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In 2020 we released our first public data file, something we’ve turned into an annual affair supporting our commitment to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI). We’ve just posted the 2022 file, which can now be downloaded via torrent like in years past. We aim to publish these in the first quarter of each year, though as you may notice, we’re a little behind our intended schedule. The reason for this delay was that we wanted to make critical new metadata fields available, including resource URLs and titles with markup.

Unfortunately, Bryan Vickery has moved onto pastures new. I would like to thank him for his many contributions at Crossref and we all wish him well. I’m now pleased to announce that Rachael Lammey will be Crossref’s new Director of Product starting on Monday, May 16th. Rachael’s skills and experience are perfectly suited for this role. She has been at Crossref since 2012 and has deep knowledge and experience of all things Crossref: our mission; our members; our culture; and our services.

Since we announced last September the launch of a new version of iThenticate, a number of you have upgraded and become familiar with iThenticate v2 and its new and improved features which include: A faster, more user-friendly and responsive interface A preprint exclusion filter, giving users the ability to identify content on preprint servers more easily A new “red flag” feature that signals the detection of hidden text such as text/quotation marks in white font, or suspicious character replacement A private repository available for browser users, allowing them to compare against their previous submissions to identify duplicate submissions within your organisation A content portal, helping users check how much of their own research outputs have been successfully indexed, self-diagnose and fix the content that has failed to be indexed in iThenticate.

A re-cap We kicked off our Ambassador Program in 2018 after consultation with our members, who told us they wanted greater support and representation in their local regions, time zones, and languages. We also recognized that our membership has grown and changed dramatically over recent years and that it is likely to continue to do so. We now have over 16,000 members across 140 countries. As we work to understand what’s to come and ensure that we are meeting the needs of such an expansive community, having trusted local contacts we can work closely with is key to ensuring we are more proactive in engaging with new audiences and supporting existing members.

Tl;dr Forthcoming amendments to Crossref’s membership terms will include: Removal of ‘reference distribution preference’ policy: all references in Crossref will be treated as open metadata from 3rd June 2022. An addition to sanctions jurisdictions: the United Kingdom will be added to sanctions jurisdictions that Crossref needs to comply with. Sponsors and members have been emailed today with the 60-day notice needed for changes in terms. Reference distribution preferences In 2017, when we consolidated our metadata services under Metadata Plus, we made it possible for members to set a preference for the distribution of references to Open, Limited, or Closed.

We talk so much about more and better metadata that a reasonable question might be: what is Crossref doing to help? Members and their service partners do the heavy lifting to provide Crossref with metadata and we don’t change what is supplied to us. One reason we don’t is because members can and often do change their records (important note: updated records do not incur fees!). However, we do a fair amount of behind the scenes work to check and report on the metadata as well as to add context and relationships.

Join us for the first in our Perspectives blog series. In this series of blogs, we will be meeting different members of our diverse, global community at Crossref. We learn more about their lives, how they came to know and work with us, and we hear insights about the scholarly research landscape in their country, challenges they face, and plans for the future.

So here I am, apologizing again. Have I mentioned that I hate computers? We had a large data center outage. It lasted 17 hours. It meant that pretty much all Crossref services were unavailable - our main website, our content registration system, our reports, our APIs. 17 hours was a long time for us - but it was also an inconvenient time for numerous members, service providers, integrators, and users. We apologise for this.

In collaboration with California Digital Library and DataCite, Crossref guides the operations of the Research Organization Registry (ROR). ROR is community-driven and has an independent sustainability plan involving grants, donations, and in-kind support from our staff. ROR is a vital component of the Research Nexus, our vision of a fully connected open research ecosystem. It helps people identify, connect, and analyze the affiliations of those contributing to, producing, and publishing all kinds of research objects.

The ecosystem of scholarly metadata is filled with relationships between items of various types: a person authored a paper, a paper cites a book, a funder funded research. Those relationships are absolutely essential: an item without them is missing the most basic context about its structure, origin, and impact. No wonder that finding and exposing such relationships is considered very important by virtually all parties involved. Probably the most famous instance of this problem is finding citation links between research outputs. Lately, another instance has been drawing more and more attention: linking research outputs with grants used as their funding source. How can this be done and how many such links can we observe?