Blog

Community Outreach in 2020

2020 hasn’t been quite what any of us had imagined. The pandemic has meant big adjustments in terms of working; challenges for parents balancing childcare and professional lives; anxieties and tensions we never had before; the strain of potentially being away from co-workers, friends, and family for a prolonged period of time. Many have suffered job losses and around the world, many have sadly lost their lives to the virus.

Calling all prospective board members

English version –– InformaciĂłn en español –– Version Française The Crossref Nominating Committee is inviting expressions of interest to join the Board of Directors of Crossref for the term starting in 2021. The committee will gather responses from those interested and create the slate of candidates that our membership will vote on in an election in September. Expressions of interest will be due Friday, June 19, 2020. The role of the board at Crossref is to provide strategic and financial oversight of the organization, as well as guidance to the Executive Director and the staff leadership team, with the key responsibilities being:

Crossing the Rubicon - The case for making chapters visible

To help better support the discovery, sale and analysis of books, Jennifer Kemp from Crossref and Mike Taylor from Digital Science, present seven reasons why publishers should collect chapter-level metadata. Book publishers should have been in the best possible position to take advantage of the movement of scholarly publishing to the internet. After all, they have behind them an extraordinary legacy of creating and distributing data about books: the metadata that supports discovery, sales and analysis.

Helping researchers identify content they can text mine

TL;DR Many organizations are doing what they can to aid in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Crossref members can make it easier for researchers to identify, locate, and access content for text mining. In order to do this, members must include elements in their metadata that: Point to the full text of the content. Indicate that the content is available under an open access license or that it is being made available for free (gratis).

Free public data file of 112+ million Crossref records

A lot of people have been using our public, open APIs to collect data that might be related to COVID-19. This is great and we encourage it. We also want to make it easier. To that end we have made a free data file of the public elements from Crossref’s 112.5 million metadata records. The file (65GB, in JSON format) is available via Academic Torrents here: https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/10.13003/83B2GP It is important to note that Crossref metadata is always openly available.

Can you help us to launch Distributed Usage Logging?

Update: Deadline extended to 23:59 (UTC) 13th March 2020.

Distributed Usage Logging (DUL) allows publishers to capture traditional usage activity related to their content that happens on sites other than their own so they can provide reports of “total usage”, for example to subscribing institutions, regardless of where that usage happens.

Crossref is 20

It seems like only yesterday…

On January 19th, 2000 a new not-for-profit organization was registered in New York State. It was called Publishers International Linking Association, Inc but was more commonly referred to as “CrossRef”. This means that Crossref will be 20 years old on January 19th, 2020 so I wanted to mark the occasion with a short post. We are planning more ways to mark our 20th anniversary later this year so keep a lookout.

A Journey of a Crossref Ambassador in Latin America

English version –– InformaciĂłn en español In this post, Arley Soto shares some experiences about his work as a Crossref ambassador in Latin America. When I joined as a volunteer Crossref ambassador in 2018, I never imagined that in less than two years, I would have the opportunity to travel to three Latin American cities, visit Toronto, organize the first Crossref LIVE in Spanish and hold webinars in Spanish about Crossref’s services.

Introducing our new Director of Finance & Operations

I’m happy to announce that Lucy Ofiesh has joined Crossref as our new Director of Finance and Operations. Lucy has experience supporting the sustainability and governance of not-for-profit organizations having held roles such as Executive Vice President of the Brooklyn Children’s Museum and for the last few years as Chief Operating Officer at Center for Open Science, a Crossref member.

A turning point is a time for reflection

Crossref strives for balance. Different people have always wanted different things from us and, since our founding, we have brought together diverse organizations to have discussions—sometimes contentious—to agree on how to help make scholarly communications better. Being inclusive can mean slow progress, but we’ve been able to advance by being flexible, fair, and forward-thinking. We have been helped by the fact that Crossref’s founding organizations defined a clear purpose in our original certificate of incorporation, which reads: