Blog

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 didn’t get a chance to join us, I’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.

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

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.

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. We’ve discussed in our previous posts in the “Integrity of the Scholarly Record (ISR)” 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.

Do you want to help make research communications better in all corners of the globe? Come and join the world of nonprofit open infrastructure and be part of improving the creation and sharing of knowledge. We are recruiting for three new staff positions, all new roles and all fully remote and flexible. See below for more about our ethos and what it’s like working at Crossref. 🚀 Technical Community Manager, working with our ‘integrators’ so all repository/publishing platforms and plugins, all API users incl.

The Publishers Learning And Community Exchange (PLACE) at theplace.discourse.group is a new online public forum created for organisations interested in adopting best practices in scholarly publishing. New scholarly publishers can access information from multiple agencies in one place, ask questions of the experts and join conversations with each other. Scholarly publishing is an interesting niche of an industry – it appears at the same time ancillary and necessary to the practice and development of scholarship itself.

We believe in Persistent Identifiers. We believe in defence in depth. Today we’re excited to announce an upgrade to our data resilience strategy. Defence in depth means layers of security and resilience, and that means layers of backups. For some years now, our last line of defence has been a reliable, tried-and-tested technology. One that’s been around for a while. Yes, I’m talking about the humble 5¼ inch floppy disk.

Recording data citations supports data reuse and aids research integrity and reproducibility. Crossref makes it easy for our members to submit data citations to support the scholarly record. TL;DR Citations are essential/core metadata that all members should submit for all articles, conference proceedings, preprints, and books. Submitting data citations to Crossref has long been possible. And it’s easy, you just need to: Include data citations in the references section as you would for any other citation Include a DOI or other persistent identifier for the data if it is available - just as you would for any other citation Submit the references to Crossref through the content registration process as you would for any other record And your data citations will flow through all the normal processes that Crossref applies to citations.

At Crossref, we care a lot about the completeness and quality of metadata. Gathering robust metadata from across the global network of scholarly communication is essential for effective co-creation of the research nexus and making the inner workings of academia traceable and transparent. We invest time in community initiatives such as Metadata 20/20 and Better Together webinars. We encourage members to take time to look up their participation reports, and our team can support you if you’re looking to understand and improve any aspects of metadata coverage of your content.

What’s in the metadata matters because it is So.Heavily.Used. You might be tired of hearing me say it but that doesn’t make it any less true. Our open APIs now see over 1 billion queries per month. The metadata is ingested, displayed and redistributed by a vast, global array of systems and services that in whole or in part are often designed to point users to relevant content. It’s also heavily used by researchers, who author the content that is described in the metadata they analyze.