide a clearer picture of the ecosystem that exists around a research object.

What was once FundRef (ahh, those logos!) has matured into the Open Funder Registry under Kirsty’s stewardship. In collaboration with Elsevier, the registry has grown from an initial 4,000 funders, to over 25,000 and we can see over 5 million works registered with Crossref that are linked to at least one funder. More recently, Kirsty was the Product Manager for the registration of research grants with Crossref, working with our Funder Advisory Group, and she was starting to work with CDL and DataCite to absorb the Funder Registry into ROR.

In 2018, Kirsty launched our first ever dashboard for member best practice. She led the development and design of Participation Reports and the decision of which checks would be most important for the scholarly community to assess. This has quickly become one of Crossref’s most valuable and used tools.

Public speaking

Kirsty always spoke with authority across a range of topics, appearing totally calm even if she was nervous. Among many talks, she spoke at the STM seminar on Publication Ethics and Research Integrity, ISMTE, UKSG, ALPSP seminars, the COPE Forum, ran numerous CrossCheck, CrossMark, FundRef and TDM webinars, and a recent online LIVE event.

She was a frequent presenter at many of Crossref annual meetings, and enjoyed the opportunity to meet and catch up with our members, the board, and the community (many of whom always ask after her). Checking in after conferences on who said what, who’s moving where, what feedback we had, and picking up on opportunities for further collaboration were all things that we looked forward to sharing.

To use UKSG’s own words, Kirsty was always a staunch supporter of the organisation - attending, exhibiting, and speaking at many UKSG conferences and events over her whole career. She was also a legend at the dinners, on the dance floor, and in the bar. At the 2019 conference she tallied the votes at the quiz night - Kirsty loved a quiz! We had an all-staff end-of-year quiz via zoom last week and it was just not the same without her.

Here are Kirsty’s slides on SlideShare, some videos of Kirsty’s talks on YouTube, and her ORCID record which lists her published works.

Strong friendships

One of the most rewarding experiences of working at Crossref is meeting up with the whole team and with our members. Jetlag, hunting out coeliac-friendly food, staying up far too late chatting, trying to fit in exploring bits of cities around board and other meetings, presenting, organizing, thinking, laughing (I’m sure to the annoyance of other plane passengers)—these experiences were all part and parcel of working with Kirsty, and where many of us cemented connections with her.

We started a message board and within days it was populated with numerous stories, poems, and photos from so many friends and colleagues on whom Kirsty made such a lasting and loving impression.

Kirsty’s message board

It’s impossible to capture someone’s character in a blog, but some of the words that carry across the messages that people have shared are empathy, compassion, honesty, intelligence, brilliance, sincerity, laughter, human, passion, openness, and fun. We’ll miss her immensely.

Kirsty was somewhat of an expert in grief. She lost her first husband, James Culling, to leukemia in December 2012, leaving her a widow with two sons, Dan, 7 at the time, and Luke, just 6-months old. A few years later, through the charity Widowed And Young (WAY), she met Martin Eggleston. Martin and his daughter Amy joined Kirsty, Dan, and Luke, and they created a very happy blended family. Some of us went to their wedding and it was an incredible event full of love and laughter - and of course music. Always music.

Kirsty represented us, along with Rachael, at the funeral of another colleague last year, Christine Hone, in Amsterdam. Kirsty helped all of us get through the grief then. And because she made it okay to grieve and to talk about grief, it is heartbreaking and also comforting that she is indirectly helping us all now to be better able to handle her own death.

How we can honour Kirsty’s memory

We heard that Kirsty’s last words were “I’m listening”. Which is just so fitting. She was always ready with an ear, a shoulder to support us all, and indeed she demanded that we express ourselves honestly.

If you want to share memories of Kirsty, you can join others who have done so on the message board or just take a few minutes to read through.

And there is a justgiving page in memory of Kirsty for Maggie’s Oxford, a branch of a cancer support charity who helped her and her family through James’s death and is now helping her family again.

Professionally, Kirsty made major contributions at Crossref and in scholarly communications in general. More importantly, she had a profound impact on a personal level with many people. Our thoughts are with Martin, Dan, Amy, and Luke, and also with Kirsty’s mum Val, her brother Colin, her in-laws, her close friends, and all the people who—like the rest of us—are better for knowing her, and will never forget her.

