TL;DR We missed an error that led to resource resolution URLs of some 500,000+ records to be incorrectly updated. We have reverted the incorrect resolution URLs affected by this problem. And, we’re putting in place checks and changes in our processes to ensure this does not happen again.
How we got here Our technical support team was contacted in late June by Wiley about updating resolution URLs for their content. It’s a common request of our technical support team, one meant to make the URL update process more efficient, but this was a particularly large request.
Crossref Conversations is an audio blog we’re trying out that will cover various topics important to our community. This conversation is between colleagues Anna Tolwinska and Rosa Morais Clark, discussing how we can make research happen faster, with fewer hurdles, and how Crossref can help. Our members have been asking us how Crossref can support open science, and we have a few insights to share. So we invite you to have a listen.
We’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 we’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 We’ve been working on the Research Organization Registry (ROR) as a community initiative for the last few years.
We’re excited (and a little nervous) to launch a new research project designed to assess the effects of metadata on research communications. We’re expecting this effort to be a significant contribution to the existing research on the topic and we’re really looking forward to getting started. We’re also a little nervous because of course we don’t know what the conclusions will be (after all, if we did, we wouldn’t be starting this project).
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.
