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STM
2023 November 28

Joint Statement on Research Data

STM, DataCite, and Crossref are pleased to announce an updated joint statement on research data. In 2012, DataCite and STM drafted an initial joint statement on the linkability and citability of research data. With nearly 10 million data citations tracked, thousands of repositories adopting data citation best practices, thousands of journals adopting data policies, data availability statements and establishing persistent links between articles and datasets, and the introduction of data policies by an increasing number of funders, there has been significant progress since.

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Kornelia Korzec
2023 November 21

What was the talk of #Crossref2023?

Have you attended any of our annual meeting sessions this year? Ah, yes – there were many in this conference-style event. I, as many of my colleagues, attended them all because it is so great to connect with our global community, and hear your thoughts on the developments at Crossref, and the stories you share. Let me offer some highlights from the event and a reflection on some emergent themes of the day.

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Luis Montilla
2023 November 20

Perspectives: Luis Montilla on making science fiction concepts a reality in the scholarly ecosystem

Hello, readers! My name is Luis, and I’ve recently started a new role as the Technical Community Manager at Crossref, where I aim to bridge the gap between some of our services and our community awareness to enhance the Research Nexus. I’m excited to share my thoughts with you. My journey from research to science communications infrastructure has been a gradual transition. As a Masters student in Biological Sciences, I often felt curious about the behind-the-scenes after a paper is submitted and published.

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Fabienne Michaud
2023 November 01

Similarity check update: A new similarity report and AI writing detection tool soon to be available to iThenticate v2 users

In May, we updated you on the latest changes and improvements to the new version of iThenticate and let you know that a new similarity report and AI writing detection tool were on the horizon. On Wednesday 1 November 2023, Turnitin (who produce iThenticate) will be releasing a brand new similarity report and a free preview to their AI writing detection tool in iThenticate v2. The AI writing detection tool will be enabled by default and account administrators will be able to switch it off/on.

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Strategic agenda and roadmap

Welcome to our new strategic roadmap—finalised January 2023—which sets out Crossref’s priorities through 2025 so everyone can see our focus areas and upcoming projects on our roadmap. It encompasses all our high-level activities, from open governance and sustainability, our work collaborating with different parts of the ever-diversifying scholarly community, through to expansion of metadata and relationships.

Like others, we envision a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organizations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society.

Crossref makes research objects easy to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse.

We’re a not-for-profit membership organization that exists to make scholarly communications better. We rally the community; tag and share metadata; run an open infrastructure; play with technology; and make tools and services—all to help put scholarly content in context.

It’s as simple—and as complicated—as that.

Rally

Getting the community working together to make scholarly communications better

Tag

Structuring, processing, and sharing metadata to reveal relationships between research outputs

Run

Operating a shared, open infrastructure that is community-governed and evolves with changing needs

Play

Engaging in debate and experimenting with technology to solve our members’ problems

Make

Creating tools and services to enable connections and give context


Read on to learn more about where Crossref is heading and let us have your thoughts by starting or joining a discussion in the strategy section of our community forum. You can dig into our public roadmap too which shows the status and progress of all projects mentioned on this page, and more. Review the archived strategic narratives for 2020-2022 and 2018-2020, and read background on our strategy on our blog.


The strategic landscape

Governments, funders, institutions, and researchers—groups who once had tangential involvement in scholarly publishing—are taking a more direct role in shaping how research is recorded, shared, contextualised, and assessed.

We now have more members that self-identify as universities or research institutions than as publishers and we have seen a rise in library- and scholar-led publishing. Many research funders are playing their part by supporting open infrastructure, registering their records with Crossref as members, and seeing this as a direct way of measuring reach and return on their grants and awards.

As more people contribute to an evolving scholarly record, so Crossref must capture provenance and relationships through metadata.

We have to scale our systems, tools, and resources to manage this and we have to do it all in the open, demonstrating our committment to POSI, to add a level of assurance that research is being properly supported, and so we can more easily integrate and co-create with others.

With a more complete picture of the scholarly record available in the open, everyone will be able to examine the integrity, impact, and outcomes of our collective efforts to progress science and society.

