Blog

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 year’s rate. As the invoices for the first quarter of 2019 have recently hit your inboxes, I thought I’d 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. Participating in the ambassador program is complementary to people’s existing roles and enables those who already work with Crossref to have a mechanism to feed back to us and to provide support for their communities.

In January, I wrote about how we’ve 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, there’s more to a transfer than just the click of a transfer button or the submission of an email to support@crossref.org, as I’m sure those of you who have been through a title transfer can attest.

As self-confessed PID nerds, we’re big fans of a persistent identifier. However, we’re also conscious that the uptake and use of PIDs isn’t 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, what’s working well and, just as importantly, what isn’t, 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. Here are the links to our latest work, a recap of everything that happened in Dublin, some of the next steps for the project, and how the community can continue to be involved.

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 “they probably should not be called grant identifiers”. Research support extends beyond monetary grants and awards, but our end goal is to make grants easy to cite, track, and identify, and ‘Grant ID’ 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. Hopefully we encompass all of them.

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 don’t 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 Europe—and 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.

Nowadays we’re all trying to eat healthier, get fitter, be more mindful and stay in the now. You think you’re doing a good job — perhaps you’ve started a yoga class or got a book on mindfulness. And then, wham! Someone in your organization casually mentions they’re planning a platform migration. I can sense the panic from here.

Hello. Isaac here again to talk about what you can tell just by looking at the prefix of a DOI. Also, as we get a lot of title transfers at this time of year, I thought I’d clarify the difference between a title transfer and a prefix transfer, and the impact of each.