Whenever we send out our quarterly deposit invoices, we receive queries from members who have registered a lot of backlist content, but have been charged at the current year’s rate. As the invoices for the first quarter of 2019 have recently hit your inboxes, I thought I’d provide a timely reminder about this in case you spot this problem on your invoice.

Our Ambassador Program is now one year old, and we are thrilled at how the first 12 months have gone. In 2018 we welcomed 16 ambassadors to the team, based in Australia, Brazil, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, UAE, Ukraine, USA, and Venezuela.

In January, I wrote about how we’ve simplified the journal title transfer process using our new Metadata Manager tool. For those disposing publishers looking for an easy, do-it-yourself option for transferring ownership of your journal, I suggest you review that blog post.

As self-confessed PID nerds, we’re big fans of a persistent identifier. However, we’re also conscious that the uptake and use of PIDs isn’t a done deal, and there are things that challenge how broadly these are adopted by the community.

What has hundreds of heads, 91,000 affiliations, and roars like a lion? If you guessed the Research Organisation Registry community, you’d be absolutely right! Last month was a big and busy one for the ROR project team: we released a working API and search interface for the registry, we held our first ROR community meeting, and we showcased the initial prototypes at PIDapalooza in Dublin.

We first announced plans to investigate identifiers for grants in 2017 and are almost ready to violate the first rule of grant identifiers which is “they probably should not be called grant identifiers”. Research support extends beyond monetary grants and awards, but our end goal is to make grants easy to cite, track, and identify, and ‘Grant ID’ resonates in a way other terms do not.

TL;DR About 11% of available references in records in our OAI-PMH & REST API don’t have DOIs when they should. We have deployed a fix, but it is running on billions of records, and so we don’t expect it to be complete until mid-April. Note that the Cited-by API that our members use appears to be unaffected by this problem.

Conflict, instability and economic conditions are just some of the factors driving new migration into Europe—and European policy makers are in dispute about how to manage and cope with the implications.

Nowadays we’re all trying to eat healthier, get fitter, be more mindful and stay in the now. You think you’re doing a good job — perhaps you’ve started a yoga class or got a book on mindfulness. And then, wham! Someone in your organisation casually mentions they’re planning a platform migration. I can sense the panic from here.

Hello. Isaac here again to talk about what you can tell just by looking at the prefix of a DOI. Also, as we get a lot of title transfers at this time of year, I thought I’d clarify the difference between a title transfer and a prefix transfer, and the impact of each. When you join Crossref, you are provided with a unique prefix, you then add suffixes of your choice to your prefix and this creates the DOIs for your content.

In December, Crossref’s Head of Metadata, Patricia Feeney and I headed to Mumbai for our first ever LIVE local event in India, held in collaboration with Editage. Crossref membership in India has escalated in recent years, with a fifth of its 500 members joining in 2017 alone. Around 40% of these new members are smaller organisations who joined through one of the eight sponsors we currently have in the country.