This past year has been a captivating journey of immersion within the Crossref community, a mix of online interactions and meaningful in-person experiences. From the engaging Sustainability Research and Innovation Conference in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, to the impactful webinars conducted globally, this has been more than just a professional endeavour; it has been a personal exploration of collaboration, insights, and a shared commitment to pushing the boundaries of scholarly communication.
One of the challenges that we face in Labs and Research at Crossref is that, as we prototype various tools, we need the community to be able to test them. Often, this involves asking for deposit to a different endpoint or changing the way that a platform works to incorporate a prototype.
The problem is that our community is hugely varied in its technical capacity and level of ability when it comes to modifying their platform.
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.
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.