Blog

Aliaksandr Birukou is the Executive Editor for Computer Science at Springer Nature and is chair of the Group that has been working to establish a persistent identifier system and registry for scholarly conferences. Here Alex provides some background to the work and asks for input from the community:

Roughly one year ago, Crossref and DataCite started a working group on conference and project identifiers. With this blog post, we would like to share the specification of conference metadata and Crossmark for proceedings and are inviting the broader community to comment.

Do you want to effect change for the scholarly community?

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

You want to hear more from us. We hear you. We’ve spent the past year building Crossref Event Data, and hope to launch very soon. Building a new piece of infrastructure from scratch has been an exciting project, and we’ve taken the opportunity to incorporate as much feedback from the community as possible. We’d like to take a moment to share some of the suggestions we had, and how we’ve acted on them.

I joined Crossref only a few weeks ago, and have happily thrown myself into the world of Event Data as the service’s new product manager. In my first week, a lot of time was spent discussing the ins and outs of Event Data. This learning process made me very much feel like you might when you’ve just bought a house, and you’re studying the blueprints while also planning the house-warming party.

The ancient Romans performed a purification rite (“lustration”) after taking a census every five years. The term “lustrum” designated not only the animal sacrifice (“suovetaurilia”) but was also applied to the period of time itself. At Crossref, we’re not exactly in the business of sacrificial rituals. But over the weekend I thought it would be fun to dive into the metadata and look at very high level changes during this period of time.

Bruce Rosenblum, CEO, Inera Incorporated talks about the work they are doing at Inera, and how they’re using our metadata as part of their workflow.

At the end of last year, Paul Peters—CEO of our member Hindawi—became the new Chair of the Crossref Board. The announcement was made in Singapore at our first LIVE Annual ever held in Asia. I caught up with Paul back in London, UK, where he answered a few questions about what he hopes to bring to the Board, and to the Crossref community as a whole.

What better way to start our program of LIVE locals in 2018 than with a trip to Japan? With the added advantage of it being Valentine’s Day, it seemed a good excuse to share our love of metadata with a group who feel the same way!

We work with a huge range of organizations in the scholarly communications world—publishers, libraries, universities, government agencies, funders, publishing service providers, and researcher services providers—and you each have different relationships with us. Some of you are members who create and disseminate your own content, register it with us by depositing metadata, and help steer our future by voting in our annual board elections. Some of you don’t vote in our board elections but do play a vital role by registering content on members’ behalf.

Wellcome, in partnership with Crossref and several research funders including the NIH and the MRC, are looking to pilot an initiative in which new grants would be assigned an open, global and interoperable grant identifier. Robert Kiley (Open Research) and Nina Frentrop (Grants Operations) from the Wellcome explain the potential benefits this would deliver and how it might work.