TL;DR… In a few weeks, publishers can upgrade to the new and improved Crossmark 2.0 including a mobile-friendly pop-up box and new button. We will provide a new snippet of code for your landing pages, and we’ll support version v1.5 until March 2017. We recently revealed a new look for the Crossmark box, bringing it up-to-date in design and offering extra space for more metadata.

While preprints have been a formal part of scholarly communications for decades in certain communities, they have not been fully adopted to date across most disciplines or systems. That may be changing very soon and quite rapidly, as new initiatives come thick and fast from researchers, funders, and publishers alike.

One of the cool things about working in Crossref Labs is that interesting experiments come up from time to time. One experiment, entitled “what happens if you plot DOI referral domains on a chart?” turned into the Chronograph project. In case you missed it, Chronograph analyses our DOI resolution logs and shows how many times each DOI link was resolved per month, and also how many times a given domain referred traffic to DOI links per day.

If you ever see me in the checkout line at some store do not ever get in the line I’m in. It is always the absolute slowest. Crossref’s metadata system has a sort of checkout line, when members send in their data they got processed essentially in a first come first served basis. It’s called the deposit queue.

Check out the events below where Crossref will attend or present in 2016. We have been busy over the past few months, and we have more planned for the rest of year.

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.