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We will shortly be adding a new feature to Crossmark. In a section called “Clinical Trials” we will be using new metadata fields to link together all of the publications we know about that reference a particular clinical trial. Most medical journals make clinical trial registration a prerequisite for publication. Trials should be registered with one of the fifteen WHO-approved public trial registries , or with clinicaltrials.gov which is run by the US National Library of Medicine.

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.

Today eight publishers have presented an open letter that sets out the rationale for making ORCID iDs a requirement for all corresponding authors, a move that is being backed by even more publishers and researchers as the news spreads on twitter with #publishORCID. Crossref is a founding organization of ORCID and an ongoing supporter so it’s great to see further uptake and even more benefit for the research community.

We’ve been talking a lot about infrastructure here at Crossref, and how the metadata we gather and organize is the foundation for so many services - those we provide directly - and those services that use our APIs to access that metadata, such as Kudos and CHORUS, which in turn provide the wider world of researchers, administrators, and funders with tailored information and tools.

The initiative formerly known as FundRef 

Together Crossref’s funding data (previously known as FundRef  – we simplified the name)  and the Open Funder Registry, our taxonomy of grant-giving organizations, comprise a hub for gathering and querying metadata related to the questions:

“Who funded this research?” and “Where has the research we funded been published?”

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.

If you’re anything like us at Crossref Labs (and we know some of you are) you would have been very excited about the launch of the Raspberry Pi Zero a couple of days ago. In case you missed it, this is a new edition of the tiny low-priced Raspberry Pi computer. Very tiny and very low-priced. At $5 we just had to have one, and ordered one before we knew exactly what we want to do with it. You would have done the same. Bad luck if it was out of stock.

You might have missed it, but you haven’t missed out.  If you want to watch – or savor re-watching – the presentations from last week’s 2015 Crossref Annual Meeting, we’ve embedded each video below in chronological order. Sit back, relax, and take it all in (again) just as though you were in an air-conditioned ballroom at the Taj.

The rebranding of Crossref was top priority when I joined in May in a new role called “Director of Member & Community Outreach”. Since then I’ve been working to understand the array of services, attributes, and audiences we have developed; to answer the questions “What do we do, for whom, and why?”

As Crossref prepares to celebrate turning fifteen at our annual meeting next week, I am thrilled to present our new brand identity with key messages and logo. And along with “thrilled” you may also detect “nervous excitement”.

Crossref goes live in tandem with DataCite to push both publication and dataset information to ORCID profiles automatically. All organisations that deposit ORCID iDs with Crossref and/or DataCite will see this information going further, automatically updating author records. 

Register for our webinar to learn best practices for depositing metadata and ways to help with the dissemination and discoverability of OA content.

New Crossref services are being developed that have particular application to OA publishers. Did you know that our upcoming DOI Event Tracker service was inspired by a group of OASPA publishers asking if there was a way to centrally support the gathering of data that could be analyzed as altmetrics?