2020 hasn’t been quite what any of us had imagined. The pandemic has meant big adjustments in terms of working; challenges for parents balancing childcare and professional lives; anxieties and tensions we never had before; the strain of potentially being away from co-workers, friends, and family for a prolonged period of time. Many have suffered job losses and around the world, many have sadly lost their lives to the virus.
English version –– Información en español –– Version Française
The Crossref Nominating Committee is inviting expressions of interest to join the Board of Directors of Crossref for the term starting in 2021. 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 19, 2020.
The role of the board at Crossref is to provide strategic and financial oversight of the organisation, as well as guidance to the Executive Director and the staff leadership team, with the key responsibilities being:
To help better support the discovery, sale and analysis of books, Jennifer Kemp from Crossref and Mike Taylor from Digital Science, present seven reasons why publishers should collect chapter-level metadata.
Book publishers should have been in the best possible position to take advantage of the movement of scholarly publishing to the internet. After all, they have behind them an extraordinary legacy of creating and distributing data about books: the metadata that supports discovery, sales and analysis.
Many organisations are doing what they can to aid in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Crossref members can make it easier for researchers to identify, locate, and access content for text mining. In order to do this, members must include elements in their metadata that:
Make sure the Crossref metadata for all of your open access content includes:
A lot of people have been using our public, open APIs to collect data that might be related to COVID-19. This is great and we encourage it. We also want to make it easier. To that end we have made a free data file of the public elements from Crossref’s 112.5 million metadata records.
The file (65GB, in JSON format) is available via Academic Torrents here: https://doi-org.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/10.13003/83B2GP
It is important to note that Crossref metadata is always openly available. The difference here is that we’ve done the time-saving work of putting all of the records registered through March 2020 into one file for download.
Update: Deadline extended to 23:59 (UTC) 13th March 2020.
Distributed Usage Logging (DUL) allows publishers to capture traditional usage activity related to their content that happens on sites other than their own so they can provide reports of “total usage”, for example to subscribing institutions, regardless of where that usage happens.
On January 19th, 2000 a new not-for-profit organisation was registered in New York State. It was called Publishers International Linking Association, Inc but was more commonly referred to as “CrossRef”. This means that Crossref will be 20 years old on January 19th, 2020 so I wanted to mark the occasion with a short post. We are planning more ways to mark our 20th anniversary later this year so keep a lookout.
English version –– Información en español
In this post, Arley Soto shares some experiences about his work as a Crossref ambassador in Latin America.
When I joined as a volunteer Crossref ambassador in 2018, I never imagined that in less than two years, I would have the opportunity to travel to three Latin American cities, visit Toronto, organize the first Crossref LIVE in Spanish and hold webinars in Spanish about Crossref’s services. After almost two years of continuous learning, I think it is worth sharing my experience with the Crossref community for a better understanding of the ambassadors’ role in Latin America and to inspire ambassadors from other parts of the world to write and post their experiences.
I’m happy to announce that Lucy Ofiesh has joined Crossref as our new Director of Finance and Operations. Lucy has experience supporting the sustainability and governance of not-for-profit organisations having held roles such as Executive Vice President of the Brooklyn Children’s Museum and for the last few years as Chief Operating Officer at Center for Open Science, a Crossref member.
Crossref strives for balance. Different people have always wanted different things from us and, since our founding, we have brought together diverse organisations to have discussions—sometimes contentious—to agree on how to help make scholarly communications better. Being inclusive can mean slow progress, but we’ve been able to advance by being flexible, fair, and forward-thinking.
We have been helped by the fact that Crossref’s founding organisations defined a clear purpose in our original certificate of incorporation, which reads:
