The Simple Text Query form (STQ) allows users to retrieve existing DOIs for journal articles, books, and chapters by cutting and pasting a reference or reference list into a simple query box. For years the service has been heavily used by students, editors, researchers, and publishers eager to match and link references.
We had changes to the service planned for the first half of this year - an upgraded reference matching algorithm, a more modern interface, etc. In the spirit of openness and transparency, part of our project plan was to communicate these pending changes to STQ users well in advance of our 30 April completion date. What would users think? Could they help us improve upon our plans?
The Crossref Nominating Committee is inviting expressions of interest to serve on the Board as it begins its consideration of a slate for the November 2019 election.
The board’s purpose is to provide strategic and financial oversight and counsel to the Executive Director and the staff leadership team, with the key responsibilities being:
Setting the strategic direction for the organization; Providing financial oversight; and Approving new policies and services. The Board tends to review the strategic direction every few years, taking a landscape view of the scholarly communications community and trends that may affect Crossref’s mission.
Whenever we send out our quarterly deposit invoices, we receive queries from members who have registered a lot of backlist content, but have been charged at the current yearās rate. As the invoices for the first quarter of 2019 have recently hit your inboxes, I thought Iād provide a timely reminder about this in case you spot this problem on your invoice.
Our Ambassador Program is now one year old, and we are thrilled at how the first 12 months have gone. In 2018 we welcomed 16 ambassadors to the team, based in Australia, Brazil, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, UAE, Ukraine, USA, and Venezuela.
Our ambassadors are volunteers with a good knowledge of Crossref and the wider scholarly community, they are well connected and passionate about the work that we do.
In January, I wrote about how weāve simplified the journal title transfer process using our new Metadata Manager tool. For those disposing publishers looking for an easy, do-it-yourself option for transferring ownership of your journal, I suggest you review that blog post. But, whether you choose to process the transfer yourself via Metadata Manager or need some help from Paul, Shayn, or myself, thereās more to a transfer than just the click of a transfer button or the submission of an email to support@crossref.org, as Iām sure those of you who have been through a title transfer can attest.
As self-confessed PID nerds, weāre big fans of a persistent identifier. However, weāre also conscious that the uptake and use of PIDs isnāt a done deal, and there are things that challenge how broadly these are adopted by the community.
At PIDapalooza (an annual festival of PIDs) in January, ORCID, DataCite and Crossref ran an interactive session to chat about the cool things that PIDs allow us to do, whatās working well and, just as importantly, what isnāt, so that we can find ways to improve and approaches that work.
What has hundreds of heads, 91,000 affiliations, and roars like a lion? If you guessed the Research Organization Registry community, you’d be absolutely right!
Last month was a big and busy one for the ROR project team: we released a working API and search interface for the registry, we held our first ROR community meeting, and we showcased the initial prototypes at PIDapalooza in Dublin.
We’re energized by the positive reception and response we’ve received and we wanted to take a moment to share information with the community.
We first announced plans to investigate identifiers for grants in 2017 and are almost ready to violate the first rule of grant identifiers which is āthey probably should not be called grant identifiersā. Research support extends beyond monetary grants and awards, but our end goal is to make grants easy to cite, track, and identify, and āGrant IDā resonates in a way other terms do not. The truth is in the metadata, and we intend to collect (and our funder friends are prepared to provide) information about a number of funding types.
TL;DR
About 11% of available references in records in our OAI-PMH & REST API don’t have DOIs when they should. We have deployed a fix, but it is running on billions of records, and so we donāt expect it to be complete until mid-April.
Note that the Cited-by API that our members use appears to be unaffected by this problem.
Conflict, instability and economic conditions are just some of the factors driving new migration into Europeāand European policy makers are in dispute about how to manage and cope with the implications. Everyone agrees that in order to respond to the challenges and opportunities of migration, a better understanding is required of what drives migration towards Europe, what trajectories and infrastructures facilitate migration, and what the key characteristics of different migrant flows are, in order to inform and improve policy making.
