On behalf of the Nominating Committee, I’m pleased to share the slate of candidates for the 2024 board election.
Each year we do an open call for board interest. This year, the Nominating Committee received 53 submissions from members worldwide to fill four open board seats.
We maintain a balanced board of 8 large member seats and 8 small member seats. Size is determined based on the organization’s membership tier (small members fall in the $0-$1,650 tiers and large members in the $3,900 - $50,000 tiers).
In our previous instalments of the blog series about matching (see part 1 and part 2), we explained what metadata matching is, why it is important and described its basic terminology. In this entry, we will discuss a few common beliefs about metadata matching that are often encountered when interacting with users, developers, integrators, and other stakeholders. Spoiler alert: we are calling them myths because these beliefs are not true! Read on to learn why.
We’ve just released an update to our participation report, which provides a view for our members into how they are each working towards best practices in open metadata. Prompted by some of the signatories and organizers of the Barcelona Declaration, which Crossref supports, and with the help of our friends at CWTS Leiden, we have fast-tracked the work to include an updated set of metadata best practices in participation reports for our members.
It’s been a while, here’s a metadata update and request for feedback In Spring 2023 we sent out a survey to our community with a goal of assessing what our priorities for metadata development should be - what projects are our community ready to support? Where is the greatest need? What are the roadblocks?
The intention was to help prioritize our metadata development work. There’s a lot we want to do, a lot our community needs from us, but we really want to make sure we’re focusing on the projects that will have the most immediate impact for now.
Content Registration allows members to register and update metadata via machine or human interfaces.
When you join Crossref as a member you are issued a DOI prefix. You combine this with a suffix of your choice to create a DOI, which becomes active once registered with Crossref. Content Registration allows members to register a DOI and deposit or update its associated metadata, via machine or human interfaces.
Benefits of content registration
Academic and professional research travels further if it’s linked to the millions of other published papers. Crossref members register content with us to let the world know it exists, instead of creating thousands of bilateral agreements.
Members send information called metadata to us. Metadata includes fields like dates, titles, authors, affiliations, funders, and online location. Each metadata record includes a persistent identifier called a digital object identifier (DOI) that stays with the work even if it moves websites. Though the DOI doesn’t change, its associated metadata is kept up-to-date by the owner of the record.
Richer metadata makes content useful and easier to find. Through Crossref, members are distributing their metadata downstream, making it available to numerous systems and organizations that together help credit and cite the work, report impact of funding, track outcomes and activity, and more.
Members maintain and update metadata long-term, telling us if content moves to a new website, and they include more information as time goes on. This means that there is a growing chance that content is found, cited, linked to, included in assessment, and used by other researchers.
Participation Reports give a clear picture for anyone to see the metadata Crossref has. See for yourself where the gaps are, and what our members could improve upon. Understand best practice through seeing what others are doing, and learn how to level-up.
This is Crossref infrastructure. You can’t see infrastructure, yet research—and researchers all over the world—rely on it.
To register content with Crossref, you need to be a member. You’ll use one of our content registration methods to give us metadata about your content. Note that you don’t send us the content itself - you create a metadata record that links persistently (via a persistent identifier) to the content on your site or hosting platform. Learn more about metadata, constructing your DOIs, and ways to register your content.
You should assign Crossref DOIs to and register content for anything that is likely to be cited in the scholarly literature.
What types of resources and records can be registered with Crossref?
We are working to make our input schema more flexible so that almost any type of object can be registered and distributed openly through Crossref. At the moment, members tend to register the following:
Conference proceedings: information about a single conference and records for each conference paper/proceeding.
Datasets: includes database records or collections.
Dissertations: includes single dissertations and theses, but not collections.
Grants: includes both direct funding and other types of support such as the use of equipment and facilities.
Journals and articles: at the journal title and article level, and includes supplemental materials as components.
Peer reviews: any number of reviews, reports, or comments attached to any other work that has been registered with Crossref.
Pending publications: a temporary placeholder record with minimal metadata, often used for embargoed work where a DOI needs to be shared before the full content is made available online.
Preprints and posted content: includes preprints, eprints, working papers, reports, and other types of content that has been posted but not formally published.
You pay a one-time content registration fee for each content item you register with us. content registration fees are different for different types of content and sometimes include volume discounts for large batches or backfile material. You don’t pay to update an existing metadata record. It’s an obligation of membership that you maintain your metadata for the long term, including updating any URLs that change. In addition, we warmly encourage you to correct and add to your metadata, and there is no charge for redepositing (updating) existing metadata. Learn more about maintaining your metadata, and managing existing DOIs.
Your content registration fees are billed quarterly in arrears. This means you’ll usually receive a bill at the beginning of each quarter for the content you registered in the previous quarter. The only exception is if you’ve only registered a small number of DOIs.
