Blog

How funding agencies can meet OSTP (and Open Science) guidance using existing open infrastructure

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.

Better preprint metadata through community participation

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.

Seeing your place in the Research Nexus

Having joined the Crossref team merely a week previously, the mid-year community update on June 14th was a fantastic opportunity to learn about the Research Nexus vision. We explored its building blocks and practical implementation steps within our reach, and within our imagination of the future. Read on (or watch the recording) for a whistlestop tour of everything – from what on Earth is Research Nexus, through to how it’s taking shape at Crossref, to how you are involved, and finally – to what concerns the community surrounding the vision and how we’re going to address that.

Rethinking staff travel, meetings, and events

As a distributed, global, and community-led organisation, sharing information and listening to our members both online and in person has always been integral to what we do. For many years Crossref has held both in-person and online meetings and events, which involved a fair amount of travel by our staff, board, and community. This changed drastically in March 2020, when we had to stop traveling and stop having in-person meetings and events.

2022 public data file of more than 134 million metadata records now available

In 2020 we released our first public data file, something we’ve turned into an annual affair supporting our commitment to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI). We’ve 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, we’re 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.

Similarity Check: what’s new with iThenticate v2?

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 “red flag” 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 research outputs have been successfully indexed, self-diagnose and fix the content that has failed to be indexed in iThenticate.

Do you want to be a Crossref Ambassador?

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 what’s 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.

Perspectives: Bruna Erlandsson on scholarly communications in Brazil

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Join us for the first in our Perspectives blog series. In this series of blogs, we will be meeting different members of our diverse, global community at Crossref. We learn more about their lives, how they came to know and work with us, and we hear insights about the scholarly research landscape in their country, challenges they face, and plans for the future.

Announcing the ROR Sustaining Supporters program

In collaboration with California Digital Library and DataCite, Crossref guides the operations of the Research Organization Registry (ROR). ROR is community-driven and has an independent sustainability plan involving grants, donations, and in-kind support from our staff. ROR is a vital component of the Research Nexus, our vision of a fully connected open research ecosystem. It helps people identify, connect, and analyze the affiliations of those contributing to, producing, and publishing all kinds of research objects.

A Registry of Editorial Boards - a new trust signal for scholarly communications?

Background Perhaps, like us, you’ve noticed that it is not always easy to find information on who is on a journal’s editorial board and, when you do, it is often unclear when it was last updated. The editorial board details might be displayed in multiple places (such as the publisher’s website and the platform where the content is hosted) which may or may not be in sync and retrieving this information for any kind of analysis always requires manually checking and exporting the data from a website (as illustrated by the Open Editors research and its dataset).