When each line of code is written it is surrounded by a sea of context: who in the community this is for, what problem we’re trying to solve, what technical assumptions we’re making, what we already tried but didn’t work, how much coffee we’ve had today. All of these have an effect on the software we write.
By the time the next person looks at that code, some of that context will have evaporated.
It turns out that one of the things that is really difficult at Crossref is checking whether a set of Crossref credentials has permission to act on a specific DOI prefix. This is the result of many legacy systems storing various mappings in various different software components, from our Content System through to our CRM. To this end, I wrote a basic application, credcheck, that will allow you to test a Crossref credential against an API.
Subject classifications have been available via the REST API for many years but have not been complete or reliable from the start and will soon be deprecated. dfdfd
The subject metadata element was born out of a Labs experiment intended to enrich the metadata returned via Crossref Metadata Search with All Subject Journal Classification codes from Scopus. This feature was developed when the REST API was still fairly new, and we now recognize that the initial implementation worked its way into the service prematurely.
Crossref and DOAJ share the aim to encourage the dissemination and use of scholarly research using online technologies and to work with and through regional and international networks, partners, and user communities for the achievement of their aims to build local institutional capacity and sustainability. Both organisations agreed to work together in 2021 in a variety of ways, but primarily to ‘encourage the dissemination and use of scholarly research using online technologies, and regional and international networks, partners and communities, helping to build local institutional capacity and sustainability around the world.
Our LIVE Annual Meeting is back in North America for the first time since 2015, and with just 10 days to go, there’s a lot going on in preparation. As you’d expect with a How good is your metadata? theme—the two-days will be entirely devoted to the subject of metadata—because it touches everything we do, and everything that publishers, hosting platforms, funders, researchers, and librarians do. Oh, and it’s actually super awesome too—and occasionally fun.
Metadata is what is used to describe the story of research: its origin, its contributors, its attention, and its relationships with other objects. The more machines start to do what humans cannot—parse millions of files through multiple views—the more we see what connections are missing, and the more we start to understand the opportunities that better metadata could offer.
We love metadata so much that we’re producing an 8-foot-high depiction of the ‘perfect’ record, in both XML and JSON, for people to gape at and annotate in person. Sneak preview:
Both days feature plenary-style talks, insights from ourselves and guests who will regale us with tales of metadata woes and wonders.
Lisa will be there at the end of Day 1 to update everyone on some recent and potential governance changes, and—the reason we started these gatherings—to reveal the results of our 2018 board election, the second contested election we’ve held, and already with twice the voters from 2017.
Our amazing guest speakers are too brilliant and too experienced to highlight in just one blog. But check out the LIVE18 schedule to see what they’ll be talking about:
Patricia Cruse, DataCite
Ravit David, University of Toronto
Clare Dean, Metadata 2020
Paul Dlug, American Physical Society
Kristen Fisher Ratan, CoKo Foundation
Stefanie Haustein, University of Ottawa
Bianca Kramer, Utrecht University
Graham Nott, Freelance developer (eLife/JATS)
Jodi Schneider, University of Urbana-Champaign
Shelley Stall, American Geophysical Union
We’ll be taking over the entire second floor of the Toronto Reference Library, whose three rooms will house a bunch of conversational sessions as well as some more formal talks:
Rally is the main room where we’ll have the plenary-style talks, a corner for Unscheduled Maintenance offering live support for your questions about billing or tech for Ryan, Shayn, Isaac, Jason, Chuck, & Mike. Running down the whole left side of this room is also the You-are-Crossref wall where the community will showcase their work with metadata through posters - feel free to bring one along and find Patricia to get the sticky tack.
The LIVE Lounge is where you can eat, drink, rest, and chat and where you’ll likely find Rosa as she laises between the caterers, the venue, AV, and all of us. The Lounge is also where we’ll gather for much-needed post-election refreshments at the end of Tuesday.
The Bigger Ambitions Room is where a lot of the Unplugged sessions will take place. This room will feature three separate stations:
Crossref Labs & Product where you can chat with Geoffrey, Esha, Jennifer L, Patrick, and Christine about your big ideas for us, and what we’re working on already.
Metadata discussions and annotations of the perfect record (previewed above) with Patricia, together with space to ideate around metadata principles.
Uses and users of metadata where Jennifer K will help us understand just how far Crossref metadata can reach, and who and what people are doing with it.
We cannot wait to show you what else we have planned :-)
For those of you not able to attend, recordings of the presentations will be made available on the event page directly soon after.