Blog

Hiccups with credentials in the Test Admin Tool

TL;DR We inadvertently deleted data in our authentication sandbox that stored member credentials for our Test Admin Tool - test.crossref.org. Weā€™re restoring credentials using our production data, but this will mean that some members have credentials that are out-of-sync. Please contact support@crossref.org if you have issues accessing test.crossref.org. The details Earlier today the credentials in our authentication sandbox were inadvertently deleted. This was a mistake on our end that has resulted in those credentials no longer being stored for our members using our Test Admin Tool - test.

A ROR-some update to our API

Earlier this year, Ginny posted an exciting update on Crossrefā€™s 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. šŸ¦ 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 now with added references

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.

Come and get your grant metadata!

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 6, 2021

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. We know an organization our size has no business running its own data center, and we have been slowly moving services out of the data center and into the cloud.

More new faces at Crossref

Looking at the road ahead, weā€™ve 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, weā€™ve 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.

Outage of October 6, 2021

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.

2021 Board Election

We are pleased to share the 2021 board election slate. Crossrefā€™s 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):

Similarity Check news: iThenticate v2.0 ready for launch

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.

Lesson learned, the hard way: Letā€™s not do that again!

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, weā€™re 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.