Blog

Our entire community – members, metadata users, service providers, community organizations and researchers – create and/or use DOIs in some way so making them more accessible is a worthy and overdue effort. For the first time in five years and only the second time ever, we are recommending some changes to our DOI display guidelines (the changes aren’t really for display but more on that below). We don’t take such changes lightly, because we know it means updating established workflows.

I’m delighted to say that Martin Paul Eve will be joining Crossref as a Principal R&D Developer starting in January 2023. As a Professor of Literature, Technology, and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London- Martin has always worked on issues relating to metadata and scholarly infrastructure. In joining the Crossref R&D group, Martin can focus full-time on helping us design and build a new generation of services and tools to help the research community navigate and make sense of the scholarly record.

Quality metadata is foundational to the research nexus and all Crossref services. When inaccuracies creep in, these create problems that get compounded down the line. No wonder that reports of metadata errors from authors, members, and other metadata users are some of the most common messages we receive into the technical support team (we encourage you to continue to report these metadata errors). We make members’ metadata openly available via our APIs, which means people and machines can incorporate it into their research tools and services - thus, we all want it to be accurate.

The other day I was out and about and got into a conversation with someone who asked me about my doctoral work in English literature. I’ve had the same conversation many times: I tell someone (only if they ask!) that my dissertation was a history of the villanelle, and then they cheerfully admit that they don’t know what a villanelle is, and then I ask them if they’re familiar with Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do not go gentle into that good night.

Having joined the Crossref team merely a week previously, the mid-year community update on June 14th was a fantastic opportunity to learn about the Research Nexus vision. We explored its building blocks and practical implementation steps within our reach, and within our imagination of the future. Read on (or watch the recording) for a whistlestop tour of everything – from what on Earth is Research Nexus, through to how it’s taking shape at Crossref, to how you are involved, and finally – to what concerns the community surrounding the vision and how we’re going to address that.

TL;DR A year ago, we announced that we were putting the “R” back in R&D. That was when Rachael Lammey joined the R&D team as the Head of Strategic Initiatives. And now, with Rachael assuming the role of Product Director, I’m delighted to announce that Dominika Tkaczyk has agreed to take over Rachael’s role as the Head of Strategic Initiatives. Of course, you might already know her. We will also immediately start recruiting for a new Principal R&D Developer to work with Esha and Dominika on the R&D team.

As a distributed, global, and community-led organisation, sharing information and listening to our members both online and in person has always been integral to what we do. For many years Crossref has held both in-person and online meetings and events, which involved a fair amount of travel by our staff, board, and community. This changed drastically in March 2020, when we had to stop traveling and stop having in-person meetings and events.

The Crossref Nominating Committee is inviting expressions of interest to join the Board of Directors of Crossref for the term starting in March 2023. The committee will gather responses from those interested and create the slate of candidates that our membership will vote on in an election in September. Expressions of interest will be due Friday, June 24th, 2022. About the our board elections The board is elected through the “one member, one vote” policy wherein every member organization of Crossref has a single vote to elect representatives to the Crossref board.

In 2020 we released our first public data file, something we’ve turned into an annual affair supporting our commitment to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI). We’ve just posted the 2022 file, which can now be downloaded via torrent like in years past. We aim to publish these in the first quarter of each year, though as you may notice, we’re a little behind our intended schedule. The reason for this delay was that we wanted to make critical new metadata fields available, including resource URLs and titles with markup.

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. I’m now pleased to announce that Rachael Lammey will be Crossref’s new Director of Product starting on Monday, May 16th. Rachael’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.