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What do you think of when you think of Chicago? Deep dish pizza? Art Deco architecture?

Well for one week only this year you can add scholarly publishing to the list as the #SSP2018 Conference comes to town. Some Crossref people are excited to be heading out for the conference, and we’re looking forward to meeting as many of our members as possible.

Come along to stand 212A and talk to Anna Tolwinska about Participation Reports. Although this new tool is still in beta, she’s giving SSP attendees a sneak peek and the chance to get an early look at whether they (and over 10 000 other members) are registering the ten key elements that add context and richness to the basic required metadata. You’ll get real insight into what metadata you’re registering, even if this work is done by a third party or other department.

Exciting news! We are getting very close to the beta release of a new tool to publicly show metadata coverage. As members register their content with us they also add additional information which gives context for other members and for services that help e.g. discovery or analytics.

Richer metadata makes content useful. Participation reports will give—for the first time—a clear picture for anyone to see the metadata Crossref has. This is data that’s long been available via our Public REST API, now visualized.

Crossref has decided to change the HTTP redirect code used by our DOIs from 303 back to the more commonly used 302. Our implementation of 303 redirects back in 2010 was based on recommended best practice for supporting linked data identifiers. Unfortunately, very few other parties have adopted this practice.

Continuing our blog series highlighting the uses of Crossref metadata, we talked to Gavin Reddick, Chief Analyst at Researchfish about the work they’re doing, and how they’re using our REST API as part of their workflow.

Aliaksandr Birukou is the Executive Editor for Computer Science at Springer Nature and is chair of the Group that has been working to establish a persistent identifier system and registry for scholarly conferences. Here Alex provides some background to the work and asks for input from the community:

Roughly one year ago, Crossref and DataCite started a working group on conference and project identifiers. With this blog post, we would like to share the specification of conference metadata and Crossmark for proceedings and are inviting the broader community to comment.

Do you want to effect change for the scholarly community?

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 2018 election.

You want to hear more from us. We hear you.

We’ve spent the past year building Crossref Event Data, and hope to launch very soon. Building a new piece of infrastructure from scratch has been an exciting project, and we’ve taken the opportunity to incorporate as much feedback from the community as possible. We’d like to take a moment to share some of the suggestions we had, and how we’ve acted on them.

I joined Crossref only a few weeks ago, and have happily thrown myself into the world of Event Data as the service’s new product manager. In my first week, a lot of time was spent discussing the ins and outs of Event Data. This learning process made me very much feel like you might when you’ve just bought a house, and you’re studying the blueprints while also planning the house-warming party.

The ancient Romans performed a purification rite (“lustration”) after taking a census every five years. The term “lustrum” designated not only the animal sacrifice (“suovetaurilia”) but was also applied to the period of time itself. At Crossref, we’re not exactly in the business of sacrificial rituals. But over the weekend I thought it would be fun to dive into the metadata and look at very high level changes during this period of time.

Bruce Rosenblum, CEO, Inera Incorporated talks about the work they are doing at Inera, and how they’re using our metadata as part of their workflow.