404: Support team down for essential maintenance

Amanda Bartell — Fri, 04 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

2020 has been a very challenging year, and we can all agree that everyone needs a break. Crossref will be providing very limited technical and membership support from 21st December to 3rd January to allow our staff to rest and recharge. We’ll be back on January 4th raring to answer your questions. Amanda explains more about why we made this decision.

As we all know, 2020 has been an unprecedented year, with the COVID-19 pandemic affecting lives across the globe.

It’s been amazing to watch our members pivot their working practices and continue to publish content and register it with Crossref to keep the wheels of research and scholarly communications moving.

Since January, we’ve seen 9,079,082 items registered with Crossref, up 13% on 2019. 2628 new members have also joined during that time and we now have almost 13.5k members from 139 countries. We’ve seen over 337 million requests to our REST API on average per month in 2020, a 9% increase over 2019 (and over 600 million total metadata queries on average per month across all our APIs and services).

Of course, all this activity brings an increasing number of requests for help and support. Since the start of 2020, we have answered almost 24,000 support tickets from the community. Sometimes these just need a quick answer or a link to our documentation. Sometimes it’s a straightforward new member application or a routine query. But sometimes a prospective member needs a lots of advice, sometimes a long-standing member or user needs in-depth investigations and consultancy. Sometimes the request highlights a problem in one of our systems that needs input from our product and development colleagues. But either way, it’s keeping our small team of five full-time employees very busy.

Vanessa wrote earlier in the year about how our Community Outreach team has changed its working practices this year. As Head of Member Experience I’ve been incredibly impressed by the way our membership, support and billing staff have done the same - remaining really focused on the needs of the Crossref community while (at the same time) balancing this with the demands of working from home, childcare, home-schooling, and supporting those affected by the pandemic in their own community. Isaac’s thoughtful post on our forum about his first week working at home because of the pandemic really highlighted some of these challenges.

We take work/life balance seriously at Crossref. We want to make sure that we’re are able to continue to help the Crossref community effectively in 2021, but are also able to continue to look after ourselves, our families, and our own communities in this difficult time. We all hope that 2021 will be a very different year, but there’s still likely to be disruption ahead for all of us, and one thing is sure: there will continue to be plenty more requests coming in for our small team to stay on top of in the meantime.

With this in mind, we want to make sure that our support staff are able to properly rest and recharge during what is a holiday period for many of us coming up. We’ll be operating with just one person each on the technical support and membership support side between 23rd December and 3rd January. This means that while we’ll be able to answer urgent queries, non-urgent questions will be left unanswered until 4th January. And we’ll not take on any new members between 21st December and 3rd January too.

We know many of you will be continuing to work during this period. If you have a non-urgent question, do take a look at our support documentation in the meantime, or see if other members (or our amazing Ambassadors) are able to help on our forum. If you can’t find what you’re looking for and it’s urgent, we hope that the limited staff who are on call will still be able to help you out.

Colleagues in the US have recently celebrated their Thanksgiving, and I remain enormously thankful for our team here at Crossref, and for you all in the scholarly community for your enthusiasm for working together collectively to help the world find, cite, link, assess, and reuse scholarly content. We all really appreciate your patience while we reset ready for 2021. Happy Holidays!

Meet the new Crossref Executive Director

Ed Pentz — Thu, 23 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It’s me! Back in January I wrote, The one constant in Crossref’s 20 years has been change. This continues to be true, and the latest change is that I’m happy to say that I will be staying on as Executive Director of Crossref. At the recent Crossref board meeting, I rescinded my resignation and the board happily accepted this.

What happened? Well, a lot has changed since I announced that I was leaving back in February. The pandemic has upended “business as usual” and everyone is rethinking pretty much everything. It’s clear that as a result of the crisis, there will be greater economic pressure on our community. These are difficult times and they are going to continue for the foreseeable future.

The people at Crossref are amazing and I’ve been impressed and inspired by everyone’s resilience and creativity in responding to these unusual challenges. Crossref has a very special organisational culture and I want to remain a part of it and continue to develop it.

