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TL;DR Crossref and Datacite provide a service to link publications and data. The easiest way for Crossref members to participate in this is to cite data using DataCite DOIs and to include them in the references within the metadata deposit. These data citations are automatically detected. Alternatively and/or additionally, Crossref members can deposit data citations (regardless of identifier) as a relation type in the metadata. Data & software citations from both methods are freely propagated.

Crossref began its service by linking publications to other publications via references. Today, this extends to relationships with associated entities. People (authors, reviewers, editors, other collaborators), funders, and research affiliations are important players in this story. Other metadata also figure prominently in it as well: references, licenses and access indicators, publication history (updates, revisions, corrections, retractions, publication dates), clinical trial and study information, etc. The list goes on. What is lesser known (and utilized) is that Crossref is increasingly linking publications to associated scholarly artifacts.

While preprints have been a formal part of scholarly communications for decades in certain communities, they have not been fully adopted to date across most disciplines or systems. That may be changing very soon and quite rapidly, as new initiatives come thick and fast from researchers, funders, and publishers alike. This flurry of activity points to the realization from these parties of preprints’ potential benefits: Accelerating the sharing of results; Catalyzing research discovery; Establishing priority of discoveries and ideas; Facilitating career advancement; and Improving the culture of communication within the scholarly community.

The role of preprints Crossref provides infrastructure services and therefore we support scholarly communications as it evolves over time. Today, preprints are increasingly discussed as a valuable part of the research story (beyond physics, math, and a small set of sub-disciplines). Preprints might play a positive role in catalyzing research discovery, establishing priority of discoveries and ideas, facilitating career advancement, and improving the culture of communication within the scholarly community.

In the 2015 Crossref Annual Meeting, I introduced a metaphor for the work that we do at Crossref. I re-present it here for broader discussion as this narrative continues to play a guiding role in the development of products and services this year.

Metadata enable connections

At Crossref, we make research outputs easy to find, cite, link, and assess through DOIs. Publishers register their publications and deposit metadata through a variety of channels (XML, CSV, PDF, manual entry), which we process and transform into Crossref XML for inclusion into our corpus. This data infrastructure which makes possible scholarly communications without restrictions on publisher, subject area, geography, etc. is far more than a reference list, index or directory.

Forty wire telephone switchboard, 1907, Author unknown, Popular Science Monthly Vol 70, Wikimedia Commons.

A few months ago Crossref announced that we will be launching a new service for the community in 2016 that tracks activities around DOIs recording user content interactions. These “events” cover a broad spectrum of online activities including publication usage, links to datasets, social bookmarks, blog mentions, social shares, comments, recommendations, etc. The Event Data service collects the data and make it available to all in an open clearinghouse so that data are open, comparable, audit-able, and portable. These data are all publicly available from external platform partners, and they meet the terms of distribution from each partner.

Publishers, researchers, funders, institutions and technology providers are all interested in better understanding how scholarly research is used. Scholarly content has always been discussed by scholars outside the formal literature and by others beyond the academic community. We need a way to monitor and distribute this valuable information.