In August 2022, the United States Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memo (PDF) on ensuring free, immediate, and equitable access to federally funded research (a.k.a. the “Nelson memo”). Crossref is particularly interested in and relevant for the areas of this guidance that cover metadata and persistent identifiers—and the infrastructure and services that make them useful.
Funding bodies worldwide are increasingly involved in research infrastructure for dissemination and discovery.
Preprints have become an important tool for rapidly communicating and iterating on research outputs. There is now a range of preprint servers, some subject-specific, some based on a particular geographical area, and others linked to publishers or individual journals in addition to generalist platforms. In 2016 the Crossref schema started to support preprints and since then the number of metadata records has grown to around 16,000 new preprint DOIs per month.
TL;DR One of the things that makes me glad to work at Crossref is the principles to which we hold ourselves, and the most public and measurable of those must be the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure, or POSI, for short. These ambitions lay out how we want to operate - to be open in our governance, in our membership and also in our source code and data. And it’s that openness of source code that’s the reason for my post today - on 26th September 2022, our first collaboration with the JSON Forms open-source project was released into the wild.
Ans: metadata and services are all underpinned by POSI.
Leading into a blog post with a question always makes my brain jump ahead to answer that question with the simplest answer possible. I was a nightmare English Literature student. ‘Was Macbeth purely a villain?’ ‘No’. *leaves exam*
Just like not giving one-word answers to exam questions, playing our role in the integrity of the scholarly record and helping our members enhance theirs takes thought, explanation, transparency, and work.
Crossref is proposing a process to support the registration of content—including DOIs and other metadata—prior to that content being made available, or published, online. We’ve drafted a paper providing background on the reasons we want to support this and highlighting the use cases. One of the main needs is in journal publishing to support registration of Accepted Manuscripts immediately on or shortly after acceptance, and dealing with press embargoes.
Proposal doc for community comment
We request community comment on the __proposed approach as outlined in this report.
Some examples of what we’d like to know:
Are you aware of the issues outlined in this proposal?
Are you aware of the funder and institutional requirements for authors to take action on acceptance of manuscripts for publication in journals?
Do you think the proposed solution and workflows are reasonable?
Are you likely to update your workflow to register content early?
If you are likely to update your workflow, how long do you estimate it will take?
Any other general comments, questions or feedback on anything raised in this document.
Please send comments, feedback and questions to me, Ginny, at feedback@crossref.org. The deadline for comments is February 4th. Thanks!
