I’m here in Toronto and looking forward to a busy week. Maddy Watson and I are in town for the 4:AM Altmetrics Conference, as well as the altmetrics17 workshop and Hack-day. I’ll be speaking at each, and for those of you who aren’t able to make it, I’ve combined both presentations into a handy blog post, which follows on from my last one. But first, nothing beats a good demo. Take a look at our live stream.

About 1 year ago, Crossref, DataCite and ORCID [announced a joint initiative] (https://orcid.org/blog/2016/10/31/organization-identifier-project-way-forward) to launch and sustain an open, independent, non-profit organization identifier registry to facilitate the disambiguation of researcher affiliations.

Now in its second year, this “open festival of persistent identifiers” brings together people from all walks of life who have something to say about PIDs. If you work with them, develop with them, measure or manage them, let us know your PID adventures, pitfalls, and plans by submitting a talk by September 18. It’ll be in Girona, Spain, January 23-24, 2018.

Over the past few months we have been adding to the metadata and functionality of our REST API, Crossref’s public machine interface for the metadata of all 90 million+ registered content items. Much of the work focused on a review and upgrade of the API’s code and architecture in order to better support its rapidly growing usage. But we have also extended the types of metadata that the API can deliver.

A number of our members have asked if they can register their peer reviews with us. They believe that discussions around scholarly works should have DOIs and be citable to provide further context and provenance for researchers reading the article. To that end, we can announce some pertinent news as we enter Peer Review Week 2017 : Crossref infrastructure is soon to be extended to manage DOIs for peer reviews.

As part of our blog post series on the Crossref REST API, we talked to Silvio Peroni and David Shotton of OpenCitations (OC) about the work they’re doing, and how they’re using the Crossref REST API as part of their workflow. Introducing OpenCitations OpenCitations employs Semantic Web technologies to create an open repository of the citation data that publishers have made available.

Our annual meeting on 14th and 15th November, LIVE17 is shaping up nicely with an exciting line-up of respected speakers talking around the theme of “Metadata + Infrastructure + Relations = Context”, with each half day covering some element of the main theme.

Crossref is governed by a board of directors that meets in person three times a year in March, July and November.

First of all – hello! I’m Vanessa. I’m fairly new to Crossref, having just joined our outreach team a few weeks ago. I previously worked in International Development, enabling individuals and institutions in Africa, Asia and Latin America to access cutting edge scholarly research and knowledge, supporting national development and transforming lives.

Slate of 2017 board candidates announced, and it’s going to be exciting Crossref is always evolving and the board knows it must evolve with us so we can continue to provide the right kind of services and support for you, as members of the research community. This year two things happened for the first time: we used our updated bylaws see article VII, section 2 agreed by the board last year, to allow more candidates than available seats;

There’s a saying about oil, something along the lines of “you really don’t want to see how it’s made”. And whilst I’m reluctant to draw too many parallels between the petrochemical industry and scholarly publishing, there are some interesting comparisons to be drawn. Oil starts its life deep underground as an amorphous sticky substance.