This blog post is from Lettie Conrad and Michelle Urberg, cross-posted from the The Scholarly Kitchen.
As sponsors of this project, we at Crossref are excited to see this work shared out.
The scholarly publishing community talks a LOT about metadata and the need for high-quality, interoperable, and machine-readable descriptors of the content we disseminate. However, as we’ve reflected on previously in the Kitchen, despite well-established information standards (e.g., persistent identifiers), our industry lacks a shared framework to measure the value and impact of the metadata we produce.
When Crossref began over 20 years ago, our members were primarily from the United States and Western Europe, but for several years our membership has been more global and diverse, growing to almost 18,000 organizations around the world, representing 148 countries.
As we continue to grow, finding ways to help organizations participate in Crossref is an important part of our mission and approach. Our goal of creating the Research Nexus—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—can only be achieved by ensuring that participation in Crossref is accessible to all.
In August 2022, the United States Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memo (PDF) on ensuring free, immediate, and equitable access to federally funded research (a.k.a. the “Nelson memo”). Crossref is particularly interested in and relevant for the areas of this guidance that cover metadata and persistent identifiers—and the infrastructure and services that make them useful.
Funding bodies worldwide are increasingly involved in research infrastructure for dissemination and discovery.
Preprints have become an important tool for rapidly communicating and iterating on research outputs. There is now a range of preprint servers, some subject-specific, some based on a particular geographical area, and others linked to publishers or individual journals in addition to generalist platforms. In 2016 the Crossref schema started to support preprints and since then the number of metadata records has grown to around 16,000 new preprint DOIs per month.
On September 1st we completed the final stage of the Crossmark v2.0 release and sent an email to all participating publishers containing instructions for upgrading. The first phase of v2.0 happened when we changed the design and layout of the Crossmark box back in May of this year. That allowed us to better display the growing set of additional metadata that our members are depositing, and saw the introduction of the Linked Clinical Trials feature.
Now all publishers have the opportunity to complete the upgrade by simply replacing the Crossmark button and the piece of code that calls the box. The new button designs are, we think, a much better fit for most websites, and are designed to look more like a button than a flat logo. The new buttons are also available as .eps files for placement in PDFs.
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Crossmark box on a mobile phone
Most importantly, switching to 2.0 makes the Crossmark box responsive for better display on mobile devices.
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Just two weeks after the code release a number of publishers have already upgraded and are running Crossmark 2.0 on their content. Congrats to the Pan African Medical Journal who were the first member to upgrade just a couple of days after the release. Â Of course we realise that many members will need time to schedule the upgrade, and while we are keen to see as many early adopters as possible, we will support version 1.5 of Crossmark through to the end of March 2017.
If your content is running Crossmark 2.0 we would love to see it. Drop us a line or put a link in the comments below.
