This blog post is from Lettie Conrad and Michelle Urberg, cross-posted from the The Scholarly Kitchen.
As sponsors of this project, we at Crossref are excited to see this work shared out.
The scholarly publishing community talks a LOT about metadata and the need for high-quality, interoperable, and machine-readable descriptors of the content we disseminate. However, as we’ve reflected on previously in the Kitchen, despite well-established information standards (e.g., persistent identifiers), our industry lacks a shared framework to measure the value and impact of the metadata we produce.
When Crossref began over 20 years ago, our members were primarily from the United States and Western Europe, but for several years our membership has been more global and diverse, growing to almost 18,000 organizations around the world, representing 148 countries.
As we continue to grow, finding ways to help organizations participate in Crossref is an important part of our mission and approach. Our goal of creating the Research Nexus—a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organizations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society—can only be achieved by ensuring that participation in Crossref is accessible to all.
In August 2022, the United States Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memo (PDF) on ensuring free, immediate, and equitable access to federally funded research (a.k.a. the “Nelson memo”). Crossref is particularly interested in and relevant for the areas of this guidance that cover metadata and persistent identifiers—and the infrastructure and services that make them useful.
Funding bodies worldwide are increasingly involved in research infrastructure for dissemination and discovery.
Preprints have become an important tool for rapidly communicating and iterating on research outputs. There is now a range of preprint servers, some subject-specific, some based on a particular geographical area, and others linked to publishers or individual journals in addition to generalist platforms. In 2016 the Crossref schema started to support preprints and since then the number of metadata records has grown to around 16,000 new preprint DOIs per month.
Watch for two important emails on September 30th – one with a voting link and material, and one with your username and password.
Running Crossref well is a key part of our mission. It’s important that we be as neutral and fair as possible, and we are always striving for that balance. One of our stated principles is “One member, one vote”. And each year we encourage each of our members-standing at over 6000 today-to participate in the election of new board members.
It is hard to believe that November 2nd will be Crossref’s 17th annual meeting and our 16th annual Board of Directors election. How time flies, and oh, how we have grown!
Crossref’s Truths, taken from our forthcoming new website.
I am hoping that we can rally the membership to participate in this important process!
Candidates will be elected at Crossref LIVE16 for three-year terms to fill five of the 16 Board seats whose terms expire this year. The slate of candidates was recommended by the Nominating Committee, which consisted of three Board members not up for re-election, and two Crossref members that are not on the Board.
This year, Jasper Simons, APA; Paul Peters, Hindawi; Jason Wilde, AIP; Chris Fell, Cambridge University Press; and Rebecca Lawrence, f1000 served on the Nominating Committee. The Committee met to discuss the process, criteria, and potential candidates, and put forward a slate which was required to be at least equal to the number of Board seats up for election. The slate may or may not consist of Board members up for re-election.
Crossref members are welcome to run as independent candidates, as long as they have ten member endorsements sent to lhart@crossref.org with the intent to run. We sent a notification of the process in advance (this year on August 26th), so any nominations could be included in the voting materials that will be sent via email on September 30th.
