Strengthening Scholarly Publishing in Africa is a collaborative webinar series bringing together ASSAf, Crossref, DOAJ, EIFL, and PKP to share practical guidance, resources, and approaches for strengthening the publishing ecosystem in the region. This series responds to the growing interest in open access, digital publishing, stronger editorial practices, and greater visibility of research publishing across Africa. Each partner organisation has long experience of building that capacity in the area of their expertise. In this series, weâre coming together to offer a more holistic learning experience to the community of African publishers, putting different aspects of the publishing process in their broader context.
Weâve had a year full of growth and reached a milestone of 60+ team members; letâs take a moment to digest what that means for people operations. Hiring staff in 19+ countries is no easy task, but we are up for it, and I can honestly say it is the main reason why our culture is so great. That might sound biased coming from Crossrefâs first Head of Human Resources, but hear me out.
You can now register rich metadata for a variety of record types in Metadata Manager using simple, guided workflows. The tool is used by many in our community to register grant and journal article records, and it has now been expanded to support books and chapters, reports, dissertations, and post-publication updates for journal content.
Metadata Manager makes it easier to capture identifiers for contributors and their affiliations, funding information, references, and more. Thanks to automated reference matching by Crossref, this offers greater visibility for the works, while the affiliations and funding information can serve as important trust signals for the community.
This year’s edition of the FORCE11 conference was hosted in June by Singapore Management University. Its title, âTo Go Far, Go Together: Advancing Scholarly Communication Across Boundaries and Disruptionsâ truly resonates with Crossrefâs truths; it takes a village! Crossref only works as long as the scholarly research community wants to work together globally, across all disciplines, for integrity and openness of the scientific record. The conversations were influenced by a genuinely diverse mix of librarians, researchers, open infrastructures, and service providers, and that mix shaped almost every interaction we had at the conference.
We encourage you to include references (citation lists, bibliographies, data and software citations) with all content you register. A key benefit is that they will appear in Cited-by query results. You can include references when your first register your DOI records, or you can add them to existing DOI records later. Learn more about the benefits of registering your references.
Including references (or adding them to an existing deposit) can be done by:
Crossref XML plugin for OJS: You must first enable References as a submission metadata field and then enable the Crossref reference linking plugin, to include references in your initial deposit, or add them later.
Metadata Manager: Our new Metadata Manager tool (previously known as the record registration form) has a built-in field for adding references. Learn more about how to use this tool.
Simple Text Query allows you to both find the DOIs for your references and add them to the metadata for a DOI that you have already registered with Crossref. Please note that this method will overwrite any references previously deposited for the content item - if youâve previously added references to an item, and want to add more references using Simple Text Query, you need to include both the existing and the new references in your deposit.
If your details have been entered correctly, you will see a success message, showing that your deposit has been submitted to the system queue for processing. When the reference deposit has been submitted, you will receive an email containing the XML deposit generated by the form. After that submission has been processed (usually within minutes of your submission), you will receive a submission log by email with the results of your submission.
