Blog

Crossref strives for balance. Different people have always wanted different things from us and, since our founding, we have brought together diverse organizations to have discussions—sometimes contentious—to agree on how to help make scholarly communications better. Being inclusive can mean slow progress, but we’ve been able to advance by being flexible, fair, and forward-thinking. We have been helped by the fact that Crossref’s founding organizations defined a clear purpose in our original certificate of incorporation, which reads:

I’m happy to announce that Bryan Vickery has joined Crossref today as our new Director of Product. Bryan has extensive experience developing products and services at publishers such as Taylor & Francis, where he led the creation of the open-access platform Cogent OA. Most recently he was Managing Director of Research Services at T&F, including Wizdom.ai after it was acquired.

As the end of the year approaches it’s useful to look back and reflect on what we’ve achieved over the last 12 months—a lot! To be honest, there were some things we didn’t get done—or didn’t make as much progress with as we hoped—but that happens when you have an ambitious agenda. However, we also got some things done that we didn’t expect to or that weren’t even on our radar at the end of 2017—this is inevitable as the research and scholarly communications landscape is rapidly changing.

100,000,000. Yes, it’s a really big number—and you helped make it happen. We’d like to say thank you to all our members, without your commitment and contribution we would not be celebrating this significant milestone. It really is no small feat.

Cross-posted on the blogs of University of California (UC3), ORCID, and DataCite: https://doi.org/10.5438/67sj-4y05. Over the past couple of years, a group of organizations with a shared purpose—California Digital Library, Crossref, DataCite, and ORCID—invested our time and energy into launching the Org ID initiative, with the goal of defining requirements for an open, community-led organization identifier registry. The goal of our initiative has been to offer a transparent, accessible process that builds a better system for all of our communities.

We are delighted to report that last year Crossref welcomed a record-breaking 1,939 new members and, because our member base is growing so rapidly in both headcount and geography—with the highest number of new members joining from Asia—we thought it was a good time to reiterate what Crossref is all about, as well as show off a little about the things we are proud to have achieved in 2017.

Happy birthday, ORCID! It’s their fifth birthday today and it’s gratifying to me—as a founding board member and former Chair of the board—to see how successful it has become. ORCID has a great staff, over 700 members from 41 countries and is quickly approaching 4 million ORCID iDs. Crossref—it’s board, staff, and members—has been an ORCID supporter from the start. One example of this support is that we seconded Geoffrey Bilder to be ORCID’s interim CTO for about eight months.

About 1 year ago, Crossref, DataCite and ORCID [announced a joint initiative] (https://orcid.org/blog/2016/10/31/organization-identifier-project-way-forward) to launch and sustain an open, independent, non-profit organization identifier registry to facilitate the disambiguation of researcher affiliations. Today we publish governance recommendations and product principles and requirements for the creation of an open, independent organization identifier registry and invite community feedback.

Crossref is governed by a board of directors that meets in person three times a year in March, July and November. At the July meeting the board typically spends a significant amount of time on strategic planning in addition to its usual activities such as financial oversight, approving investment in new services based on staff and committee recommendations, reviewing and approving policies and fees for new and existing services and generally making sure Crossref is healthy and well run.

At the end of October 2016, Crossref, DataCite, and ORCID reported on collaboration in the area of organization identifiers. We issued three papers for community comment and after input we subsequently announced the formation of The OI Project, along with a call for expressions of interest from people interested in serving on the working group.