Ed Pentz
Ed Pentz became Crossref’s first Executive Director when the organization was founded in 2000 and manages all aspects of the organization to ensure that it fulfills its mission to make research outputs easy to find, cite, link and assess. Ed was Chair of the ORCID board of directors from 2014-2017 and is current Treasurer of the International DOI Foundation. Prior to joining Crossref, Ed held electronic publishing, editorial and sales positions at Harcourt Brace in the US and UK and managed the launch of Academic Press’s first online journal, the Journal of Molecular Biology, in 1995. Ed has a degree in English Literature from Princeton University and lives in Oxford, England.
Read more about Ed Pentz on their team page.
100,000,000. Yes, it’s a really big number—and you helped make it happen. We’d like to say thank you to all our members, without your commitment and contribution we would not be celebrating this significant milestone. It really is no small feat.
Cross-posted on the blogs of University of California (UC3), ORCID, and DataCite: https://doi.org/10.5438/67sj-4y05.
Over the past couple of years, a group of organizations with a shared purpose—California Digital Library, Crossref, DataCite, and ORCID—invested our time and energy into launching the Org ID initiative, with the goal of defining requirements for an open, community-led organization identifier registry. The goal of our initiative has been to offer a transparent, accessible process that builds a better system for all of our communities.
We are delighted to report that last year Crossref welcomed a record-breaking 1,939 new members and, because our member base is growing so rapidly in both headcount and geography—with the highest number of new members joining from Asia—we thought it was a good time to reiterate what Crossref is all about, as well as show off a little about the things we are proud to have achieved in 2017.
Happy birthday, ORCID! It’s their fifth birthday today and it’s gratifying to me—as a founding board member and former Chair of the board—to see how successful it has become. ORCID has a great staff, over 700 members from 41 countries and is quickly approaching 4 million ORCID iDs. Crossref—it’s board, staff, and members—has been an ORCID supporter from the start. One example of this support is that we seconded Geoffrey Bilder to be ORCID’s interim CTO for about eight months.
About 1 year ago, Crossref, DataCite and ORCID [announced a joint initiative] (https://orcid.org/blog/2016/10/31/organization-identifier-project-way-forward) to launch and sustain an open, independent, non-profit organization identifier registry to facilitate the disambiguation of researcher affiliations. Today we publish governance recommendations and product principles and requirements for the creation of an open, independent organization identifier registry and invite community feedback.
Crossref is governed by a board of directors that meets in person three times a year in March, July and November. At the July meeting the board typically spends a significant amount of time on strategic planning in addition to its usual activities such as financial oversight, approving investment in new services based on staff and committee recommendations, reviewing and approving policies and fees for new and existing services and generally making sure Crossref is healthy and well run.
At the end of October 2016, Crossref, DataCite, and ORCID reported on collaboration in the area of organization identifiers. We issued three papers for community comment and after input we subsequently announced the formation of The OI Project, along with a call for expressions of interest from people interested in serving on the working group.
Crossref was founded to enable collaboration between publishers.  As our membership has grown and diversified over recent years, it’s becoming even more vital that we take input from a representative cross-section of the membership. This is especially important when considering how fees and policies will affect our diverse members in different ways.
The scholarly communications sector has built and adopted a series of open identifier and metadata infrastructure systems to great success.  Content identifiers (through Crossref and DataCite) and contributor identifiers (through ORCID) have become foundational infrastructure to the industry. Â
