Blog

Open Funder Registry to transition into Research Organization Registry (ROR)

Today, we are announcing a long-term plan to deprecate the Open Funder Registry. For some time, we have understood that there is significant overlap between the Funder Registry and the Research Organization Registry (ROR), and funders and publishers have been asking us whether they should use Funder IDs or ROR IDs to identify funders. It has therefore become clear that merging the two registries will make workflows more efficient and less confusing for all concerned.

Open funding metadata through Crossref; a workshop to discuss challenges and improving workflows

Ten years on from the launch of the Open Funder Registry (OFR, formerly FundRef), there is renewed interest in the potential of openly available funding metadata through Crossref. And with that: calls to improve the quality and completeness of that data. Currently, about 25% of Crossref records contain some kind of funding information. Over the years, this figure has grown steadily. A number of recent publications have shown, however, that there is considerable variation in the extent to which publishers deposit these data to Crossref.

Perspectives: My thoughts on starting my new role at Crossref

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, Iā€™m sharing the experience and insights of my first 4 months in this role.

A Request for Comment: Automatic Digital Preservation and Self-Healing DOIs

Martin Eve

Martin Eve – 2023 June 29

In LabsTechnology

Digital preservation is crucial to the “persistence” of persistent identifiers. Without a reliable archival solution, if a Crossref member ceases operations or there is a technical disaster, the identifier will no longer resolve. This is why the Crossref member terms insist that publishers make best efforts to ensure deposit in a reputable archive service. This means that, if there is a system failure, the DOI will continue to resolve and the content will remain accessible.

Crossref Research and Development: Releasing our Tools from the Ground Up

This is the first post in a series designed to showcase what we do in the Crossref R&D group, also known as Crossref Labs, which over the last few years has been strengthened, first with Dominika Tkaczyk and Esha Datta, last year with part of Paul Davisā€™s time, and more recently, yours truly. Research and development are, obviously, crucial for any organization that doesnā€™t want to stand still. The R&D group builds prototypes, experimental solutions, and data-mining applications that can help us to understand our member base, in the service of future evolution of the organization.

Our annual call for board nominations

The Crossref Nominating Committee invites expressions of interest to join the Board of Directors of Crossref for the term starting in March 2024. The committee will gather responses from those interested and create the slate of candidates that our members will vote on in an election in September. Expressions of interest will be due Monday, June 26th, 2023. About the board elections The board is elected through the ā€œone member, one voteā€ policy wherein every member organization of Crossref has a single vote to elect representatives to the Crossref board.

Metadata connects the global community ā€“ summary of our Community update 2023

We were delighted to engage with over 200 community members in our latest Community update calls. We aimed to present a diverse selection of highlights on our progress and discuss your questions about participating in the Research Nexus. For those who didnā€™t get a chance to join us, Iā€™ll briefly summarise the content of the sessions here and I invite you to join the conversations on the Community Forum. You can take a look at the slides here and the recordings of the calls are available here.

2023 public data file now available with new and improved retrieval options

We have some exciting news for fans of big batches of metadata: this yearā€™s public data file is now available. Like in years past, weā€™ve wrapped up all of our metadata records into a single download for those who want to get started using all Crossref metadata records. Weā€™ve once again made this yearā€™s public data file available via Academic Torrents, and in response to some feedback weā€™ve received from public data file users, weā€™ve taken a few additional steps to make accessing this 185 gb file a little easier.

Similarity Check: look out for a refreshed interface and improvements for iThenticate v2 account administrators

In 2022, we flagged up some changes to Similarity Check, which were taking place in v2 of Turnitin’s iThenticate tool used by members participating in the service. We noted that further enhancements were planned, and want to highlight some changes that are coming very soon. These changes will affect functionality that is used by account administrators, and doesn’t affect the Similarity Reports themselves. From Wednesday 3 May 2023, administrators of iThenticate v2 accounts will notice some changes to the interface and improvements to the Users, Groups, Integrations, Statistics and Paper Lookup sections.

ISR part four: Working together as a community to preserve the integrity of the scholarly record

We’ve been spending some time speaking to the community about our role in research integrity, and particularly the integrity of the scholarly record. In this blog, we’ll be sharing what we’ve discovered, and what we’ve been up to in this area. Weā€™ve discussed in our previous posts in the ā€œIntegrity of the Scholarly Record (ISR)ā€ series that the infrastructure Crossref builds and operates (together with our partners and integrators) captures and preserves the scholarly record, making it openly available for humans and machines through metadata and relationships about all research activity.