The official countdown to PIDapalooza 2020 begins here! It’s 163 days to go till our flame-lighting opening ceremony at the fabulous Belem Cultural Center in Lisbon, Portugal. Your friendly neighborhood PIDapalooza Planning Committee—Helena Cousijn (DataCite), Maria Gould (CDL), Stephanie Harley (ORCID), Alice Meadows (ORCID), and I—are already hard at work making sure itâs the best one so far!
With a smaller group than usual, we’re dedicating this year’s annual meeting to hear what you value about Crossref. Which initiatives would you put first and/or last? Where would you have us draw the line between mission and ambition? What is âcoreâ for you? How could/should we adapt for the future in order to meet your needs?
Striving for balance Different people want different things from us. As Aristotle said: “There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.
Our Ambassador Program is now one year old, and we are thrilled at how the first 12 months have gone. In 2018 we welcomed 16 ambassadors to the team, based in Australia, Brazil, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, UAE, Ukraine, USA, and Venezuela.
Our ambassadors are volunteers with a good knowledge of Crossref and the wider scholarly community, they are well connected and passionate about the work that we do.
As self-confessed PID nerds, weâre big fans of a persistent identifier. However, weâre also conscious that the uptake and use of PIDs isnât a done deal, and there are things that challenge how broadly these are adopted by the community.
At PIDapalooza (an annual festival of PIDs) in January, ORCID, DataCite and Crossref ran an interactive session to chat about the cool things that PIDs allow us to do, whatâs working well and, just as importantly, what isnât, so that we can find ways to improve and approaches that work.
What has hundreds of heads, 91,000 affiliations, and roars like a lion? If you guessed the Research Organization Registry community, you’d be absolutely right!
Last month was a big and busy one for the ROR project team: we released a working API and search interface for the registry, we held our first ROR community meeting, and we showcased the initial prototypes at PIDapalooza in Dublin.
We’re energized by the positive reception and response we’ve received and we wanted to take a moment to share information with the community.
In December, Crossrefâs Head of Metadata, Patricia Feeney and I headed to Mumbai for our first ever LIVE local event in India, held in collaboration with Editage.
Crossref membership in India has escalated in recent years, with a fifth of its 500 members joining in 2017 alone. Around 40% of these new members are smaller organizations who joined through one of the eight sponsors we currently have in the country.
Running a smooth event is always the goal, but not always the case! No matter how well managed an event is, there is always a chance that things will not go according to plan. And so it was with LIVE18.
For the first day we were without the tablecloths we had ordered, which actually gave the room quite a nice, but unintentional, ârusticâ look. When they finally did arrive the following day, we realized we preferred the rustic look!
As the end of the year approaches itâs useful to look back and reflect on what weâve achieved over the last 12 monthsâa lot! To be honest, there were some things we didnât get doneâor didnât make as much progress with as we hopedâbut that happens when you have an ambitious agenda. However, we also got some things done that we didnât expect to or that werenât even on our radar at the end of 2017âthis is inevitable as the research and scholarly communications landscape is rapidly changing.
Our LIVE Annual Meeting is back in North America for the first time since 2015, and with just 10 days to go, thereâs a lot going on in preparation. As youâd expect with a How good is your metadata? theme—the two-days will be entirely devoted to the subject of metadata—because it touches everything we do, and everything that publishers, hosting platforms, funders, researchers, and librarians do. Oh, and it’s actually super awesome too—and occasionally fun.
There has been a steady increase in the growth of our membership in Latin Americaâand in Brazil in particularâover the past few years. We currently have more than 800 Brazil-based members; some as individual members, but most are sponsored by another organization. As part of our LIVE Local program Chuck Koscher and I traveled to meet some of these members in Goiânia and Fortaleza, where we co-hosted events with Associação Brasileira de Editores CientĂficos do Brasil (ABEC Brasil)âone of our largest sponsoring organizations.
