TL;DR Crossref discourages our members from using DOI-like strings or fake DOIs.

Rallying the community is a key Crossref role. Sometimes this means collaborating on new initiatives but it is also an ongoing process, a cornerstone of our outreach efforts. Part of rallying the community is bringing people together, literally, in a series of outreach days around the globe. It means we encourage dialog with us and among members and non-publisher affiliates.

The role of preprints Crossref provides infrastructure services and therefore we support scholarly communications as it evolves over time.

We now have linked clinical trials deposits coming in from five publishers: BioMedCentral, BMJ, Elsevier, National Institute for Health Research and PLOS. It’s still a relatively small pool of metadata - around 4000 DOIs with associated clinical trial numbers - but we’re delighted to see that “threads” of publications are already starting to form.

Known unknowns If you follow this blog, you are going to notice a theme over the coming months- Crossref supports the deposit and distribution of a lot more kinds of metadata than people usually realise.

The act of registering a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) for scholarly content is sometimes conflated with the notion of conferring a seal of approval or other mark of good quality upon an item of content.  This is a fundamental misunderstanding. A DOI is a tool, not a badge of honor.

Last week a bunch of Crossref’s staff traveled to the 2016 Society for Scholarly Publishing Annual Meeting in Vancouver, BC.  After we returned en masse, all nine of us put our heads together to share some of our personal memories of the event.

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As part of our Event Data work we’ve been investigating where DOI resolutions come from. A resolution could be someone clicking a DOI hyperlink, or a search engine spider gathering data or a publisher’s system performing its duties. Our server logs tell us every time a DOI was resolved and, if it was by someone using a web browser, which website they were on when they clicked the DOI. This is called a referral.

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TL;DR By August 2016, Crossref will enable its members to assign Crossref DOIs to preprints. Preprint DOIs will be assigned by the Crossref member responsible for the preprint and that DOI will be different from the DOI assigned by the publisher to the accepted manuscript and version of record.