Thank you to everyone who responded with feedback on the Op Cit proposal. This post clarifies, defends, and amends the original proposal in light of the responses that have been sent. We have endeavoured to respond to every point that was raised, either here or in the document comments themselves.
We strongly prefer for this to be developed in collaboration with CLOCKSS, LOCKSS, and/or Portico, i.e. through established preservation services that already have existing arrangements in place, are properly funded, and understand the problem space.
I’m pleased to share the 2023 board election slate. Crossref’s Nominating Committee received 87 submissions from members worldwide to fill seven open board seats.
We maintain a balance of eight large member seats and eight small member seats. A member’s size is determined based on the membership fee tier they pay. We look at how our total revenue is generated across the membership tiers and split it down the middle. Like last year, about half of our revenue came from members in the tiers $0 - $1,650, and the other half came from members in tiers $3,900 - $50,000.
https://0-doi-org.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/10.13003/c23rw1d9
Crossref acquires Retraction Watch data and opens it for the scientific community Agreement to combine and publicly distribute data about tens of thousands of retracted research papers, and grow the service together
12th September 2023 —– The Center for Scientific Integrity, the organisation behind the Retraction Watch blog and database, and Crossref, the global infrastructure underpinning research communications, both not-for-profits, announced today that the Retraction Watch database has been acquired by Crossref and made a public resource.
Today, we are announcing a long-term plan to deprecate the Open Funder Registry. For some time, we have understood that there is significant overlap between the Funder Registry and the Research Organization Registry (ROR), and funders and publishers have been asking us whether they should use Funder IDs or ROR IDs to identify funders. It has therefore become clear that merging the two registries will make workflows more efficient and less confusing for all concerned.
Our friend and colleague Christine Hone (née Buske) passed away in May from a short but brutal illness. Here is our attempt at ‘some words’, which we wrote for her funeral book and are posting here with her husband Dave’s permission.
We are devastated to lose Christine as a colleague and friend. It’s hard to put into words the effect she had on our small organization in such a short time, and how much we’re already missing her. But here it goes.
It was 2015 when some of us first met Chris, and we immediately saw how much of an asset she could be to our organization. She was very active in the community and well-known in many academic and publishing circles around the world. And she had an enviable combination of technical skills, a scientific mind, and a natural ability to engage people.
We tried to recruit her back then but she was in demand by others and it wasn’t until early 2018 that we succeeded. We finally got her! She became the Product Manager for a very advanced and complex system but she took to it perfectly, with real excitement and a complete understanding of how we (and therefore she) could help the research community all over the world see and make connections.
Christine’s official Crossref headshot 😊
With colleagues spread around the world, she joined an organization that had exciting opportunities and its share of challenges. Chris engaged with all of this head-on. She handled a constant stream of queries from people spread across time zones, whilst at the same time getting to grips with a service that was difficult to pin down. She balanced these tasks which were at very opposite ends of the spectrum. She added so much and with such energy and intelligence to everything she got involved in, always bringing human attention and creativity.
Chris was also on the winning team at 2018’s UKSG quiz!
Ed, Amanda, and Chris: the Crossref contingent of the winning quiz team
In her talk at the 5:AM altmetrics conference she brought together technical detail, big-picture ideas, and her own particular passion. Her opening words were “My name is Christine and I’m a recovering fish scientist”. Never afraid to bring her personal brand of humour into the workplace, her opening slide was a photograph of her covered in rats. That presentation was the first time that much of the audience really understood our service. Having cracked the messaging for us, she was due to give the same talk at our annual meeting in Toronto a few months later…
Chris’s opening slide at her 5:AM talk
Chris giving her now legendary talk at 5:AM on Event Data
Many of us were in Toronto for that meeting; it was two weeks after we’d heard the news of her diagnosis. Some of us were able to visit her in the hospital where she told us of her and Dave’s decision to bring forward their wedding plans. It was a bittersweet announcement but, clearly, they adored each other and were determined to be happy together despite the challenging times ahead.
Over the last few months, even when she had little energy to spare, Chris popped in (virtually) to chat and update us, share pictures and, selflessly, to see how we were doing. Even people who never met or worked closely with her started to follow her vlog and exchange notes and news directly.
Always checking in with us, an update from Chris shortly before she passed
We have all been rocked by the news and there is a lot of sadness and grief among the Crossref staff and community. Even in the last moments we shared together Chris always asked about how her projects were going. Her passion for her products was a big part of what animated her when she first joined. Throughout her late-stage illness, this remained constant. She yearned to return to work. This zeal will forever be an inspiration to us all at Crossref.