I’ve also been inspired by the board. In particular, at its July meeting they passed a progressive motion based on a proposal from the leadership team:

RESOLVED: Crossref should proactively lead an effort to explore, with other infrastructure organisations and initiatives, how we can improve the scholarly research ecosystem. Crossref is committed to the collaborative development of open scholarly infrastructure for the benefit of our members and the wider research community.

This is the result of a process that started back in 2019. In the A turning point is a time for reflection blog post, we took a step back as we approached Crossref’s 20th anniversary. We conducted research into the perceived value of Crossref, reflected on what we had achieved, and what the future holds for Crossref. At our annual meeting, “the strategy one” and in our annual report fact file, we reminded people of the organisation’s original founding purpose:

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

Following on from 2019, as the pandemic hit, we held virtual strategic sessions with the board in March, May and June. These culminated in the motion above, which allows Crossref to fully embrace this simple, but ambitious, vision. This was a game changer for me, and I realized there was nothing else I wanted to do or that better suited my skills and experience than to continue to lead Crossref and work with the community through the next phase of transformation.

This is not the time for “business as usual”. We live in an interconnected, interdependent world and open infrastructure organisations have to collaborate more deeply and look at doing things differently in order to improve the scholarly research ecosystem. So - more to come!

New faces at Crossref

Crossref — Tue, 30 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Please help us welcome new faces at Crossref! Martyn, Sara, Laura, and Mark joined us very recently and we are happy they’re with us. Both Martyn and Sara have joined the Product team and this has given us the chance to reorganize the team into the following groups: content registration, scholarly stewardship, scholarly impact, metadata retrieval, and UX/UI leadership. Laura joined the Finance and Operations team to help make the billing process simple for our members. Mark joins the Technology team and one of his projects will be improving the Event Data service.

It is exciting to already see the impact of your contributions and look forward to what’s to come!

And now a few words from each of them.

Martyn Rittman

I am a former university researcher who worked on interdisciplinary projects around life sciences and analytical chemistry, with positions in the UK and Germany. I spent seven years at open access publisher MDPI doing everything from running journals to handling production, developing services for authors and publishers, and supporting preprints. I’m very excited to be joining Crossref as a Product Manager and developing some great products and services that focus on how Crossref-indexed research creates impact. This includes supporting the use of preprint metadata. I’m also looking forward to getting my teeth into event data, which looks at how those in the research community and beyond reference, use, and reuse research. If you are interested in making use of event data or have examples of event data applications, I would like to hear from you.

Sara Bowman

I’m thrilled to have joined Crossref at this exciting time in the organisation. As a member of the Product team, my primary area of focus is content registration, building, and improving tools for our members to deposit rich metadata. I’m particularly interested in how we can create a unified user experience for content registration while supporting the needs of our diverse membership. A scientist by training, I’ve spent the last 6 years working on open source technologies to support scholarly communication, most recently in the role of Product Manager at the Center for Open Science. I’m passionate about open tools and using data to drive product development, building innovative solutions to improve research and scholarly communication.

Laura Cuniff

I joined Crossref two months ago as a part-time Billing Support Specialist on the Finance and Operations team. With the help of my supportive and knowledgeable colleagues, I took on learning the various systems. My goal is to make the billing process as simple as possible for our members by researching, retrieving, and relaying billing information. This allows our members to focus on the reason for their engagement with Crossref. With several part-time jobs cobbled together at different times of the day, I have the flexibility to volunteer with a few organisations in my hometown of Ipswich, MA. If you find yourself at the Ipswich Visitor Center, I may greet you, recommend the most beautiful spots in town, give you a tour of the Ipswich Museum, or send you off with a wonderful Ipswich Humane Group cat or dog! I’m very excited to be here!

Mark Woodhall

I am an open-source enthusiast who has worked in a range of technology roles at a variety of companies as a polyglot programmer with experience in Clojure(Script), Java, C#, and JavaScript. It’s really exciting to be working at Crossref as a Senior Software Developer on the Technology team and I’m proud to be part of a team with open source at its heart. I’m really looking forward to getting more involved with event data and building a scalable solution to support its future uses.

Welcome to the Crossref community Martyn, Laura, Sara, and Mark.

