Having joined the Crossref team merely a week previously, the mid-year community update on June 14th was a fantastic opportunity to learn about the Research Nexus vision. We explored its building blocks and practical implementation steps within our reach, and within our imagination of the future.
Read on (or watch the recording) for a whistlestop tour of everything – from what on Earth is Research Nexus, through to how it’s taking shape at Crossref, to how you are involved, and finally – to what concerns the community surrounding the vision and how we’re going to address that.
TL;DR A year ago, we announced that we were putting the “R” back in R&D. That was when Rachael Lammey joined the R&D team as the Head of Strategic Initiatives.
And now, with Rachael assuming the role of Product Director, I’m delighted to announce that Dominika Tkaczyk has agreed to take over Rachael’s role as the Head of Strategic Initiatives. Of course, you might already know her.
We will also immediately start recruiting for a new Principal R&D Developer to work with Esha and Dominika on the R&D team.
As a distributed, global, and community-led organisation, sharing information and listening to our members both online and in person has always been integral to what we do.
For many years Crossref has held both in-person and online meetings and events, which involved a fair amount of travel by our staff, board, and community. This changed drastically in March 2020, when we had to stop traveling and stop having in-person meetings and events.
The Crossref Nominating Committee is inviting expressions of interest to join the Board of Directors of Crossref for the term starting in March 2023. 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 24th, 2022.
About the our board elections The board is elected through the “one member, one vote” policy wherein every member organization of Crossref has a single vote to elect representatives to the Crossref board.
Content Registration allows members to register and update metadata via machine or human interfaces.
When you join Crossref as a member you are issued a DOI prefix. You combine this with a suffix of your choice to create a DOI, which becomes active once registered with Crossref. Content Registration allows members to register a DOI and deposit or update its associated metadata, via machine or human interfaces.
Benefits of content registration
Academic and professional research travels further if it’s linked to the millions of other published papers. Crossref members register content with us to let the world know it exists, instead of creating thousands of bilateral agreements.
Members send information called metadata to us. Metadata includes fields like dates, titles, authors, affiliations, funders, and online location. Each metadata record includes a persistent identifier called a digital object identifier (DOI) that stays with the work even if it moves websites. Though the DOI doesn’t change, its associated metadata is kept up-to-date by the owner of the record.
Richer metadata makes content useful and easier to find. Through Crossref, members are distributing their metadata downstream, making it available to numerous systems and organizations that together help credit and cite the work, report impact of funding, track outcomes and activity, and more.
Members maintain and update metadata long-term, telling us if content moves to a new website, and they include more information as time goes on. This means that there is a growing chance that content is found, cited, linked to, included in assessment, and used by other researchers.
Participation Reports give a clear picture for anyone to see the metadata Crossref has. See for yourself where the gaps are, and what our members could improve upon. Understand best practice through seeing what others are doing, and learn how to level-up.
This is Crossref infrastructure. You can’t see infrastructure, yet research—and researchers all over the world—rely on it.
To register content with Crossref, you need to be a member. You’ll use one of our content registration methods to give us metadata about your content. Note that you don’t send us the content itself - you create a metadata record that links persistently (via a persistent identifier) to the content on your site or hosting platform. Learn more about metadata, types of metadata, constructing your DOIs, and ways to register your content.
You should assign Crossref DOIs to and register content for anything that is likely to be cited in the scholarly literature.
What types of records can be registered with Crossref?
We are working to make our input schema more flexible so that almost any type of object can be registered and distributed openly through Crossref. At the moment, members tend to register the following:
Conference proceedings: information about a single conference and records for each conference paper/proceeding.
Datasets: includes database records or collections.
Dissertations: includes single dissertations and theses, but not collections.
Grants: includes both direct funding and other types of support such as the use of equipment and facilities.
Journals and articles: at the journal title and article level, and includes supplemental materials as components.
Peer reviews: any number of reviews, reports, or comments attached to any other work that has been registered with Crossref.
Pending publications: a temporary placeholder record with minimal metadata, often used for embargoed work where a DOI needs to be shared before the full content is made available online.
Preprints and posted content: includes preprints, eprints, working papers, reports, and other types of content that has been posted but not formally published.
You pay a one-time content registration fee for each content item you register with us. content registration fees are different for different types of content and sometimes include volume discounts for large batches or backfile material. You don’t pay to update an existing metadata record. It’s an obligation of membership that you maintain your metadata for the long term, including updating any URLs that change. In addition, we warmly encourage you to correct and add to your metadata, and there is no charge for redepositing (updating) existing metadata. Learn more about maintaining your metadata, and managing existing DOIs.
Your content registration fees are billed quarterly in arrears. This means you’ll usually receive a bill at the beginning of each quarter for the content you registered in the previous quarter. The only exception is if you’ve only registered a small number of DOIs.
