CrossRef Blog

Ed Pentz will be speaking and participating in a panel discussion at the STM meetings next week.

He will be part of a panel discussion on standards called We've got all these standards - why can't we just implement them and be done with it? at the STM E-Production Seminar on Friday December 6.

And the following day at the STM Innovations Seminar he'll give an update on ORCID. His talk entitled ORCID after launch: ready for future authors services will take place on Saturday, December 7 at 16:00.

Learn more.

Posted by Anna Tolwinska at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Following the successful 6 previous congresses, the Seventh International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication, which will be held September 8-10, 2013, in Chicago, Illinois, will provide a forum for the presentation and discussion of new research on peer review and scientific publication. Abstracts on any aspect of scientific editorial and funding peer review, publication, and information access and exchange will be considered.

The increasing sophistication of research into these issues means that preference is likely to be given to well-developed studies with generalizable results (eg, multijournal, prospective, multiyear trials and prospective observational studies). Retrospective studies, systematic reviews, bibliometric analyses, surveys, and other types of studies will also be considered. Abstracts that report new research and findings will be given priority.

Abstracts can be submitted between January 1 and March 1, 2013.

Suggested research topics, instructions for preparing and submitting abstracts, programs and abstracts from previous congresses, and information about the meeting hotel, and other information are available on the Peer Review Congress website at www.peerreviewcongress.org.

Posted by Anna Tolwinska at 4:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Please note that new DOI prefixes issued by CNRI will now have 7 digits instead of 6 (10.xxxxx instead of 10.xxxx). This won't have an impact on any CrossRef services, but if you have created tools that expect DOIs beginning with 10.xxxx/ you'll need to accommodate an extra digit.

Posted by Anna Tolwinska at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) has launched its registry (http://orcid.org), where researchers can distinguish themselves by creating a unique personal identifier. Read the press release or register for an ORCID id.

Posted by Anna Tolwinska at 11:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

CrossRef's Ed Pentz and Rachael Lammey will be attending the Frankfurt Book Fair next week. They will be at stand 4.2 N448.

Ed Pentz will also be attending the 2012 STM Frankfurt Conference the day before the Frankfurt Book Fair opens on October 9th.

Posted by Anna Tolwinska at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

KBART (Knowledge Bases And Related Tools) Working Group is a joint NISO/UKSG initiative, that is exploring data problems within the OpenURL supply chain and is also working on recommendations to help improve metadata in OpenURL knowledge bases.

The latest members to endorse Phase I of the recommendations are: BioOne, JSTOR, LOCKSS, the Royal Society of Chemistry and SpringerLink (hosted by Metapress).

Read the press release here.

Posted by Anna Tolwinska at 11:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Connect with fellow CrossRef members and hear great speakers at this year's CrossRef Annual Meeting at the Royal Society in London, UK on November 13-14.
Be sure to register early as space is limited.

We have a very exciting program with Jason Scott coordinator of the Archive Team,as keynote speaker. Other distinguished speakers on the program are:

• Laure Haak, Executive Director of Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) will provide an update on the ORCID launch.


• Fred Dylla of American Institute of Physics and Kevin Dolby of Wellcome Trust will describe the FundRef project to standardize funder names in the scholarly literature.


• A panel on CrossRef and Global Publishing will include Eleonora Dagiene of the Vilnius Gediminas University Press, Choon-Shil Lee from KAMJE, Yan Shuai from Tsinghua University Press and Edilson Damasio from EDUEM - Maringá State University Press.


• Virginia Barbour, President of the Committee on Publications Ethics (COPE), who will discuss policies for dealing with plagiarism and other ethical issues in scholarly publishing.

CrossRef Annual Meeting Registration - November 14

The CrossRef Workshops covering technical, operational and workflow issues will be held on Tuesday, 13 November. The morning sessions will be appropriate for new members and individuals new to CrossRef, and the afternoon sessions will delve into more technical, procedural and operational issues of interest to all members and affiliates. In addition, for the first time, we will hold a CrossCheck user group on Tuesday morning in a concurrent session to the CrossRef Boot Camp (Introduction to CrossRef).

