Crossref is undertaking a large program, dubbed 'RCFS' (Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability) that will initially tackle five specific issues with our fees. We haven’t increased any of our fees in nearly two decades, and while we’re still okay financially and do not have a revenue growth goal, we do have inclusion and simplification goals.

The Crossref Nominating Committee is inviting expressions of interest to join the Board of Directors of Crossref for the term starting in January 2025. 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.

This past year has been a captivating journey of immersion within the Crossref community, a mix of online interactions and meaningful in-person experiences. From the engaging Sustainability Research and Innovation Conference in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, to the impactful webinars conducted globally, this has been more than just a professional endeavour;

One of the challenges that we face in Labs and Research at Crossref is that, as we prototype various tools, we need the community to be able to test them. Often, this involves asking for deposit to a different endpoint or changing the way that a platform works to incorporate a prototype. The problem is that our community is hugely varied in its technical capacity and level of ability when it comes to modifying their platform.

When each line of code is written it is surrounded by a sea of context: who in the community this is for, what problem we’re trying to solve, what technical assumptions we’re making, what we already tried but didn’t work, how much coffee we’ve had today. All of these have an effect on the software we write. By the time the next person looks at that code, some of that context will have evaporated.

It turns out that one of the things that is really difficult at Crossref is checking whether a set of Crossref credentials has permission to act on a specific DOI prefix. This is the result of many legacy systems storing various mappings in various different software components, from our Content System through to our CRM. To this end, I wrote a basic application, credcheck, that will allow you to test a Crossref credential against an API.

Subject classifications have been available via the REST API for many years but have not been complete or reliable from the start and will soon be deprecated. dfdfd The subject metadata element was born out of a Labs experiment intended to enrich the metadata returned via Crossref Metadata Search with All Subject Journal Classification codes from Scopus.

Crossref and DOAJ share the aim to encourage the dissemination and use of scholarly research using online technologies and to work with and through regional and international networks, partners, and user communities for the achievement of their aims to build local institutional capacity and sustainability.

Crossref holds metadata for approximately 150 million scholarly artifacts. These range from peer reviewed journal articles through to scholarly books through to scientific blog posts.

We’re equally sad and proud to report that Rachael Lammey is moving on in her career to the very lucky team at 67Bricks. Her last day at Crossref is today, Friday 16th February. Which is too soon for us, but very exciting for her! It’s hard to overstate Rachael’s impact on Crossref’s growth and success in her 12 years here.

Great news to share: our Executive Director, Ed Pentz, has been selected as the 2024 recipient of the Miles Conrad Award from the USA’s National Information Standards Organization (NISO). The award is testament to an individual’s lifetime contribution to the information community, and we couldn’t be more delighted that Ed was voted to be this year’s well-deserved recipient.