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TL;DR

By August 2016, Crossref will enable its members to assign Crossref DOIs to preprints. Preprint DOIs will be assigned by the Crossref member responsible for the preprint and that DOI will be different from the DOI assigned by the publisher to the accepted manuscript and version of record. Crossref’s display guidelines, tools and APIs will be modified in order to enable researchers to easily identify and link to the best available version of a document (BAV). We are doing this in order to support the changing publishing models of our members and in order to clarify the scholarly citation record.

Background

It can be a pain when companies rebrand as it usually requires some coordinated updating of wording and logos on websites, handouts, and slides. Nevermind changing habits and remembering to use the new names verbally in presentations. Why bother? As our infrastructure and services expanded, we sometimes branded services with no reference to Crossref. As explained in our The Logo Has Landed post last November, this has led to confusion, and it was not scalable nor sustainable.

I had a great chat with Danielle Padula of Scholastica, a journals platform with an integrated peer-review process that was founded in 2011. We talked about how journals get started with Crossref, and she turned our conversation into a blog post that describes the steps to begin registering content and depositing metadata with us. Since the result is a really useful description of our new member on-boarding process, I want to share it with you here as well.

Test out the early preview of Event Data while we continue to develop it. Share your thoughts. And be warned: we may break a few eggs from time to time!

Want to discover which research works are being shared, liked and commented on? What about the number of times a scholarly item is referenced? Starting today, you can whet your appetite with an early preview of the forthcoming Crossref Event Data service. We invite you to start exploring the activity of DOIs as they permeate and interact with the world after publication.

As of this week, there are 80,000,000 scholarly items registered with Crossref! By the way, we update these interesting Crossref stats regularly and you can search the metadata. The 80 millionth scholarly item is [drumroll…] Management Approaches in Beihagi History from the journal Oman Chapter of Arabian Journal of Business and Management Review, published by Al Manhal in the United Arab Emirates. There have been loads of changes since Wiley registered “Designer selves: Construction of technologically mediated identity within graphical, multiuser virtual environments” with the DOI http://dx.

Dr Norman Paskin 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.

Back in 2014, Geoffrey Bilder blogged about the kick-off of an initiative between Crossref and Wikimedia to better integrate scholarly literature into the world’s largest knowledge space, Wikipedia. Since then, Crossref has been working to coordinate activities with Wikimedia: Joe Wass has worked with them to create a live stream of content being cited in Wikipedia; and we’re including Wikipedia in Event Data, a new service to launch later this year.

I’m a co-founder with rOpenSci, a non-profit that focuses on making software to facilitate reproducible and open science. Back in 2013 we started to make an R client working with various Crossref web services. I was lucky enough to attend last year’s Crossref annual meeting in Boston, and gave one talk on details of the programmatic clients, and another higher level talk on text mining and use of metadata for research.

TL;DR: We will proceed with implementing the proposed support for registering content before online availability. Adopting the workflow will be optional and will involve no extra fees. Background At the end of January, Crossref issued a “request for community comment” on a proposed new process to support the registration of content including DOIs before online availability. We promised that we would summarize the results of the survey once we had received and analyzed all the responses.

What happens to a research work outside of the formal literature? That’s what Event Data will aim to answer when the service launches later this year. Following the successful DOI Event Tracker pilot in Spring 2014, development has been underway to build our new service, newly re-named Crossref Event Data. It’s an open data service that registers online activity (specifically, events) associated with Crossref metadata. Event Data will collect and store a record of any activity surrounding a research work from a defined set of web sources.