CrossRef Workshops Registration incl. CrossCheck User Group - November 13

More information including agendas, and hotel information is available here.

Posted by Anna Tolwinska at 3:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The latest issue of the CrossRef Quarterly newsletter is now available.

In this issue you will find updates on the 2012 CrossRef Annual Meeting, CrossRef's ALPSP Award for Contributions to Scholarly Publishing, ORCID, FundRef, CrossCheck and CrossMark among others.

Posted by Anna Tolwinska at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From the NISO Press Release:

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and the National Federation for Advanced Information Services (NFAIS) have issued a new Recommended Practice on Online Supplemental Journal Article Materials, Part B: Technical Recommendations (NISO RP-15-201x) for public comment until September 15, 2012.

Although supplemental materials are increasingly being added to journal articles, there is no recognized set of practices to guide in the selection, delivery, discovery, or preservation of these materials. To address this gap, NISO and NFAIS jointly sponsored a working group to establish best practices that would provide guidance to publishers and authors for management of supplemental materials and would solve related problems for librarians, abstracting and indexing services, and repository administrators.

The Supplemental Materials project has two groups working in tandem: one to address business practices and one to focus on technical issues. The draft currently available for comment includes the recommendations from the Technical Working Group; the Business Group draft recommendations were issued earlier this year. Following the current public comment period, the two parts will be finalized and combined into the final Recommended Practice.

Recommended Practice on Online Supplemental Journal Article Materials, Part B: Technical Recommendations, the supporting documentation, and an online commenting form are available from the NISO website at: www.niso.org/workrooms/supplemental. Publishers, authors, librarians, abstracting and indexing services, and repository administrators are all encouraged to review and comment on this draft.

Recommended Practice on Online Supplemental Journal Article Materials, Part B: Technical Recommendations, the supporting documentation, and an online commenting form are available from the NISO website at: www.niso.org/workrooms/supplemental. Publishers, authors, librarians, abstracting and indexing services, and repository administrators are all encouraged to review and comment on this draft.

Read the full press release.

Alexander ('Sasha') Schwarzman, who is currently Content Technology Architect at the Optical Society, began this discussion on the CrossRef Technical Working group in 2009, so it is especially important that members of the CrossRef community comment on the recommendations.

Posted by Anna Tolwinska at 9:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Baltimore, MD & Philadelphia, PA - January 31, 2012.

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and the National Federation for Advanced Information Services (NFAIS) have issued a new Recommended Practice on Online Supplemental Journal Article Materials, Part A: Business Policies and Practices (NISO RP-15-201x) for public comment ending on *February 29, 2012*.

Although supplemental materials are increasingly being added to journal articles, there is no recognized set of practices to guide in the selection, delivery, discovery, or preservation of these materials. To address this gap, NISO and NFAIS jointly sponsored a working group to establish best practices that would provide guidance to publishers and authors for management of supplemental materials and would solve related problems for librarians, abstracting and indexing services, and repository administrators. The Supplemental Materials project has two groups working in tandem: one to address business practices and one to focus on technical issues. The draft currently available for comment includes the recommendations from the Business Working Group.

Press release:
http://www.niso.org/news/pr/view?item_key=f4bc8a5a8210061012b507c0fbc2c42d10fb5f1f

Draft for public comment (PDF):
http://www.niso.org/apps/group_public/download.php/7964/RP-15-201x%20Suppl_BWG_draft_for_comments.pdf

Document Details:
http://www.niso.org/apps/group_public/document.php?document_id=7964&wg_abbrev=suppbusiness

Online commenting form:
http://www.niso.org/apps/group_public/add_comment.php?document_id=7964

It is anticipated that Part B: Technical Considerations and Implementation Recommendations will be released for Public Comment in Summer 2012.