Introducing our new Director of Finance & Operations

Ed Pentz — Mon, 09 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’m happy to announce that Lucy Ofiesh has joined Crossref as our new Director of Finance and Operations. Lucy has experience supporting the sustainability and governance of not-for-profit organisations having held roles such as Executive Vice President of the Brooklyn Children’s Museum and for the last few years as Chief Operating Officer at Center for Open Science, a Crossref member.

At Center for Open Science, Lucy built her knowledge of the research communications community; she is knowledgeable about how diverse this community has become and the challenges of planning and scale that this comes with. She knows how to manage the complexities of an expanding global operation, where members, users––and staff––in several locations need fair, timely, and accurate information, whether it’s about how invoices relate to their use of our services or information about our approach to health benefits.

Finance underpins all that Crossref does and is crucial to long term sustainability while ‘Operations’ is a varied function and it is only becoming more so as Crossref grows. The role encompasses human resources, organisation culture, governance (including serving as secretary of the organisation), and working as part of the senior leadership team. Lucy will bring community focus to our operations, putting member experience first so that it becomes easier to work with us, from implementing systems and processes that work for multiple languages and currencies to providing personable billing support.

She will also play a vital role on the Crossref leadership team, working with me and the other directors Bryan, Ginny, and Geoffrey to hone the strategies, goals, and metrics that will allow us to track progress and meet our ambitious goals.

A word from Lucy…

I am excited to be joining Crossref as its next Director of Finance and Operations. I previously worked for an organisation that was a Crossref member and two qualities stood out to me: first, the focus with which Crossref has provided solutions to shared challenges across scholarly publishing; and second, the ways Crossref operates transparently and from a values-driven perspective.

My past experience has been in helping organisations run as effectively as they can, navigate change and growth, and build and support high functioning teams. Specifically, my work has focused on strategic and sustainability planning, financial forecasting, organisational governance, and staff management. My goal in finance and operations is to ensure that the working experience at Crossref––both for external partners and members and internal staff––is as frictionless as possible so we can have the greatest impact on our community.

I am only the second person to step into this role. Lisa Hart Martin has led finance and operations for the first twenty years of Crossref’s existence. I am fortunate to be overlapping with her for a couple of weeks and grateful for the trust of the Crossref team to help guide us into our third decade. I really want to hear from our members so please reach out to me with your thoughts on Crossref’s finance and operations.

Please join us in welcoming Lucy to the Crossref community!

Introducing our new Director of Product

Ed Pentz — Mon, 19 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’m happy to announce that Bryan Vickery has joined Crossref today as our new Director of Product. Bryan has extensive experience developing products and services at publishers such as Taylor & Francis, where he led the creation of the open-access platform Cogent OA. Most recently he was Managing Director of Research Services at T&F, including Wizdom.ai after it was acquired.

He previously held a range of roles from Publisher to Chief Operations Officer at BioMedCentral, as well as online community and technology leadership roles at Elsevier.

Bryan is a great addition to Crossref and we are lucky to have him. The product team is keen to progress the long list of wishes from our community with his guidance. Bryan will bring focus and clarity to our roadmap and our development processes, making it easier for people to adopt and participate in our services, and ensuring that we are working on the issues that are most important to our members.

He will also be a vital part of the leadership team, working with me and the other directors Geoffrey, Ginny, and Lisa to help us take the organisation forward in a transparent way that serves our mission and empowers our excellent staff.

And now a few words from Bryan…

I’m thrilled to be joining Crossref as Director of Product at a time of considerable change in scholarly communication. I’ve worked in, and around, scholarly publishing for more than 20 years.

This is a challenging role. We have many exciting services and collaborations to progress, and also technical debt to address (like everyone else) to upgrade our existing services - it’s essential we balance these. My priority is to stay on top of the issues of the highest value to the scholarly community, now and in the future, and ensure we deliver services that are both useful and usable.

I will be attending Crossref LIVE19 “The strategy one” along with other staff and look forward to meeting many of our members then. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts on where we’ve been (what it’s like working with us and using our services) and where we’re going (what you’d like to see from us). You can reach me via our feedback email.

Please join us in welcoming Bryan to the Crossref community.