Contribute to an environment where the community identifies and co-creates solutions for broad benefit

A sustainable source of complete, open, and global scholarly metadata and relationships

Publicly accountable to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) practices of sustainability, insurance, and governance

Foster a strong team—because reliable infrastructure needs committed people who contribute to and realise the vision, and thrive doing it

We want to contribute to an environment in which the scholarly research community identifies shared problems and co-creates solutions for broad benefit

We do this in all teams through research and engagement with our expanding community.

Some problems benefit from collective action. Scholarly communications changes rapidly and we need to be proactive with our community to understand how we can help solve shared problems. We continue to focus on collaboration with new and long standing partners, and our revived R&D team allows us to move nimbly, try new things, and involve the community as we do.

Recently completed

In focus

Up next

2024

Under consideration

  • How do we best gather changes and notify changes to metadata?
  • Monitoring research integrity community developments and tools

We want to be a sustainable source of complete, open, and global scholarly metadata and relationships

We are working towards this vision of a ‘Research Nexus’ by demonstrating the value of richer and connected open metadata, incentivising people to meet best practices, while making it easier to do so.

Building a more complete picture of the scholarly record means thinking about our metadata outside the more rigid structures once provided by record types. In line with community needs, we will build in more flexibility, clearer assertions of metadata provenance, and charge ourselves with improving the accuracy, transparency, and downstream usage of the metadata we collect and ingest from a range of sources. We will support our members in improving the provision of key metadata fields so that they can easily contribute to the growing network of metadata and relationships.

Recently completed

In focus

  • Adoption activities to focus on top metadata adoption priorities which are: references; abstracts; grants; ROR
  • Build new content system and move or deprecate as we go
  • Implement ‘item graph’ to reflect nuanced relationships in the API and to ensure future schema flexibility
  • Broad adoption of the GEM Program to include more of the world’s metadata
  • Develop clear metadata development strategy, priorities, and roadmap
  • Deliver data citation via the relationships API endpoint
  • Build a test environment for metadata schema updates
  • Exploring preservation coverage among Crossref membership
  • Extend new registration form to include articles and other record types and retire Metadata Manager tool
  • Automating membership processes to support continued growth

Up next

2024

Under consideration

We want to be held publicly accountable to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) practices of governance, insurance, and sustainability

We do this by focusing on broad community governance, organisational resilience, open forkable code, and transparent operations.

We will invest time and resources in embedding open and transparent practices in our organisation so that you know what we know. We use POSI as a decision framework to help us evaluate conversations, prioritise collaborations, plus improve our own way of working. We’ll keep revisiting these areas, and uncovering more as we evolve our own strategy and continue to evaluate the principles themselves as we work with POSI adopters and potential partnerships, prioritising those organisations who also commit to POSI.

Recently completed

In focus

  • 2022/3 POSI self-assessment update
  • Publishing openly all internal policies and documentation
  • Engaging with other POSI-adoptee infrastructures and drafting the next version of the principles together
  • Move from data center to cloud
  • Drafting patent non-assertion policy

Up next

Pending

  • Deprecate closed code and open-source more/all code (see: Insurance)
  • Build a bridge API that will enable transparent tools and information about billing

Under consideration

  • Is our governance structure representative and are the processes efficient? (see: Governance)

We want to foster a strong team—because reliable infrastructure needs committed people who contribute to and realise the vision, and thrive doing it

We do this through fair policies and working practices, a balanced approach to resourcing, and accountability to each other.

Our commitment to collaboration and transparency is reflected internally and externally. Collaboration is at the centre of everything we do – we find shared solutions that address the scholarly research community’s needs and benefit from a collective approach. This is reflected in how we operate as a team as well. By making our operations more transparent we can ensure that our approach is applied consistently and equitably; potential candidates can get a sense of how we operate; and other organisations can adapt and reuse policies if they wish.

Recently completed

In focus

  • Goal planning and aligning team priorities
  • Developing a framework to better track our carbon emissions
  • Reviewing recruitment and compensation practices
  • Undertake 2023 recruitment
  • Project underway to assess how our resourcing supports Crossref’s sustainability
  • Publish our employee manuals and policies publicly

Up next

2024

  • All staff retreat

Under consideration

Page owner: Ginny Hendricks   |   Last updated 2023-June-16