Latest blog posts
Jennifer Kemp
2023 January 25

Measuring Metadata Impacts: Books Discoverability in Google Scholar

This blog post is from Lettie Conrad and Michelle Urberg, cross-posted from the The Scholarly Kitchen. As sponsors of this project, we at Crossref are excited to see this work shared out. The scholarly publishing community talks a LOT about metadata and the need for high-quality, interoperable, and machine-readable descriptors of the content we disseminate. However, as we’ve reflected on previously in the Kitchen, despite well-established information standards (e.g., persistent identifiers), our industry lacks a shared framework to measure the value and impact of the metadata we produce.

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Susan Collins
2022 December 07

Introducing our new Global Equitable Membership (GEM) program

When Crossref began over 20 years ago, our members were primarily from the United States and Western Europe, but for several years our membership has been more global and diverse, growing to almost 18,000 organizations around the world, representing 148 countries. As we continue to grow, finding ways to help organizations participate in Crossref is an important part of our mission and approach. Our goal of creating the Research Nexus—a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organizations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society—can only be achieved by ensuring that participation in Crossref is accessible to all.

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Ed Pentz
2022 November 17

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.

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Martyn Rittman
2022 November 09

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.

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Documentation

Linked clinical trials

Crossmark can be used to display the relationships between different publications that report on a common clinical trial. This section describes the steps a member needs to take to participate in this initiative. Learn more about the background to the project.

Clinical trial numbers should be extracted from the paper by the publisher or supplied by the author on submission.

There are three elements to the metadata that members need to deposit to participate in linked clinical trials:

  1. The registry in which the clinical trial has been registered (required) Clinical trials should be registered with one of the WHO-approved national trial registries or with ClinicalTrials.gov. Crossref maintains a list of these approved registries, and has assigned a DOI to each one. This ID should be deposited. The registry ID is used in combination with the trial number to identify trials correctly.
  2. The registered clinical trial number (required) The trial number, including its prefix, for example, ISRCTN00757750
  3. The relationship of the publication to the clinical trial (optional) This field is optional but encouraged. The three allowed elements are “pre-results”, “results” and “post-results”, indicating which stage of the trial the publication is reporting on.

These fields should be included within the custom metadata section of the Crossmark deposit. When clinical trial metadata is deposited, the Clinical Trials section of the Crossmark box will automatically appear and be populated.

Example deposit for linked clinical trials

<clinicaltrial_data>
<doi>10.5555/12345678</doi>
<ct:program>
<ct:clinical-trial-number registry="10.18810/isrctn" type="results">ISRCTN1234</ct:clinical-trial-number>
<ct:clinical-trial-number registry="10.18810/isrctn" type="results">ISRCTN9999</ct:clinical-trial-number>
</ct:program>
</clinicaltrial_data>

Page owner: Martyn Rittman   |   Last updated 2020-April-08