Earlier this year, Ginny posted an exciting update on Crossrefâs progress with adopting ROR, the Research Organization Registry for affiliations, announcing that we’d started the collection of ROR identifiers in our metadata input schema. đŚ
The capacity to accept ROR IDs to help reliably identify institutions is really important but the real value comes from their open availability alongside the other metadata registered with us, such as for publications like journal articles, book chapters, preprints, and for other objects such as grants.
Event Data is our service to capture online mentions of Crossref records. We monitor data archives, Wikipedia, social media, blogs, news, and other sources. Our main focus has been on gathering data from external sources, however we know that there is a great deal of Crossref metadata that can be made available as events. Earlier this year we started adding relationship metadata, and over the last few months we have been working on bringing in citations between records.
Tl;dr: Metadata for the (currently 26,000) grants that have been registered by our funder members is now available via the REST API. This is quite a milestone in our program to include funding in Crossref infrastructure and a step forward in our mission to connect all.the.things. This post gives you all the queries you might need to satisfy your curiosity and start to see what’s possible with deeper analysis. So have the look and see what useful things you can discover.
Update on the outage of October 6th. In my blog post on October 6th, I promised an update on what caused the outage and what we are doing to avoid it happening again. This is that update.
Crossref hosts its services in a hybrid environment. Our original services are all hosted in a data center in Massachusetts, but we host new services with a cloud provider. We also have a few R&D systems hosted with Hetzner.
Looking at the road ahead, weâve set some ambitious goals for ourselves and continue to see new members join from around the world, now numbering 16,000. To help achieve all that we plan in the years to come, weâve grown our teams quite a bit over the last couple of years, and we are happy to welcome Carlos, Evans, Fabienne, Mike, Panos, and Patrick.
On October 6 at ~14:00 UTC, our data centre outside of Boston, MA went down. This affected most of our network services- even ones not hosted in the data centre. The problem was that both of our primary and backup network connections went down at the same time. We’re not sure why yet. We are consulting with our network provider. It took us 2 hours to get our systems back online.
We are pleased to share the 2021 board election slate. Crossrefâs Nominating Committee received over 60 submissions from members worldwide to fill five open board seats. It was a fantastic group of applicants and showed the strength of our membership community.
There are five seats open for election (three small, two large), and the Nominating Committee presents the following slate.
The 2021 slate Candidate organizations, in alphabetical order, for the Small category (three seats available):
Crossref Similarity Check news: iThenticate v2.0 ready for launch
Last year, we announced the upcoming launch of a new version of iThenticate, the product from Turnitin that powers Crossref Similarity Check. We know some of you have been waiting a long time for this upgrade and we are very happy to share with you that we are now ready to release it.
We will be rolling out this new version in stages, so not everyone will be able to upgrade to the new version immediately.
TL;DR We missed an error that led to resource resolution URLs of some 500,000+ records to be incorrectly updated. We have reverted the incorrect resolution URLs affected by this problem. And, weâre putting in place checks and changes in our processes to ensure this does not happen again.
How we got here Our technical support team was contacted in late June by Wiley about updating resolution URLs for their content. It’s a common request of our technical support team, one meant to make the URL update process more efficient, but this was a particularly large request.
Crossref Conversations is an audio blog we’re trying out that will cover various topics important to our community. This conversation is between colleagues Anna Tolwinska and Rosa Morais Clark, discussing how we can make research happen faster, with fewer hurdles, and how Crossref can help. Our members have been asking us how Crossref can support open science, and we have a few insights to share. So we invite you to have a listen.
