Some of you who have submitted content to us during the first two months of 2021 may have experienced content registration delays. We noticed; you did, too.
The time between us receiving XML from members, to the content being registered with us and the DOI resolving to the correct resolution URL, is usually a matter of minutes. Some submissions take longer - for example, book registrations with large reference lists, or very large files from larger publishers can take up to 24 to 48 hours to process.
TL;DR: We have a Community Forum (yay!), you can come and join it here: community.crossref.org.
Community is fundamental to us at Crossref, we wouldn’t be where we are or achieve the great things we do without the involvement of you, our diverse and engaged members and users. Crossref was founded as a collaboration of publishers with the shared goal of making links between research outputs easier, building a foundational infrastructure making research easier to find, cite, link, assess, and re-use.
Event Data uncovers links between Crossref-registered DOIs and diverse places where they are mentioned across the internet. Whereas a citation links one research article to another, events are a way to create links to locations such as news articles, data sets, Wikipedia entries, and social media mentions. We’ve collected events for several years and make them openly available via an API for anyone to access, as well as creating open logs of how we found each event.
2020 wasn’t all bad. In April of last year, we released our first public data file. Though Crossref metadata is always openly available––and our board recently cemented this by voting to adopt the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI)––we’ve decided to release an updated file. This will provide a more efficient way to get such a large volume of records. The file (JSON records, 102.6GB) is now available, with thanks once again to Academic Torrents.
It was with great sadness and shock that I learned that Dr Norman Paskin had passed away unexpectedly on the 27th March. This is a big loss to the DOI, Crossref and digital information communities. Norman was the driving force behind the DOI System and was a key supporter and ally of Crossref from the start. Norman founded the International DOI Foundation in 1998 and ran it successfully until the end of 2015 when he moved to a strategic role as an Independent Board Member.
Norman was an early proponent of the value of persistent digital identifiers paired with standardised metadata and laid the groundwork for the system and infrastructure that has made Crossref and eight other Registration Agencies so successful. Norman was also a key adviser and participant in many standards organizations and initiatives where he regularly provided key intellectual input to help improve digital communications.
Personally, it was a great pleasure to work with Norman over the last twenty years and I greatly appreciated his intelligence, humour, advice, and particularly his help and generous support when I relocated to Oxford.