Blog

Our paper, Crossref: the sustainable source of community-owned scholarly metadata, was recently published in Quantitative Science Studies (MIT Press). The paper describes the scholarly metadata collected and made available by Crossref, as well as its importance in the scholarly research ecosystem.

Hello from sunny Girona! I’m heading to PIDapalooza, the Persistent Identifier festival, as it returns for its second year. It’s all about to kick off. One of the themes this year is “bridging worlds”: how to bring together different communities and the identifiers they use. Something I really enjoyed about PIDapalooza last year was the variety of people who came. We heard about some “traditional” identifier systems (at least, it seems that way to us): DOIs for publications, DOIs for datasets, ORCIDs for researchers.

I’m here in Toronto and looking forward to a busy week. Maddy Watson and I are in town for the 4:AM Altmetrics Conference, as well as the altmetrics17 workshop and Hack-day. I’ll be speaking at each, and for those of you who aren’t able to make it, I’ve combined both presentations into a handy blog post, which follows on from my last one. But first, nothing beats a good demo. Take a look at our live stream.

There’s a saying about oil, something along the lines of “you really don’t want to see how it’s made”. And whilst I’m reluctant to draw too many parallels between the petrochemical industry and scholarly publishing, there are some interesting comparisons to be drawn. Oil starts its life deep underground as an amorphous sticky substance. Prospectors must identify oil fields, drill, extract the oil and refine it. It finds its way into things as diverse as aspirin, paint and hammocks.

We’ve been talking about it at events, blogging about it on our site, living it, breathing it, and even sometimes dreaming about it, and now we are delighted to announce that Crossref Event Data has entered Beta.