Latest blog posts
Ginny Hendricks
2024 December 12

A progress update and a renewed commitment to community

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.

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Rosa Morais Clark
2024 December 09

A summary of our Annual Meeting

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 Crossref’s 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.

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Lucy Ofiesh
2024 December 07

2024 POSI audit

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 they’re working towards each of the principles. In 2020, Crossref’s board voted to adopt the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure, and we completed our first self-audit.

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Ed Pentz
2024 December 05

Summary of the environmental impact of Crossref

In June 2022, we wrote a blog post “Rethinking staff travel, meetings, and events” outlining our new approach to staff travel, meetings, and events with the goal of not going back to ‘normal’ 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!

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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