The NISO-NFAIS Working Group will be grateful for your comments.

Posted by Anna Tolwinska at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So says a report commissioned by the Publishing Research Consortium.

While many publishers continue to be unsure of the business models for journal data mining, they are generally open to the modest number of requests they receive for data mining projects. Respondents also suggested ways to make data mining easier, from increasing data standardization to the more extreme possibility of creating a single combined platform to mine data from multiple sources.

The study, written by Eefke Smit and Maurits van der Graaf, reports on results of interviews with 29 individuals from academia, libraries, publishers, and pharmaceutical companies involved in journal data mining. It also presents results from a survey of members of the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM) and members of CrossRef.

The accesible report is written for an intelligent business audience and is well worth a read for those wanting a non-technical overview of the issues surrounding datamining.

Posted by Carol Anne Meyer at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Phil Davis, over at the Scholarly Kitchen, has people thinking about retractions. His blog post "When Bad Science Persists on the Internet" focuses on just one aspect that CrossRef's upcoming CrossMark service is meant to help with: the dire case when an article must be retracted.

As I noted in the Learned Publishing article that started Phil thinking about this, retractions are the most extreme form of corrections and updates that CrossMark is designed to help with.

And Geoff Bilder, the brains behind CrossMark, notes that CrossMark has other interesting applications. BioMed Central has reported on some early experiments in using CrossMark to thread related content together.

Coincidentally, the Journal of Medical Ethics just published an analysis of the growth and causes of retractions in the biomedical literature by Liz Wager from the Committee on Publication Ethics, which shows that retractions are up about tenfold from the 80s to the period from 2006-2009.

Another source for keeping an eye on retractions is watchdog blog Retraction Watch.

So what's the deal with CrossMark now? We are currently in a pilot phase with a few publishers who will be adding CrossMark logos and status information to a few test journals. We are recruiting additional CrossRef members to participate in the next phase of the pilot. If you are interested in participating, please contact us at info@crossref.org. We will plan a webinar soon to provide a demo of the service. I'll also be describing CrossMark at the Society for Scholarly Publishing's (SSP) Annual Meeting and the AAAS Pacific Meeting LIbrary Science Symposium, both in June.

To make sure you are in the loop as CrossMark develops, make sure to sign up for our mailing list

Posted by Carol Anne Meyer at 1:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Copyright violations have been around as long as copyright law (1709, did you know?), but digital piracy is a relatively new phenomenon, and one that is a justifiable concern for publishers. A recent SSP web seminar entitled “How to Combat Digital Piracy on a Budget” demonstrated how to do just that, and provided a very interesting overview of the problem and how it affects scholarly publishers.

At the end of last year an independent study by the internet monitoring and enforcement service Attributor tracked 900 book titles over a three month period and concluded that each of the titles was illegally downloaded 10,000 times, with titles in the categories of Business and Investing, Professional and Technical, and Science topping the list (see the report for details - PDF). Ed McCoyd from the AAP explained that over half of these downloads came from just two sites: rapidshare.com and 4shared.com, both “one-click hosting” sites to which users can upload content and share it by distributing the files’ URLs. 4shared.com and other sites also offer a search function whereby anyone can download from other users’ public folders (I found articles from a number of CrossRef members’ journals with just a few clicks on 4shared).

But it’s not all bad news: when the authors of the study followed up with these sites, 85% of the illegal copies were subsequently removed or blocked. There’s work, however, in contacting these sites, and to this end the Publisher’s Association has launched its Copyright Infringement Portal. Members submit details of a reported infringement to the portal and it identifies the offending site, sends an appropriate takedown notice and tracks progress through to removal. To date, Scribd is the biggest offender but also the most cooperative partner, removing 98% of offending works almost immediately (the overall removal rate is currently 61%). Alicia Wise from the PA demonstrated how the portal is also useful as a discovery resource, allowing publishers to see notices issued by others and thereby identifying the most frequently offending sites.

