Please help us welcome new faces at Crossref! Martyn, Sara, Laura, and Mark joined us very recently and we are happy they’re with us. Both Martyn and Sara have joined the Product team and this has given us the chance to reorganize the team into the following groups: content registration, scholarly stewardship, scholarly impact, metadata retrieval, and UX/UI leadership. Laura joined the Finance and Operations team to help make the billing process simple for our members. Mark joins the Technology team and one of his projects will be improving the Event Data service.
It is exciting to already see the impact of your contributions and look forward to what’s to come!
2020 hasn’t been quite what any of us had imagined. The pandemic has meant big adjustments in terms of working; challenges for parents balancing childcare and professional lives; anxieties and tensions we never had before; the strain of potentially being away from co-workers, friends, and family for a prolonged period of time. Many have suffered job losses and around the world, many have sadly lost their lives to the virus.
English version –– Información en español
The Crossref Nominating Committee is inviting expressions of interest to join the Board of Directors of Crossref for the term starting in 2021. The committee will gather responses from those interested and create the slate of candidates that our membership will vote on in an election in September. Expressions of interest will be due Friday, June 19, 2020.
The role of the board at Crossref is to provide strategic and financial oversight of the organization, as well as guidance to the Executive Director and the staff leadership team, with the key responsibilities being:
After 20 years in operation, and as our system matures from experimental to foundational infrastructure, it’s time to review our documentation.
Having a solid core of education materials about the why and the how of Crossref is essential in making participation possible, easy, and equitable.
As our system has evolved, our membership has grown and diversified, and so have our tools - both for depositing metadata with Crossref, and for retrieving and making use of it.
The rebranding of Crossref was top priority when I joined in May in a new role called “Director of Member & Community Outreach”. Since then I’ve been working to understand the array of services, attributes, and audiences we have developed; to answer the questions “What do we do, for whom, and why?”
As Crossref prepares to celebrate turning fifteen at our annual meeting next week, I am thrilled to present our new brand identity with key messages and logo. And along with “thrilled” you may also detect “nervous excitement”.
Over the last few months we have reviewed earlier research and talked with a number of members, affiliates, and academics. Turns out we’re the plain talkers of the industry, the do-ers, the scrappy people who get stuff done, chivvy others along, and in some cases we are—dare I say it—the voice of reason!
While balancing differing views within the scholarly community, we’re all about making connections – literally and figuratively. We help bring together people and metadata in pursuit of an excellent research communications system for all. And, to mirror one of Ed Pentz’s new catchphrases, we are “keeping it real” with down-to-earth language.
Crossref Key Messages
New logos and names for all our products will come soon (in some cases it’ll be a ‘de-brand’ rather than a re-brand!). We’ll gradually phase in the new identity over the next month or two, starting with our annual meeting, and with a complete website relaunch following in 2016. We will contact all of our members and partners in the coming weeks with information about using the new logo, using a content delivery network (CDN) so that sites can reference the correct file.
Why rebrand?
We have not rebranded because we plan on doing something different but rather to better express the things we already do. Our ‘problem’ was that often people didn’t know Crossref was behind initiatives like CrossCheck, Crossmark and FundRef. Our products had become unlinked from the organisation. And since we’re all about linking things together, that just made no sense.
We needed an icon to give more flexibility across the web that a word mark cannot do alone. The icon is made up of two interlinked angle brackets familiar to those who work with metadata, and can also act as arrows depicting Metadata In and Metadata Out, two themes under which our services can generally be grouped.
Sentence case helps to avoid splitting the word; we do not want to tempt the Cross and the Ref to divide again. So that lowercase R you see in the middle of our name is indeed an official change. (Hopefully we can change the habit!)
The palette gives a nod to the history of Crossref with red & dark grey, but brings in contemporary colors for a fresh palette that is distinctive in our industry (we researched a lot - everyone has circles, and traditional shades abound). Our aesthetic embodies classic Swiss design principles and is minimalist in keeping with our straight-talking personality.
So, in the words of Board Chair, Ian Bannerman, it’s time for Crossref to step forward.
About Crossref
I’m looking forward to revealing more of the story at our annual meeting next week!