Rest in peace Christine Hone

Crossref — Sun, 09 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Our friend and colleague Christine Hone (née Buske) passed away in May from a short but brutal illness. Here is our attempt at ‘some words’, which we wrote for her funeral book and are posting here with her husband Dave’s permission.

We are devastated to lose Christine as a colleague and friend. It’s hard to put into words the effect she had on our small organisation in such a short time, and how much we’re already missing her. But here it goes.

It was 2015 when some of us first met Chris, and we immediately saw how much of an asset she could be to our organisation. She was very active in the community and well-known in many academic and publishing circles around the world. And she had an enviable combination of technical skills, a scientific mind, and a natural ability to engage people.

We tried to recruit her back then but she was in demand by others and it wasn’t until early 2018 that we succeeded. We finally got her! She became the Product Manager for a very advanced and complex system but she took to it perfectly, with real excitement and a complete understanding of how we (and therefore she) could help the research community all over the world see and make connections.

Christine’s official Crossref headshot 😊

With colleagues spread around the world, she joined an organisation that had exciting opportunities and its share of challenges. Chris engaged with all of this head-on. She handled a constant stream of queries from people spread across time zones, whilst at the same time getting to grips with a service that was difficult to pin down. She balanced these tasks which were at very opposite ends of the spectrum. She added so much and with such energy and intelligence to everything she got involved in, always bringing human attention and creativity.

Chris was also on the winning team at 2018’s UKSG quiz!

Ed, Amanda, and Chris: the Crossref contingent of the winning quiz team

In her talk at the 5:AM altmetrics conference she brought together technical detail, big-picture ideas, and her own particular passion. Her opening words were “My name is Christine and I’m a recovering fish scientist”. Never afraid to bring her personal brand of humour into the workplace, her opening slide was a photograph of her covered in rats. That presentation was the first time that much of the audience really understood our service. Having cracked the messaging for us, she was due to give the same talk at our annual meeting in Toronto a few months later…

Chris’s opening slide at her 5:AM talk

Chris giving her now legendary talk at 5:AM on Event Data

Many of us were in Toronto for that meeting; it was two weeks after we’d heard the news of her diagnosis. Some of us were able to visit her in the hospital where she told us of her and Dave’s decision to bring forward their wedding plans. It was a bittersweet announcement but, clearly, they adored each other and were determined to be happy together despite the challenging times ahead.

Over the last few months, even when she had little energy to spare, Chris popped in (virtually) to chat and update us, share pictures and, selflessly, to see how we were doing. Even people who never met or worked closely with her started to follow her vlog and exchange notes and news directly.

Always checking in with us, an update from Chris shortly before she passed

We have all been rocked by the news and there is a lot of sadness and grief among the Crossref staff and community. Even in the last moments we shared together Chris always asked about how her projects were going. Her passion for her products was a big part of what animated her when she first joined. Throughout her late-stage illness, this remained constant. She yearned to return to work. This zeal will forever be an inspiration to us all at Crossref.

Christine taught us a lot, through her work, with her attitude to life, and in the manner that she dealt with this terrible illness. We thank her for giving us so many great memories and we will never forget her.

A Crossref photoshoot; our Christine ❤️

Crossref is hiring an R&D Developer in Oxford

Geoffrey Bilder — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

We are looking to hire an R&D Developer in our Oxford offices. We are look for somebody who:

Is passionate about creating tools for online scholarly communication.
Relishes working with metadata.
Has experience delivering web-based applications using agile methodologies.
Wants to learn new skills and work with a variety of programming languages.
Enjoys working with a small, geographically dispersed team.
Groks mixed-content model XML.
Groks RDF.
Groks REST.
Has explored MapReduce-based database systems.
Is expert in one or more popular development language (Java, C, C++, C#).
Is expert in one or more popular scripting language (Ruby, Python, Javascript).
Has deployed and maintained Linux/BSD-based systems.
Understands relational databases (MySQL, Postgres, Oracle).
Tests first.

If you are interested, please see the full job description. If you are not interested, but know somebody who might be, please let them know about this great opportunity.

Crossref is hiring an R&D software engineer

Geoffrey Bilder — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Crossref is hiring an R&D software engineer to work in our Oxford office. This is a fantastic opportunity to work on wide range of projects that promise to revolutionize scholarly publishing.