Looking back over 2024, we wanted to reflect on where we are in meeting our goals, and report on the progress and plans that affect you - our community of 21,000 organisational members as well as the vast number of research initiatives and scientific bodies that rely on Crossref metadata.
In this post, we will give an update on our roadmap, including what is completed, underway, and up next, and a bit about what’s paused and why.
The Crossref2024 annual meeting gathered our community for a packed agenda of updates, demos, and lively discussions on advancing our shared goals. The day was filled with insights and energy, from practical demos of Crossrefâs latest API features to community reflections on the Research Nexus initiative and the Board elections.
Our Board elections are always the focal point of the Annual Meeting. We want to start reflecting on the day by congratulating our newly elected board members: Katharina Rieck from Austrian Science Fund (FWF), Lisa Schiff from California Digital Library, Aaron Wood from American Psychological Association, and Amanda Ward from Taylor and Francis, who will officially join (and re-join) in January 2025.
Background The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) provides a set of guidelines for operating open infrastructure in service to the scholarly community. It sets out 16 points to ensure that the infrastructure on which the scholarly and research communities rely is openly governed, sustainable, and replicable. Each POSI adopter regularly reviews progress, conducts periodic audits, and self-reports how theyâre working towards each of the principles.
In 2020, Crossrefâs board voted to adopt the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure, and we completed our first self-audit.
In June 2022, we wrote a blog post âRethinking staff travel, meetings, and eventsâ outlining our new approach to staff travel, meetings, and events with the goal of not going back to ânormalâ after the pandemic. We took into account three key areas:
The environment and climate change Inclusion Work/life balance We are aware that many of our members are also interested in minimizing their impacts on the environment, and we are overdue for an update on meeting our own commitments, so here goes our summary for the year 2023!
Registering your DOI records using the OJS platform
You can register your DOI records with us using the OJS platform with two extra plugins - the DOI plugin, and the Crossref XML plugin for OJS. We highly recommend including your references in the metadata you send to us, too - you can do this by adding the OJS references plugin.
Step 1: Set up the DOI plugin
Ask your OJS administrator to install the DOI plugin, and add the DOI prefix that we gave to you. Your prefix will start with 10. and will be followed by other numbers.
You can check whether the DOI Plugin is already set up by following these steps:
Go to âSettingsâ on your dashboard and click âWebsiteâ
Switch to the âPluginsâ tab
Search âPublic Identifier Pluginsâ and find âDOIâ
Click the checkbox on the right side of the DOI plugin description to enable it
Step 2: Set up the Crossef XML plugin for OJS
To make best use of the plugin, make sure youâre using OJS version 3 or higher.
You can start by finding the Crossref plugin from your dashboard:
Click âToolsâ
Choose the âImport/Exportâ tab
Click âCrossref XML Export Pluginâ
You can deposit content with us in one of three ways:
Register your content with us automatically using the OJS plugin
Register the content with us manually, from the plugin interface
Simply click the checkbox at the bottom of the DOI plugin settings to enable automatic deposits.
Youâll then need to add information into the plugin:
Hereâs what to enter into each of the fields shown in the screenshot above:
Depositor name - the name of the organization registering the DOIs (note: this field is not authenticated with Crossref)
Depositor email - the email address of the individual responsible for registering content with Crossref (note: this field is not authenticated with Crossref)
Username - this is the username element of your Crossref depositor credentials. It will be passed to us to authenticate your submission(s). Your username might be just a collection of letters (role credentials), or it might be an email address (user credentials) - there is more information on role versus user credentials below.
Password - this is the password associated with your Crossref depositor credentials
Note: if the combination of username and password is incorrect, OJS will return a â401 unauthorized status codeâ error at the time of registration. This error indicates that the username and password are incorrectly entered. That is, they do not match the username and/or password set with Crossref.
If you are using organization-wide, shared role credentials (i.e. your username is a collection of letters), you can simply add in your shared username and password.
If you are using personal user credentials that are unique to you (i.e. your username is your email address), youâll need to add your email address and your role into the username field, and your personal password into the password field. Hereâs an example of what this will look like:
The OJS references plugin is available from OJS 3.1.2 onwards. The plugin will use the Crossref API to check against plain text references and locate possible DOIs for articles. The plugin will also allow the display of reference lists on the article landing page in OJS and deposit them as part of your metadata deposit. Linking references is a requirement of Crossref membership.
Two things need to be set up to activate the references plugin:
a) Workflow Settings
Click âSettingsâ and then âWorkflowâ from your dashboard
Under the âSubmissionâ tab, choose âMetadataâ!
Scroll down to the bottom and to find the âReferencesâ section Make sure you enable references metadata by clicking the checkbox âEnable references metadataâ. You also need to select the option âAsk the author to provide references during submissionâ.
Click save!
b) Website Settings
Then you need to activate the references plugin on the website, too, by following the instructions here:
Click âSettingsâ and then âWebsiteâ from your dashboard
Choose the âPluginsâ tab.
Search âCrossref reference linkingâ
Click the âCrossref reference linking checkbox
This plugin will deposit the references that you enter into the XML deposit.
Additional OJS plugins for Crossref
In addition to the Crossref XML plugin for OJS, there are also other important plugins that can be enabled in OJS to enrich your metadata records:
Funding Metadata plugin - as of OJS 3.1.2, it is possible to enable a funder registry plugin for submitting funding information to Crossref. The plugin will use the Open Funder Registry to check against existing funding agencies. The plugin will include funding information in your Crossref DOI deposits.
Similarity Check plugin - if you are using OJS 3.1.2 or above, you are able to use the Similarity Check plugin. This will enable you to automatically send manuscripts to your iThenticate account to check their similarity to already published content. You will need to be subscribed to Crossrefâs Similarity Check service for this to work.
Getting help with OJS plugins
The team at Crossref didnât create these plugins - they were either created by the team at PKP, or by third-party developers. Because of this, we arenât able to give in-depth help or troubleshooting on problems with these plugins.
