Support on Crossref

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!

Come for a swim in our new pool of Education materials

Laura J Wilkinson — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

After 20 years in operation, and as our system matures from experimental to foundational infrastructure, it’s time to review our documentation.

Having a solid core of education materials about the why and the how of Crossref is essential in making participation possible, easy, and equitable.

As our system has evolved, our membership has grown and diversified, and so have our tools - both for depositing metadata with Crossref, and for retrieving and making use of it.

Our new documentation gives the full picture, with each chapter explaining an aspect of Crossref and why it matters, followed by instructions on how to participate. As far as possible, these instructions are given for each of our deposit and retrieval methods.

The revised documentation has been edited for use of simple English, and consistent terminology. Specialist vocabulary is explained as it is introduced. Understanding what’s involved across the full range of Crossref services can often seem complicated. This makes the documentation easier for readers, and provides a good basis for human and machine translations.

The chapters and sections are modular, so you can approach and combine them in different ways according to your existing knowledge and what you wish to learn. This Choose Your Own Adventure style means that sections don’t overlap, avoiding problems of repetition and versioning, and helping us to keep the information current.

The revised documentation includes several new topics, including:

The importance of metadata, explaining why you might register metadata for different purposes (discoverability, research integrity, reproducibility, and reporting and assessment)
Persistent identifiers (PIDs), explaining the structure of a DOI, and how you might use DOIs at different levels
Choosing which way to register your content, including suggested DOI registration workflow and suffix generator to make life easier
Introduction to types of metadata, including descriptive (bibliographic), administrative, and structural
Version control, corrections, and retractions, including publication stages and DOIs
Metadata stewardship, including maintaining your metadata, reports, understanding your member obligations, and maintaining your Crossref membership.

This new documentation is part of our efforts to make Crossref participation possible, easy, and rewarding for our members large and small, all over the world. It provides a concrete basis on which to build further education and outreach projects in the future. New members will start to see our paced member onboarding program, introducing them to parts of the documentation as and when it’s useful to them. And like the rest of the Crossref website, it’s all licensed for reuse under CC-BY.

I would like to say a big thank you to the members of the Education Task Force, who helped guide the development of the new documentation, representing a diverse range of Crossref members large and small from around the world:

Anjum Sherasiya - India, Editor-in-Chief of Veterinary World, Crossref Ambassador
Budi Setiawan - Indonesia, Poltekkes Kemenkes Yogyakarta
Caroline Breul - USA, BioOne
Isabel Recavarren - Peru, Consejo Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación Tecnológica (CONCYTEC), Crossref Ambassador
Mike Nason - Canada, Public Knowledge Project (PKP) and University of New Brunswick
Nadine van der Merwe - South Africa, Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf)
Roberto Camargo - Brazil, Associação Brasileira de Editores Científicos (ABEC)
Sioux Cumming - UK, INASP
Taeil Kim - South Korea, Korean Association of Medical Journal Editors (KAMJE)
and from Crossref: Amanda, Esha, Geoffrey, Ginny, Isaac, Kirsty, Patricia, and Susan.

Please explore the new documentation, give us your feedback using the yellow “Docs feedback” button at the bottom of each page, and share this update to spread the word!

Status, I am new

Isaac Farley — Mon, 02 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Hi, I’m Isaac. I’m new here. What better way to get to know me than through a blog post? Well, maybe a cocktail party, but this will have to do. In addition to giving you some details about myself in this post, I’ll be introducing our status page, too.

A little about me

In mid-April, I began as the new Support Manager. My goal is to fill the very large shoes left by Patricia Feeney moving into the Head of Metadata role. I know Patricia knows Crossref and the rich community of members (and metadata!) inside and out. I’ll get there too. For now, I have immersed myself in tackling as many of your support questions as possible, so I may have already met some of you on a support ticket. If so, thanks for your patience; you likely have already taught me a thing or two!

Isaac, on the lookout to provide you excellent support

I came to this position from one of our members – the Society of Exploration Geophysicists, where I served as the Digital Publications Manager for the last five years. Like many of you, I was always impressed, intrigued, and excited by the work underway at Crossref and wanted to be a part of the team. So, here I am, very much looking forward to the challenge ahead.

I work remotely from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I live with my wife and two daughters. Tulsa doesn’t have as many members as D.C., London, or Jakarta, but I hope to meet some of you during outreach trips, LIVE events, online in a webinar, or in our support community.

One of the things that attracts me to being a part of this community are our truths. As a quick reminder, the truths are:

Come one, come all
One member, one vote
Smart alone, brilliant together
Love metadata, love technology
What you see, what you get
Here today, here tomorrow

I am drawn to forward-thinking, action-oriented communities that value collaboration and openness. These truths, and the ten weeks I have been at Crossref, have confirmed that this is one of those communities. As your new support manager, I want to emphasize our commitment to transparency: Ask me anything; I’ll tell you what I know. In that spirit, I have the privilege of introducing our new status page—a key piece in furthering our own transparency and openness.

status.crossref.org

Our new status page provides critical, real-time information about our services—it helps us tell our overall story. If you are looking for metrics on the performance of our APIs, websites, the deposit system, or new beta services, bookmark this page. The system metrics provide daily, weekly, and monthly overviews of each of our services’ response time (in milliseconds) and uptime, or percentage of time that service has been operational during your selected time span (daily, weekly, or monthly).

From this page, we’ll announce planned maintenance and keep you regularly updated when we have an incident. And, we’ll provide regular status updates for these incidents when in progress, updated, and completed.

Our new status page – status.crossref.org

I encourage you to subscribe to the updates from the top-right corner of the page. While we’ll update this page with any service-related outages, subscribing for notifications will allow you to stay current on the latest. We’ll describe maintenance and incidents clearly, simply, and timely when we have them. And, if we don’t, call us on it.

If you have questions about the performance of our services, the status page is a great starting place. If you still have questions, ask us, we’ll tell you what we know.

Monitoring Crossref Technical Developments

Anna Tolwinska — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Announcements regarding Crossref system status or changes are posted in an Announcements forum on our support portal (http://support.crossref.org.pluma.sjfc.edu). We recommend that someone from your organisation monitor this forum to stay informed about Crossref system status, schema changes, or other issues affecting deposits and queries. Subscribe to this forum via RSS feed (https://support-crossref-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/hc/en-us) or select the ‘Subscribe’ option in the forum to subscribe by email.

The TWG Discussion forum replaces the TWG mailing list and can be accessed by members of the Crossref community who log in to our support portal. Intended topics include technical matters related to Crossref’s services, DOI issues and Crossref system operation.