On behalf of the Nominating Committee, I’m pleased to share the slate of candidates for the 2024 board election.
Each year we do an open call for board interest. This year, the Nominating Committee received 53 submissions from members worldwide to fill four open board seats.
We maintain a balanced board of 8 large member seats and 8 small member seats. Size is determined based on the organization’s membership tier (small members fall in the $0-$1,650 tiers and large members in the $3,900 - $50,000 tiers).
In our previous instalments of the blog series about matching (see part 1 and part 2), we explained what metadata matching is, why it is important and described its basic terminology. In this entry, we will discuss a few common beliefs about metadata matching that are often encountered when interacting with users, developers, integrators, and other stakeholders. Spoiler alert: we are calling them myths because these beliefs are not true! Read on to learn why.
We’ve just released an update to our participation report, which provides a view for our members into how they are each working towards best practices in open metadata. Prompted by some of the signatories and organizers of the Barcelona Declaration, which Crossref supports, and with the help of our friends at CWTS Leiden, we have fast-tracked the work to include an updated set of metadata best practices in participation reports for our members.
It’s been a while, here’s a metadata update and request for feedback In Spring 2023 we sent out a survey to our community with a goal of assessing what our priorities for metadata development should be - what projects are our community ready to support? Where is the greatest need? What are the roadblocks?
The intention was to help prioritize our metadata development work. There’s a lot we want to do, a lot our community needs from us, but we really want to make sure we’re focusing on the projects that will have the most immediate impact for now.
TL;DR: We no longer charge fees for members to participate in Crossmark, and we encourage all our members to register metadata about corrections and retractions - even if you can’t yet add the Crossmark button and pop-up box to your landing pages or PDFs.
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Research doesn’t stand still; even after publication, articles can be updated with supplementary data or corrections. When research outputs are is changed in this way the publisher should report and link it, so that those accessing and citing the content know if it’s been updated, corrected or even retracted. This also emphasizes the member’s commitment to the ongoing stewardship of research outputs.
Many people find and store articles to read later, either as PDFs on their laptop or on one of any number of reference management systems - when they come back to read and cite these articles, possibly many months later, they want to know if the version they have is current or not.
Removing Crossmark fees
To encourage even wider adoption of Crossmark, and to promote best practice around better reporting of corrections and retractions, we will no longer be charging additional fees for our Crossmark service. This change applies to all Crossmark metadata registered from 1 January 2020. All members are now encouraged to add Crossmark metadata and add the Crossmark button and pop-up box to their publications - and you can do so as part of your regular content registration.
Richer metadata gives important context
We know that there are many more corrections and retractions that are not yet being registered, and to address this, we are now asking all of our members to start registering metadata for significant updates to your publications, even if you don’t implement the Crossmark button and pop-up box on your content. Remember, anyone can access the Crossmark metadata through our public REST API, and start using it straight away - even if you’re not ready to implement the Crossmark button.
Check out how to get started; if you only want to deposit metadata, follow steps one through four. If you also want to add the Crossmark button and pop-up box to your web pages/PDFs so that readers can easily see when content has changed, then also follow the rest of the steps.
Crossmark
We launched Crossmark in 2012 to raise awareness of these critical changes, by asking Crossref members to:
help readers find out about the changes by placing a Crossmark button and pop-up box (which is consistent across all members making it recognizable to readers) on your landing pages and in PDFs
Members can also use Crossmark to register additional metadata about content, giving further context and background for the reader. These metadata appear in the “More Information” section of the Crossmark box. 7 million DOIs have some additional metadata, the most common being copyright statements, publication history, and peer review methods.
Anyone can access the Crossmark metadata through our public REST API, providing a myriad of opportunities for integration with other systems, and analysis of changes to the scholarly record.
Who has implemented Crossmark?
440 Crossref members have implemented Crossmark to date. 11.4 million DOIs have some Crossmark metadata.
Total DOIs
DOIs with Crossmark metadata
%
Journal articles
80,862,460
10,155,340
12.56%
Book chapters
14,040,646
792,953
5.65%
Conference Papers
6,175,733
457,237
7.40%
Datasets
1,862,852
19,206
1.03%
Books
753,298
239
0.03%
Monographs
469,333
23
0.00%
Of those, about 130,000 contain an update:
You can see which members or journals have implemented Crossmark by viewing the relevant Crossref Participation Report.