Blog

Hello from sunny Girona! I’m heading to PIDapalooza, the Persistent Identifier festival, as it returns for its second year. It’s all about to kick off.

One of the themes this year is “bridging worlds”: how to bring together different communities and the identifiers they use. Something I really enjoyed about PIDapalooza last year was the variety of people who came. We heard about some “traditional” identifier systems (at least, it seems that way to us): DOIs for publications, DOIs for datasets, ORCIDs for researchers. But, gathered in Reykjavik, under dark Icelandic skies, I met oceanographic surveyors assigning DOIs to drilling equipment, heard stories of identifiers in Chinese milk production and consoled librarians trying navigate the identifier landscape.

We have listened to the feedback from you, our members, and you’ve told us of a need for local experts to provide support in your timezone and language, and to act as liaisons with the Crossref team. You’ve also asked for an increased number of training events both online and in person close to you, and for more representatives from Crossref at regional industry events.

We want to make sure we can reach members around the globe, and as such, a wide team of people is required who are knowledgeable in the languages, cultures, and member needs in a variety of countries. This is why we’re launching our Ambassador Program.

Hello there. I’m Amanda Bartell, and I joined the Crossref team in mid-October as the new Head of Member Experience. My new Member Experience team will be responsible for metadata users as well as members, onboarding new accounts, supporting existing ones, and making sure that everyone can make the most of Crossref services - an an easy and efficient way. I have spent the last couple of months exploring the world of academic publishing and what our members need - and it’s been fascinating!

Crossref’s Open Funder Registry (neé FundRef) now includes over 15 thousand entries. Crossref has over 2 million metadata records that include funding information - 1.7 million of which include an Open Funder Identifier. The uptake of funder identifiers is already making it easier and more efficient for the scholarly community to directly link funding to research outputs, but lately we’ve been hearing from a number of people that the time is ripe for a global grant identifier as well.

To that end, Crossref convened its funder advisory group along with representatives from our collaborator organizations, ORCID and DataCite, to explore the creation of a global grant identifier system.

We thought you might like to know about what we’ve been discussing…

Earlier this year we sent out a short survey inviting members to rate our performance. We asked what you think we do well, what we don’t do so well, and one thing we could do to improve our rating.

Following on from our LIVE Annual Meeting in Singapore, my colleague, Susan Collins, and I held a local LIVE event in Yogyakarta thanks to support from Universitas Ahmad Dahlan (UAD), Universitas Muhammadiyah Sidoarjo and one of Crossref’s new Sponsoring Affiliates, Relawan Jurnal Indonesia.

PIDs’R’Us and if they’re you, too, please join us for the second PIDapalooza, in Girona, Spain on January 23-24, for a two-day celebration of persistent identifiers.

Together, we will achieve the incredible - make a meeting about persistent identifiers and networked research fun! Brought to you by California Digital Library, Crossref, DataCite, and ORCID, this year’s sessions are organized around eight themes:

So much has happened since we held LIVE16 (our annual meeting) in London last year that we wanted to check-in with our UK community and share the year’s developments around our tools, teams and services ahead of LIVE17 next month in Singapore.

We know that research communication happens everywhere, and we want your help in finding it!

From October 9th we will be collecting links sent in by you through a social campaign across Twitter and Facebook called #BestBlogsRead.

Simply send us links to the blogs YOU like to read It’s easy to participate, all you have to do is watch out for the daily tweets and facebook posts and then send us links to the blogs (and news sites) you read.

We’ll be at booth M82 in the Hotspot area of Hall 4.2 and would love to meet with you. Let us know if you’re interested in chatting with one of us - about anything at all.