Latest blog posts
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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Patrick Vale
2022 October 19

Forming new relationships: Contributing to Open source

TL;DR One of the things that makes me glad to work at Crossref is the principles to which we hold ourselves, and the most public and measurable of those must be the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure, or POSI, for short. These ambitions lay out how we want to operate - to be open in our governance, in our membership and also in our source code and data. And it’s that openness of source code that’s the reason for my post today - on 26th September 2022, our first collaboration with the JSON Forms open-source project was released into the wild.

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Rachael Lammey
2022 October 17

ISR part three: Where does Crossref have the most impact on helping the community to assess the trustworthiness of the scholarly record?

Ans: metadata and services are all underpinned by POSI. Leading into a blog post with a question always makes my brain jump ahead to answer that question with the simplest answer possible. I was a nightmare English Literature student. ‘Was Macbeth purely a villain?’ ‘No’. *leaves exam* Just like not giving one-word answers to exam questions, playing our role in the integrity of the scholarly record and helping our members enhance theirs takes thought, explanation, transparency, and work.

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Documentation

Suggested DOI registration workflow, including suffix generator

Here is a suggested workflow for depositing DOIs and metadata in order to register your content. We also provide a suffix generator tool to help you create suffix strings which comply with best practices (suffixes should be opaque, unique, and short). Download the suffix generator (macro-enabled .xlsm file). When you open it, choose Read-only, and Enable macros.

  1. Create a spreadsheet to keep track of DOIs assigned (master list). Use one tab per prefix. Add columns for suffix, full DOI, and URL (you can add others if you wish)
  2. Generate suffixes using our tool (or invent them yourself), and add each suffix and full DOI to the master list
  3. Each time you create a new content item, add its URL to a new row. Display the DOI from the same row on your content item, following our DOI display guidelines
  4. Deposit the the DOI and its associated metadata with Crossref. The DOI is only active once it is registered with us.

Checking for duplicates: the suffix generator should be sufficiently random to avoid creating duplicates. However, if when you deposit the metadata with Crossref, if the system says the DOI has already been registered, remove it from your master list, and use a new suffix.

Page owner: Isaac Farley   |   Last updated 2020-April-08