The Crossref Nominating Committee is inviting expressions of interest to join the Board of Directors of Crossref for the term starting in 2021. The committee will gather responses from those interested and create the slate of candidates that our membership will vote on in an election in September. Expressions of interest will be due Friday, June 19, 2020.
The role of the board at Crossref is to provide strategic and financial oversight of the organization, as well as guidance to the Executive Director and the staff leadership team, with the key responsibilities being:
After 20 years in operation, and as our system matures from experimental to foundational infrastructure, it’s time to review our documentation.
Having a solid core of education materials about the why and the how of Crossref is essential in making participation possible, easy, and equitable.
As our system has evolved, our membership has grown and diversified, and so have our tools - both for depositing metadata with Crossref, and for retrieving and making use of it.
To help better support the discovery, sale and analysis of books, Jennifer Kemp from Crossref and Mike Taylor from Digital Science, present seven reasons why publishers should collect chapter-level metadata.
Book publishers should have been in the best possible position to take advantage of the movement of scholarly publishing to the internet. After all, they have behind them an extraordinary legacy of creating and distributing data about books: the metadata that supports discovery, sales and analysis.
Hello, I’m Paul Davis and I’ve been part of the Crossref support team since May 2017. In that time I’ve become more adept as a DOI detective, helping our members work out whodunnit when it comes to submission errors.
If you have ever received one of our error messages after you have submitted metadata to us, you may know that some are helpful and others are, well, difficult to decode. I’m here to help you to become your own DOI detective.
Sign up for Crossmark - contact us to let us know that you want to get started with Crossmark.
Create a Crossmark policy page and assign it a DOI: create a page on your website explaining that you are participating in the Crossmark service and have committed to maintaining version of record copies of content that display the Crossmark button. This page should be registered and have a DOI to enable persistent linking. It should explain your policies on corrections, retractions, withdrawals and other updates, and may contain definitions and explanations of any additional custom metadata fields that are being used. The page could also include links to other relevant policies such as author submission guidelines, and peer review guidelines. Learn more about creating a Crossmark policy page.
The DOI of the content the Crossmark is being applied to
The DOI for the your Crossmark Policy Page
If you are using Metadata Manager to register your content with us, go to the journal-level record for your publication, add your Crossmark policy page DOI, and click Save.
Adding more information
Several metadata elements will automatically display in the Crossmark box if you are registering them:
Author names and their ORCID iDs (learn more about contributors)
If you are already registering this additional metadata at the time you implement Crossmark, there is nothing more you need to do. If you start to register these metadata elements after you have set up Crossmark, they will automatically be put into the Crossmark box.
Custom metadata
The Crossmark box has a section for you to show any additional non-bibliographic information about the content. You decide what to include here (you are not required to add anything). In this section, Crossmark participants often include publication history dates, details of the peer review process used, and links to supporting information.
Use Metadata Manager to add custom metadata, or use the assertion element in your XML.
The role of the @order attribute
@order is an optional attribute. If @order is absent, it will return stuff in the order you list it in deposit, but this is not guaranteed. If you want to be sure of the order, then you can use @order. Learn more about the Crossmark deposit elements (including what is optional) in the schema.
Step 1: Provide DOIs for items being corrected or updated. Crossmark updates should only be deposited for editorially significant changes - those that are likely to affect the interpretation or crediting of the work, and not for minor changes such as spelling corrections or formatting changes.
There are 12 defined types of accepted update within Crossmark:
addendum
clarification
correction
corrigendum
erratum
expression_of_concern
new_edition
new_version
partial_retraction
removal
retraction
withdrawal
If an update does not fall into one of these categories, it should instead be placed in the more information section of the pop-up box by being deposited as an assertion.
When deposited content corrects or updates earlier content, the DOI(s) of the corrected content must be supplied in the Crossmark metadata. See the Crossref unixref documentation section on updates for examples of how this is recorded in the Crossmark metadata.
When a correction is made in situ (that is, it replaces the earlier version completely), then the DOI of the corrected content will be the same as the DOI for the original Crossref deposit. In situ updates are not considered best practice as they obscure the scholarly record.
Step 2: Record the DOI in HTML metadata. You should ensure that the DOI is embedded in the head of the HTML metadata for all content to which Crossmark buttons are being applied as follows:
<meta name="dc.identifier" content="doi:10.5555/12345678"/>
Step 3: Apply the Crossmark button to your HTML pages. We supply a templated HTML/JavaScript code widget which will embed the Crossmark button and functionality into your web pages. The latest version of the widget (v2.0) is below. Do ensure you are using the latest version and that it points to our production server.
Crossmark HTML widget. Please use the widget as specified below and do not alter the script or host the button locally.
There are a number of variations of the Crossmark button available so that you can choose one that fits well on your site. You can change the Crossmark button that is used simply by changing the src attribute of the img element to point to one of the following:
Step 4: Add Crossmark metadata to PDF content. At a minimum, this metadata must include the DOI of the content and the optional Crossmark domain(s). You may wish to use our open source tool pdfmark for embedding metadata in PDF files. The appropriate metadata is added to a PDF with the following command:
It may appear redundant to apply Crossmark elements both in their own Crossmark namespace as well in the pdfx namespace, but the latter is necessary to ensure the Crossmark elements appear in the PDF dictionary, a specific requirement for some search engines. Any metadata found in the pdfx namespace will be copied over to the document info dictionary. Simply make sure that Crossmark metadata is in the pdfx namespace in the XMP provided to the tool.
Step 5: Apply linked Crossmark buttons to your content - learn more about Crossmark button guidelines, including how and where to display the Crossmark button.
We have also created pdfstamp, an open-source command-line tool that makes it possible to add an image or stamp to any location on a PDF and to link that image to a chosen URL.
The link structure for Crossmark links from PDFs looks like this:
domain tells the Crossmark system what kind of static content the link is coming from, and will change for different static formats (such as epub)
date_stamp tells the Crossmark system the date on which a last Major Version of the PDF was generated. In most cases, this will be the date the article was published. However, when a member makes significant corrections to a PDF in-situ (no notice issued, and no new version of the work with a new DOI) then the date_stamp should reflect when the PDF was regenerated with the corrections. The system will then use the date_stamp in order to tell whether the reader needs to be alerted to updates or not. The date_stamp argument should be recorded in the form YYYY-MM-DD (learn more about ISO 8601).
