Latest blog posts
Martyn Rittman
2024 November 15

Research Integrity Roundtable 2024

For the third year in a row, Crossref hosted a roundtable on research integrity prior to the Frankfurt book fair. This year the event looked at Crossmark, our tool to display retractions and other post-publication updates to readers. Since the start of 2024, we have been carrying out a consultation on Crossmark, gathering feedback and input from a range of members. The roundtable discussion was a chance to check and refine some of the conclusions we’ve come to, and gather more suggestions on the way forward.

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Dominika Tkaczyk
2024 November 06

How good is your matching?

In our previous blog post in this series, we explained why no metadata matching strategy can return perfect results. Thankfully, however, this does not mean that it’s impossible to know anything about the quality of matching. Indeed, we can (and should!) measure how close (or far) we are from achieving perfection with our matching. Read on to learn how this can be done! How about we start with a quiz? Imagine a database of scholarly metadata that needs to be enriched with identifiers, such as ORCIDs or ROR IDs.

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Kornelia Korzec
2024 October 28

Update on the Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability research

We’re in year two of the Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability (RCFS) research. This report provides an update on progress to date, specifically on research we’ve conducted to better understand the impact of our fees and possible changes. Crossref is in a good financial position with our current fees, which haven’t increased in 20 years. This project is seeking to future-proof our fees by: Making fees more equitable Simplifying our complex fee schedule Rebalancing revenue sources In order to review all aspects of our fees, we’ve planned five projects to look into specific aspects of our current fees that may need to change to achieve the goals above.

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Lucy Ofiesh
2024 September 24

Meet the candidates and vote in our 2024 Board elections

On behalf of the Nominating Committee, I’m pleased to share the slate of candidates for the 2024 board election. Each year we do an open call for board interest. This year, the Nominating Committee received 53 submissions from members worldwide to fill four open board seats. We maintain a balanced board of 8 large member seats and 8 small member seats. Size is determined based on the organization’s membership tier (small members fall in the $0-$1,650 tiers and large members in the $3,900 - $50,000 tiers).

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Warnings, Caveats and Weasel Words

Most of the experiments linked to here are running on R&D equipment in a non-production environment. They may disappear without warning and/or perform erratically. If one of them isn’t working for some reason, come back later and try again.

Labs

 4 minute read.

Crossref Labs is the dedicated R&D arm of Crossref. In late 2021 we announced that we are re-energizing Labs after a period of working mostly on development tasks.

What’s our focus?

The division between what the R&D group does at the group-level, and what the wider organisation does will always be more of a gradient than a line. But at the highest level we’d say that R&D will focus on projects that:

  • Address new constituencies.
  • Involve fundamentally new approaches (technology or process or both).
  • Are exploratory with no clear product application yet.

And that a “strategic initiative” (as opposed to a new feature, service, or product) is something that:

  • Involves something we’ve never done before.
  • Involves potential changes to our membership model and fees.
  • Would require a large investment of resources outside of normal budget.

We’re certainly not the only group at Crossref who experiment, build proof of concepts (POCs), and do research, but we hope to support other groups who do - both inside our organization and in the wider research ecosystem.

Sound right up your street? Interested in collaborating on something you’re working on? Let us know.

labs_email

What are we working on now?

All the projects we are working on can be browsed here. We also have a list of Labs ideas.

A few current highlights are:

  • Measuring how good our community is at preservation. Dashboard at https://the-vault.fly.dev/ and these are displayed on the Labs prototype (see next…!)
  • Playing around with how we might evolve our Participation Reports.
  • Looking at running a “labs” version of our API where we can experiment with exposing new functionality and metadata in order to get quick feedback from the community.
  • Making the Retraction Watch data openly available via the Labs API (and in .csv format) so we can get feedback on it before integrating it into our REST API.
  • Looking at how we can extend the classification information we currently make available via our API across more journal titles.
  • Exploring how we currently do citation matching with a view to evolving this approach i.e. making it better, more transparent and open to community contributions.
  • Creating a sampling framework that can be used to extract samples of works and make them publicly available.
  • Building POC tools to help our members and support team more easily accomplish common tasks.

A flavor of Labs research and experiments

Documents

Graduated to production services (or became part of them)

Retired

Labs Group

Alumni

Page owner: A Crossref Labs creature   |   Last updated 2023-February-20