Event Data

Open for your interpretation

Now available in Beta

Want to discover how research is being shared, liked and commented on in social media? What about which articles are referenced on Wikipedia, mentioned on Reddit or have post-publication annotations in Hypothes.is? Crossref Event Data allows anyone to discover this and more, all from the one centralized location.

A collaborative initiative by Crossref and DataCite, Event Data meets a growing community need by offering transparency around the way interactions with scholarly research occur online, outside of publisher platforms

These interactions are made up of a number of individual ‘events’ such as a bookmark, a comment, a social share, or a link. With tens of thousands of events occurring every day at a rate of approximately one per second, there’s a wealth of insight that can be derived by analyzing and interpreting this data. And we’re here to help you do just that.

Event Data records and stores this activity and make it available as a raw data record for anyone interested in getting a view of how content registered with us transverses the online world. As the data is transparent and traceable, this means everyone will have access to information about the provenance and context of every event we curate in our service.

Event Data does not provide metrics, totals or interpretations; what is does provide is the raw data to help you facilitate your own analysis, giving you the freedom to integrate the data into your own systems.

Event Data Beta is now available!

Event Data is currently under development, with a production service launch expected in late 2017. But as we don’t like developing in the dark, our Event Data Beta service is open to everyone and we encourage you to take a look at the data and send us your feedback. All the data you collect from Crossref Event Data is licensed for public sharing and reuse, according to our Terms of Use. However until Event Data is in production mode, we do not recommend building any commercial or customer-based tools off the data.

For more information and to access Beta, take a look at our Event Data User Guide.

A word of warning too, our development process means that we like to break things often just so we can build them back better each time. So while we can’t guarantee the reliability of Beta, it is the perfect aperitif for the curious.

How does it work?

Luckily, once a publisher registers content with us, we have a way of keeping track of it. Using an item’s Crossref DOI, we are able to find out when it has been saved, shared, liked, referenced or commented on in a range of different environments; from social sites like Twitter and Facebook, to reference and blog sites like Wikipedia and ResearchBlogging. We are also able to capture the links between authors, datasets and content items as they are added into the metadata deposited with DataCite and Crossref.

As the service matures, we will continue to connect with new data sources, ensuring our coverage of activity grows with time.

Where does our data come from?

The Events in our service are mostly collected and curated by us from the data sources, but some are produced by our partners. Crossref Event Data currently contains Events from the following data sources:

What are the benefits?

• Our data is open, transferrable, and portable.
• Regular updates from data contributors and reliable, secure storage.
• Raw data, free of charge with the addition of an SLA provided at favorable rates.
• A community-led initiative and data from a neutral source.

Once launched in production, your organization may need an extra reliable Event Data service. If so, then you may want to ask us about a service-level agreement.

Who is it for?

Publishers and publishing platforms By analyzing and interpreting our data collection, publishers or content distributors can use the event records to undertake metric-lead analysis to help drive their business needs.

General and altmetrics service providers As we are a centrally-managed resource, third party vendors can collect real-time data from the one location to enrich, analyze, interpret and report via their own tools. Additionally, the optional benefit of an SLA with us means that we are a reliable and flexible source of data.

Bibliometricians Bibliometricians can use our trusted raw data as the underlying data for their research. Our data is made easily accessible to researchers in a single, normalized format across a variety of sources. Additionally, as Event Data data is auditable, researchers will be assured that all data we collect is matched to the evidence and context from the source.

Journal editors Editors can use our records to quickly find reviewers based on publication network analysis, identify new areas to grow author submissions and track the reach of submissions selected for publication. In addition, our records can help editor’s to attract authors by offering data on the audience’s research interest, track the full-scope of article dissemination and gain a better understanding of how the publications they manage compare to each other.

Funders Funders can use Event Data to isolate and track the dissemination and usage of the research they funded outside of the scholarly literature.

Want to learn more?

Take a look at our technical documentation in the Event Data User Guide, read our Terms of Use, and then plug into the Event Data Query API to get started.

For membership questions, including arranging a service-level agreement, please contact Jennifer Kemp. For product development questions including being or requesting a new data source, please contact Christine Buske.