Blog

Rachael Lammey

For 12 years, Rachael held several roles at Crossref before leaving to further her career in February 2023. Most recently, as Director of Product, she led Crossref’s product team, consulting with members, users, and other open scholarly infrastructure organisations to help focus the organisation’s priorities and deliver on our ambitious roadmap. Rachael worked her way up through editorial groups at a scholarly publisher before joining Crossref as a Product Manager in 2012. In that role she introduced ORCID Auto-update and oversaw improvements to Crossmark and Similarity Check. In the Community team she initiated our important partnership with the Public Knowledge Project and other organisations, grew adoption of preprints, grants, and data citation, and a brief strint in R&D saw her engage new technical and community iniiatives such as crowd-sourcing retrations and updates which led to the acquisition of the Retraction Watch database in 2023.

RORing ahead: using ROR in place of the Open Funder Registry

A few months ago we announced our plan to deprecate our support for the Open Funder Registry in favour of using the ROR Registry to support both affiliation and funder use cases. The feedback weā€™ve had from the community has been positive and supports our members, service providers and metadata users who are already starting to move in this direction. We wanted to provide an update on work thatā€™s underway to make this transition happen, and how you can get involved in working together with us on this.

News: Crossref and Retraction Watch

https://doi.org/10.13003/c23rw1d9 Crossref acquires Retraction Watch data and opens it for the scientific community Agreement to combine and publicly distribute data about tens of thousands of retracted research papers, and grow the service together 12th September 2023 ā€”– The Center for Scientific Integrity, the organisation behind the Retraction Watch blog and database, and Crossref, the global infrastructure underpinning research communications, both not-for-profits, announced today that the Retraction Watch database has been acquired by Crossref and made a public resource.

Open Funder Registry to transition into Research Organization Registry (ROR)

Today, we are announcing a long-term plan to deprecate the Open Funder Registry. For some time, we have understood that there is significant overlap between the Funder Registry and the Research Organization Registry (ROR), and funders and publishers have been asking us whether they should use Funder IDs or ROR IDs to identify funders. It has therefore become clear that merging the two registries will make workflows more efficient and less confusing for all concerned.

The more the merrier, or how more registered grants means more relationships with outputs

One of the main motivators for funders registering grants with Crossref is to simplify the process of research reporting with more automatic matching of research outputs to specific awards. In March 2022, we developed a simple approach for linking grants to research outputs and analysed how many such relationships could be established. In January 2023, we repeated this analysis to see how the situation changed within ten months. Interested? Read on!

ISR part three: Where does Crossref have the most impact on helping the community to assess the trustworthiness of the scholarly record?

Ans: metadata and services are all underpinned by POSI. Leading into a blog post with a question always makes my brain jump ahead to answer that question with the simplest answer possible. I was a nightmare English Literature student. ‘Was Macbeth purely a villain?’ ‘No’. *leaves exam* Just like not giving one-word answers to exam questions, playing our role in the integrity of the scholarly record and helping our members enhance theirs takes thought, explanation, transparency, and work.

Announcing our new Director of Product: Rachael Lammey

Unfortunately, Bryan Vickery has moved onto pastures new. I would like to thank him for his many contributions at Crossref and we all wish him well. Iā€™m now pleased to announce that Rachael Lammey will be Crossrefā€™s new Director of Product starting on Monday, May 16th. Rachaelā€™s skills and experience are perfectly suited for this role. She has been at Crossref since 2012 and has deep knowledge and experience of all things Crossref: our mission; our members; our culture; and our services.

A ROR-some update to our API

Earlier this year, Ginny posted an exciting update on Crossrefā€™s progress with adopting ROR, the Research Organization Registry for affiliations, announcing that we’d started the collection of ROR identifiers in our metadata input schema. šŸ¦ The capacity to accept ROR IDs to help reliably identify institutions is really important but the real value comes from their open availability alongside the other metadata registered with us, such as for publications like journal articles, book chapters, preprints, and for other objects such as grants.

Come and get your grant metadata!

Tl;dr: Metadata for the (currently 26,000) grants that have been registered by our funder members is now available via the REST API. This is quite a milestone in our program to include funding in Crossref infrastructure and a step forward in our mission to connect all.the.things. This post gives you all the queries you might need to satisfy your curiosity and start to see what’s possible with deeper analysis. So have the look and see what useful things you can discover.

Some rip-RORing news for affiliation metadata

Weā€™ve just added to our input schema the ability to include affiliation information using ROR identifiers. Members who register content using XML can now include ROR IDs, and weā€™ll add the capability to our manual content registration form, participation reports, and metadata retrieval APIs in the near future. And we are inviting members to a Crossref/ROR webinar on 29th September at 3pm UTC. The background Weā€™ve been working on the Research Organization Registry (ROR) as a community initiative for the last few years.

Doing more with relationships - via Event Data

Crossref aims to link research together, making related items more findable, increasing transparency, and showing how ideas spread and develop. There are a number of moving parts in this effort: some related to capturing and storing linking information, others to making it available. By including relationship metadata in Event Data, we are taking a big step to improve the visibility of a large number of links between metadata. We know this is long-promised and weā€™re pleased that making this valuable metadata available supports a number of important initiatives.