The seminar finished with Daphne Ireland talking about the ways in which Princeton University Press is attempting to fight piracy. PUP is alerted to much of its pirated content by its authors who come across it on the web, yet they estimate that 50% of these illegal copies are author copies that have been redistributed. Educating authors on copyright is, as you might imagine, high on their agenda. They are also making use of watermarking and tightening their license agreements with all third parties who handle their content. But on a more strategic level, Daphne’s advice to other publishers was to “embrace the digital marketplace”. If your content is available to purchase in many places at a reasonable price then people will have fewer reasons to seek out pirated copies.

Posted by Kirsty Meddings at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bob Campbell of Wiley-Blackwell, who serves as the Chair of CrossRef's Board of Directors, recently received the prestigious Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) award for Contribution to Scholarly Publishing. ALPSP's Council cited Bob's "fierce and passionate advoca[cy] of the publishing industry and the role and importance of society publishing." Congratulations, Bob!

Visit the ALPSP website for more on this year's awards.
Robert Parker (ALPSP Chair) and Bob Campbell (Wiley-Blackwell). (Photo courtesy ALPSP)

Posted by Carol Anne Meyer at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

CrossRef Executive Director Ed Pentz and Yvonne Campfens of Springer explain the Project Transfer Code of Practice in the October issue of Learned Publshing (http://dx.doi.org/10.1087/20090405). A good example of industry collaboration, Project Transfer's Code proves a set of voluntary best practices that help ensure that online publications that change ownership or publishers or both are still accessible to subscribers.

Learned Publishing access is by subscription--ALPSP and SSP provide access as part of membership.

Posted by Carol Anne Meyer at 6:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Chuck Koscher, CrossRef's Director of Technology, begins his term as Chair of the National Information Standards Organization. Here's an exerpt from NISO's press release:

Chuck Koscher, Director of Technology at CrossRef, who was elected last year and has served as Vice Chair during the current term, will become Chair of NISO for the 2009-10 term.
“NISO has a great deal of opportunity before us,” said Koscher, the incoming Chair.

“With recent successes on the Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) and Shared Electronic Resources Understanding (SERU), new work on single sign-on authentication and Cost of Resource Exchange (CORE), as well as potential projects on XML structures, physical delivery, and e-resource management, NISO is at the forefront of technology issues facing the information community. Helping to lead the organization in this exciting time will be a great honor.”

Please see the NISO Press release for more information.

Posted by Carol Anne Meyer at 6:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

CrossRef's Kirsty Meddings shows how Twitter worked at the recent UKSG meeting: http://tinyurl.com/UKSGtweets.

A reassuring word that actual face-to-face conversations are not dead from her article published in UKSG Serials e-News: "It was also good to see people seeking each other out in person after having exchanged tweets, to continue conversations in a more traditional manner with people that they probably otherwise would not have met."

Posted by Carol Anne Meyer at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Image via Wikipedia

I had an opportunity to preview this extremely helpful talk last week, and I highly recommend that publishers, authors, and librarians attend to find out how this agreement may affect their rights.

Register at the CCC web site.

Posted by Carol Anne Meyer at 3:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A number of articles and news items have brought the issue of plagiarism into focus recently. Last week, a short paper in Science provided an update on the research by Harold Garner and his colleagues that was previously reported in Nature News, and has since been commented on in a number of places including SSP’s Scholarly Kitchen blog.

Garner’s team has taken abstracts from Medline and used a piece of software called eTBLAST to compare them against each other for similar and overlapping text. To date, with a combination of machine and human analysis, they have identified 9120 articles with "high levels of citation similarity and no overlapping authors", and 212 pairs of articles "with signs of potential plagiarism". They have gone on to contact authors and editors and (under assurances of anonymity) have received a range of responses from outrage to apology to denial. As of February 2009 they are aware of their study having triggering 83 internal investigations leading to 46 retractions.

