Blog

Crossref Event Data and the importance of understanding what lies beneath the data. Some things in life are better left a mystery. There is an argument for opaqueness when the act of full disclosure only limits your level of enjoyment: in my case, I need a complete lack of transparency to enjoy both chicken nuggets and David Lynch films. And that works for me. But metrics are not nuggets. Because in order to consume them, you really need to know how they’re made.

Introducing our new blog series Meet the members; where we talk to some of our members and find out a little bit more about them, ask them to share how they use our services, and discuss what their plans for the future are. To start the series we talk to Liam Finnis of Oxfam.

About 13-20 billion researcher-hours were spent in 2015 doing peer reviews. What valuable work! Let’s get more mileage out of these labors and make these expert discussions citable, persistent, and linked up to the scholarly record. As we previously shared during Peer Review week, Crossref is lauintroducing support for a new record type to support the registration of peer reviews. We’re one step closer to changing that. Today, we are excited to announce that we’re open for deposits.

So much has happened since we held LIVE16 (our annual meeting) in London last year that we wanted to check-in with our UK community and share the year’s developments around our tools, teams and services ahead of LIVE17 next month in Singapore.

Happy birthday, ORCID! It’s their fifth birthday today and it’s gratifying to me—as a founding board member and former Chair of the board—to see how successful it has become. ORCID has a great staff, over 700 members from 41 countries and is quickly approaching 4 million ORCID iDs. Crossref—it’s board, staff, and members—has been an ORCID supporter from the start. One example of this support is that we seconded Geoffrey Bilder to be ORCID’s interim CTO for about eight months.

We are making a change to section 9b of the standard Crossref membership agreement which will come into effect on January 1, 2018. This will not change how members register content, nor will it affect membership fees in any way. The new 2018 agreement is on our website, and the exact wording changes are highlighted below. The new membership agreement will automatically replace the previous version from January 1, 2018 and members will not need to sign a new agreement.

Continuing our blog series highlighting the uses of Crossref metadata, we talked to Ulf Kronman, Bibliometric Analyst at the National Library of Sweden about the work they’re doing, and how they’re using our REST API as part of their workflow.

The day I received my learner driver permit, I remember being handed three things: a plastic thermosealed reminder that age sixteen was not a good look on me; a yellow L-plate sign as flimsy as my driving ability; and a weighty ‘how to drive’ guide listing all the things that I absolutely must not, under any circumstances, even-if-it-seems-like-a-really-swell-idea-at-the-time, never, ever do.

We know that research communication happens everywhere, and we want your help in finding it! From October 9th we will be collecting links sent in by you through a social campaign across Twitter and Facebook called #BestBlogsRead. Simply send us links to the blogs YOU like to read It’s easy to participate, all you have to do is watch out for the daily tweets and facebook posts and then send us links to the blogs (and news sites) you read.

We’ll be at booth M82 in the Hotspot area of Hall 4.2 and would love to meet with you. Let us know if you’re interested in chatting with one of us - about anything at all.