Blog

Mending Chesterton’s Fence: Open Source Decision-making

Joe Wass

Joe Wass – 2024 March 18

In EngineeringPOSI

When each line of code is written it is surrounded by a sea of context: who in the community this is for, what problem we’re trying to solve, what technical assumptions we’re making, what we already tried but didn’t work, how much coffee we’ve had today. All of these have an effect on the software we write. By the time the next person looks at that code, some of that context will have evaporated.

Credential Checking at Crossref

It turns out that one of the things that is really difficult at Crossref is checking whether a set of Crossref credentials has permission to act on a specific DOI prefix. This is the result of many legacy systems storing various mappings in various different software components, from our Content System through to our CRM. To this end, I wrote a basic application, credcheck, that will allow you to test a Crossref credential against an API.

Subject codes, incomplete and unreliable, have got to go

Patrick Polischuk

Patrick Polischuk – 2024 March 13

In MetadataAPIs

Subject classifications have been available via the REST API for many years but have not been complete or reliable from the start and will soon be deprecated. The subject metadata element was born out of a Labs experiment intended to enrich the metadata returned via Crossref Metadata Search with All Subject Journal Classification codes from Scopus. This feature was developed when the REST API was still fairly new, and we now recognize that the initial implementation worked its way into the service prematurely.

DOAJ and Crossref renew their partnership to support the least-resourced journals

Crossref and DOAJ share the aim to encourage the dissemination and use of scholarly research using online technologies and to work with and through regional and international networks, partners, and user communities for the achievement of their aims to build local institutional capacity and sustainability. Both organisations agreed to work together in 2021 in a variety of ways, but primarily to ‘encourage the dissemination and use of scholarly research using online technologies, and regional and international networks, partners and communities, helping to build local institutional capacity and sustainability around the world.

What do we know about DOIs

Martin Eve

Martin Eve – 2024 February 29

In CommunityStaff

Crossref holds metadata for approximately 150 million scholarly artifacts. These range from peer reviewed journal articles through to scholarly books through to scientific blog posts. In fact, amid such heterogeneity, the only singular factor that unites such items is that they have been assigned a document object identifier (DOI); a unique identification string that can be used to resolve to a resource pertaining to said metadata (often, but not always, a copy of the work identified by the metadata).

The Lammey Effect

Crossref

Crossref – 2024 February 16

In CommunityStaff

We’re equally sad and proud to report that Rachael Lammey is moving on in her career to the very lucky team at 67Bricks. Her last day at Crossref is today, Friday 16th February. Which is too soon for us, but very exciting for her! It’s hard to overstate Rachael’s impact on Crossref’s growth and success in her 12 years here. She started as a Product Manager where she developed that role into a broad and central function, and soon moved into the newly-formed community team as International Outreach Manager where she grew important programs such as Sponsors, Ambassadors, a series of ‘LIVE’ events around the world, and she went on to manage her own team and establish some of the most important strategic relationships that Crossref now feels fortunate to have.

Ed Pentz accepts the 2024 NISO Miles Conrad Award

Rosa Clark

Rosa Clark – 2024 February 13

In CommunityStaffStrategyGEM

Great news to share: our Executive Director, Ed Pentz, has been selected as the 2024 recipient of the Miles Conrad Award from the USA’s National Information Standards Organization (NISO). The award is testament to an individual’s lifetime contribution to the information community, and we couldn’t be more delighted that Ed was voted to be this year’s well-deserved recipient. During the NISO Plus conference this week in Baltimore, USA, Ed accepted his award and delivered the 2024 Miles Conrad lecture, reflecting on how far open scholarly infrastructure has come, and the part he has played in this at Crossref and through numerous other collaborative initiatives.

ISR Roundtable 2023: The future of preserving the integrity of the scholarly record together

Metadata about research objects and the relationships between them form the basis of the scholarly record: rich metadata has the potential to provide a richer context for scholarly output, and in particular, can provide trust signals to indicate integrity. Information on who authored a research work, who funded it, which other research works it cites, and whether it was updated, can act as signals of trustworthiness. Crossref provides foundational infrastructure to connect and preserve these records, but the creation of these records is an ongoing and complex community effort.

RORing ahead: using ROR in place of the Open Funder Registry

A few months ago we announced our plan to deprecate our support for the Open Funder Registry in favour of using the ROR Registry to support both affiliation and funder use cases. The feedback we’ve had from the community has been positive and supports our members, service providers and metadata users who are already starting to move in this direction. We wanted to provide an update on work that’s underway to make this transition happen, and how you can get involved in working together with us on this.

Solving your technical support questions in a snap!

My name is Isaac Farley, Crossref Technical Support Manager. We’ve got a collective post here from our technical support team - staff members and contractors - since we all have what I think will be a helpful perspective to the question: ‘What’s that one thing that you wish you could snap your fingers and make clearer and easier for our members?’ Within, you’ll find us referencing our Community Forum, the open support platform where you can get answers from all of us and other Crossref members and users. We invite you to join us there; how about asking your next question of us there? Or, simply let us know how we did with this post. We’d love to hear from you!