In The Scientist Garner explains that technology has a role to play in plagiarism detection because "You can't expect all the editors and reviewers to have all 18,000,000 papers in their head from biomedicine”. Technology will never be an adequate substitute for a human domain expert’s knowledge and judgment, but a system such as CrossCheck can scan vast amounts of content and flag up potential issues, saving time and adding a level of reassurance previously unavailable.

The CrossCheck database currently contains almost 11 million content items and is on course to become the most comprehensive resource against which to check scholarly content for plagiarism. Look out for sessions on CrossCheck and plagiarism at the UKSG conference at the end of the month, and also at the Council of Science Editors meeting in May.

Posted by Kirsty Meddings at 8:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It was announced last night at the ALPSP International Conference Dinner that CrossCheck was chosen as the recipient of this year's Award for Publishing Innovation. The award recognizes a truly innovative approach to any aspect of publication. Applications are judged on their originality and innovative qualities, together with their utility, benefit to their community and long term prospects.

CrossCheck powered by iThenticate is a new initiative to aid publishers in verifying the originality of scholarly content. CrossRef members who choose to participate can check submissions against a vast database of proprietary as well as open web content.

For more information about ALPSP and their awards program, visit http://www.alpsp.org/.

Posted by Amy Brand at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Elsevier recently launched its Publishing Ethics Resource Kit (PERK) - http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/editorshome.editors/Introduction - which mentions the CrossCheck pilot and the important work being done by COPE - the Committee on Publishing Ethics (http://www.publicationethics.org.uk/about).

I'm glad that Elsevier has highlighted its participation in the CrossCheck Pilot which we hope to move into production and role out to all CrossRef members starting in June 2008. The PERK information shows that a technology tool for detecting overlapping text between documents is only one small (but important) part of the larger issue of ethics in publishing. Publishers need to look at a broad range of policies and procedures and need to explain to authors and readers how they go about publishing high-quality, original content - scholarly publishers haven't always been very good at this in the past but publishers do add a lot of value.

Posted by Ed Pentz at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Research Information Network (RIN - http://www.rin.ac.uk/) worked with funders in the UK, Wiley-Blackwell and CrossRef to come up with some very reasonable guidelines on the acknowledgement of research funders in scholarly journal articles. The full document is available on the RIN website - http://www.rin.ac.uk/funders-acknowledgement).

If all the parties work together there will be a virtuous circle - funders instruct grantees on how to cite the funder and grant numbers in publications, authors follow these instructions when submitting papers to journals and publishers pick up the standard funder names and grant numbers, tag them and list the information in a separate section. Publishers add value and the funders can assess the results of funding.

Continue reading "Acknowledgement of funders in journal articles" »

Posted by Ed Pentz at 9:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Please see the important announcement below about Project Transfer which CrossRef has been involved in. Publishers will be asked to sign up to the Code, which includes a requirement to follow the CrossRef DOI Ownership Transfer Policy - http://www.crossref.org/02publishers/61ownership.html

Oxford, UK - 9th May 2007- Project Transfer is inviting publishers to sign up to a Code of Practice which aims to improve the procedures and policies surrounding the transfer of journals between publishers. The Code has been drafted with extensive help from many of the major international publishing houses and has already been applauded as an excellent step forward by the contributing library community.

The Code outlines a set of guidelines for both the Transferring and the Receiving publisher in any journal transfer. Comprehensive in its detail, the Code covers the thorny issues of ongoing access provision to online content, exchange of subscriber lists, DOI and URL transfer as well as the division and definition of born-digital versus newly digitized backfile content.

The Project Transfer Working Group is inviting publishers to sign up to this Code through the Project website: <http://www.projecttransfer.org/> where the Code of Practice can also be found. Full details of the Code were launched at the UKSG Annual Conference in Warwick (16-18 April 2007).

Note: A direct link to the Transfer Code of Practice is <http://www.uksg.org/sites/uksg.org/files/UKSG_TRANSFER_Code_of_Conduct_Phase_1.pdf>

Posted by Ed Pentz at 6:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)