Research data is growing exponentially and making all of this information easily accessible to researchers, publishers, and research institutions can surely be a daunting task. Crossref is an organization that aims to make scholarly communications better. They offer a number of services related to research metadata from various content types such as journal articles, preprints, books, and datasets.<\/p>\n
As part of our interview series on Connecting Scholarly Publishing Experts and Researchers, we had the opportunity to speak with the Crossref team.<\/p>\n
Could you give our readers a brief idea about Crossref?<\/em><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
We are a not-for-profit organization that helps to put scholarly content in context, however, we are much more than that\u2014we are a sagacious configuration of staff, board, working groups, and committees as well as a broad range of collaborators, users, and supporters in the wider scholarly communications community. Everything we do at Crossref is designed to put research outputs in context so that the content our members publish can be found, cited, used, assessed, and re-used.<\/p>\n
What are the primary areas of focus for Crossref in 2018?<\/em><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Our focus for the coming year revolves around four key areas: improving metadata, expanding to help new constituencies, simplifying and enriching our services, and collaborating where we can with like-minded organizations. Everything we are planning for the coming year (and beyond) fits into one of these four strategic priorities. For example, we\u2019ll be looking at developing a persistent identifier (PID) for research grants and related activities as well as a central PID for organizations. We\u2019re also introducing dashboards where our members can see how they\u2019re doing in terms of metadata completeness, and overhauling our administration system so members can see their deposit queue and the status of content registration.<\/p>\n
What are some of the recent achievements at Crossref?<\/em><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The year 2017 was a great year for us\u2014we were able to achieve a number of major milestones, such as the Beta launch of our new and exciting service Event Data<\/a>. In September, we were a big part of the collaborative launch of Metadata 2020<\/a>, which aims to rally and support the community around the critical issue of sharing richer metadata for research communications. In November, we introduced a new service called Metadata Plus<\/a>, which ensures our APIs continue to have genuine utility, and that platforms and tools like the\u00a0library, search, analytics, and other systems can leverage our metadata to increase their offerings for their users, and the discoverability of members\u2019 content.<\/p>\n
We are also very proud to report a record-breaking 1,939 new members in 2017\u2014with the highest number of new members joining from Indonesia, Brazil, Japan, Turkey, and Russia.<\/p>\n
Could you tell us some of the challenges faced by the Crossref team?<\/em><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Our ever-present challenge is to continually find effective ways to communicate the wider story around the importance of open infrastructure<\/a> and metadata\u2014especially as our member base becomes more and more global. We have a strong Outreach team based across the US and the UK that very actively go out and speak at what we call Crossref LIVE locals\u2014regional events that are local for the attendees. These events provide a much-needed face-to-face platform for us to share information with the research community on how to enrich their metadata deposits (and why they should), as well as covering the services Crossref offers that could help to facilitate this. Earlier this year, we also launched an Ambassador Program<\/a> which will go a long way in helping us reach more members around the globe.<\/p>\n
One specific recent challenge\u2014within the context of obtaining richer metadata\u2014has been conveying the options for members in how references are distributed through our services. Around one-third of our members’ deposit reference lists from their journal articles, usually as part of their participation in our Cited-by <\/a>service. Historically, references were not included in all our metadata delivery services and were subject to case-by-case opt-outs<\/a>. However, in July 2017, the Crossref board voted to update the options for reference distribution<\/a>. Members can choose for their references to be \u201cpublic\u201d, \u201climited\u201d or \u201cclosed\u201d with the default being \u201climited\u201d (only available to Metadata Plus users) and case-by-case opt-outs are not allowed. Members can inform us to set their references to \u2018open\u2019 and, while many have<\/a>, there are still some publishers unaware of the options. References set to \u201copen\u201d are available through all our Metadata Delivery<\/a> services, including the REST API<\/a> and bulk data dumps, without restriction, to any interested party, an important contribution to the research endeavour as a whole.<\/p>\n
Could you share some details on how Crossref is making citations more open through the \u201cInitiative for Open Citations\u201d? <\/em><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Crossref is not affiliated with I4OC but they are a Metadata Plus user and can get references from us that are set to \u201copen\u201d and \u201climited\u201d. I4OC was set up by consumers of Crossref metadata and some publishers who are Crossref members to encourage more members to set their references to \u201copen\u201d to better benefit scholarly research and communications. We\u2019re happy to hear from any member who wants to set their references to \u201copen\u201d but it\u2019s a decision for each member to make – Crossref is neutral.<\/p>\n
What is a DOI? How does it help authors?<\/em><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
A Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is an identifier system that provides unique alpha-numeric identifiers that can be turned into\u2014and be used as\u2014a URL. A DOI is applied to a particular piece of intellectual property, usually in an online environment. Unlike a URL, however, a DOI specifies the content <\/em>of an online object, not the location, and is,\u00a0therefore, a “persistent” identifier, as it remains associated with the object irrespective of changes in the object’s web address. Crossref is just one of eleven members of the DOI Foundation<\/a> and one of two worldwide ones (DataCite<\/a> is the other with whom we work closely).<\/p>\n
Simply put, a DOI can help an author’s work become discoverable by uniquely identifying it, thereby providing a way to link to it long-term\u2014so that it can be found, cited, shared, linked to, and ultimately used by others.<\/p>\n
How is Crossref making peer reviews more citable and discoverable?<\/em><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Publishers have been registering peer reviews with us for a while but historically these were embedded within other content such as an article, a dataset, or a component. To enable peer reviews to be deposited as a separate content type we extended our infrastructure to include metadata from the whole peer review<\/a> history\u2014referee reports, decision letters, author responses, community comments\u2014and across all review rounds. In October last year, we announced that we\u2019re fully open for peer review deposits<\/a> and as of the end of June 2018, we have around 12,000 registered items of peer review content.<\/p>\n
What benefits does the Crossmark service offer to authors and journals?<\/em><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Crossmark allows publishers to present \u201ctrust signals\u201d to readers in a consistent way, so they can show the rigor that went into the work (and any additional information they choose). Crucially, it\u2019s a way to alert readers (even of saved PDFs years later) if there has been an update or a retraction. This is science doing its job of being self-correcting, so it is something all journals see as a crucial part of their job. Additionally, this update\/correction\/retraction information is available through our open APIs to be displayed on third-party tools like databases and reference manager systems.<\/p>\n
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