In 2020 we released our first public data file, something weâve turned into an annual affair supporting our commitment to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI). Weâve just posted the 2022 file, which can now be downloaded via torrent like in years past.
We aim to publish these in the first quarter of each year, though as you may notice, weâre a little behind our intended schedule. The reason for this delay was that we wanted to make critical new metadata fields available, including resource URLs and titles with markup.
Unfortunately, Bryan Vickery has moved onto pastures new. I would like to thank him for his many contributions at Crossref and we all wish him well.
Iâm now pleased to announce that Rachael Lammey will be Crossrefâs new Director of Product starting on Monday, May 16th.
Rachaelâs skills and experience are perfectly suited for this role. She has been at Crossref since 2012 and has deep knowledge and experience of all things Crossref: our mission; our members; our culture; and our services.
Since we announced last September the launch of a new version of iThenticate, a number of you have upgraded and become familiar with iThenticate v2 and its new and improved features which include:
A faster, more user-friendly and responsive interface A preprint exclusion filter, giving users the ability to identify content on preprint servers more easily A new âred flagâ feature that signals the detection of hidden text such as text/quotation marks in white font, or suspicious character replacement A private repository available for browser users, allowing them to compare against their previous submissions to identify duplicate submissions within your organisation A content portal, helping users check how much of their own published content has been successfully indexed, self-diagnose and fix the content that has failed to be indexed in iThenticate.
A re-cap We kicked off our Ambassador Program in 2018 after consultation with our members, who told us they wanted greater support and representation in their local regions, time zones, and languages.
We also recognized that our membership has grown and changed dramatically over recent years and that it is likely to continue to do so. We now have over 16,000 members across 140 countries. As we work to understand whatâs to come and ensure that we are meeting the needs of such an expansive community, having trusted local contacts we can work closely with is key to ensuring we are more proactive in engaging with new audiences and supporting existing members.
Continuing our blog series highlighting the uses of Crossref metadata, we talked to David Sommer, co-founder and Product Director at the research dissemination management service, Kudos. David tells us how Kudos is collaborating with Crossref, and how they use the REST API as part of our Metadata Plus service.
Introducing Kudos
At Kudos we know that effective dissemination is the starting point for impact. Kudos is a platform that allows researchers and research groups to plan, manage, measure, and report on dissemination activities to help maximize the visibility and impact of their work.
We launched the service in 2015 and now work with almost 100 publishers and institutions around the world, and have nearly 250,000 researchers using the platform.
We provide guidance to researchers on writing a plain language summary about their work so it can be found and understood by a broad range of audiences, and then we support researchers in disseminating across multiple channels and measuring which dissemination activities are most effective for them.
As part of this, we developed the Sharable-PDF to allow researchers to legitimately share publication profiles across a range of sites and networks, and track the impact of their work centrally. This also allows publishers to prevent copyright infringement, and reclaim lost usage from sharing of research articles on scholarly collaboration networks.
An example of a Kudos publication page showing the plain language summary
How is Crossref metadata used in Kudos?
Since our launch, Crossref has been our metadata foundation. When we receive notification from our publishing partners that an article, book or book chapter has been published, we query using the Crossref REST API to retrieve the metadata for that publication. That data allows us to populate the Kudos publication page.
We also integrate earlier in the researcher workflow, interfacing with all of the major Manuscript Submission Systems to support authors who want to build impact from the point of submission.
More recently, we started using the Crossref REST API to retrieve citation counts for a DOI. This enables us to include the number of times content is cited as part of the âbasket of metricsâ we provide to our researchers. They can then understand the performance of their publications in context, and see the correlation between actions and results.
A Kudos metrics page, showing the basket of metrics and the correlation between actions and results
What are the future plans for Kudos?
We have exciting plans for the future! We are developing Kudos for Research Groups to support the planning, managing, measuring and reporting of dissemination activities for research groups, labs and departments. We are adding a range of new features and dissemination channels to support this, and to help researchers to better understand how their research is being used, and by whom.
What else would Kudos like to see in Crossref metadata?
We have always found Crossref to be very responsive and open to new ideas, so we look forward to continuing to work together. We are keen to see an industry standard article-level subject classification system developed, and it would seem that Crossref is the natural home for this.
We are also continuing to monitor Crossref Event Data which has the potential to provide a rich source of events that could be used to help demonstrate dissemination and impact.
Finally, we are pleased to see the work Crossref are doing to help improve the quality of the metadata and supporting publishers in auditing their data. If we could have anything we wanted, our dream would be to prevent âfunny charactersâ in DOIs that cause us all kinds of escape character headaches!
Thank you David. If you would like to contribute a case study on the uses of Crossref Metadata APIs please contact the Community team.
