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 organization 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 organizations who joined through one of the eight sponsors we currently have in the country.

This is a long overdue followup to 2016’s “URLs and DOIs: a complicated relationship”. Like that post, this accompanies my talk at PIDapalooza, the festival of open persistent identifiers). I don’t think I need to give a spoiler warning when I tell you that it’s still complicated.

Hi, Crossref blog-readers. I’m Shayn, from Crossref’s support team. I’ve been fielding member questions about how to effectively deposit metadata and register content (among other things) for the past three years. In this post, I’ll take you through some of the improvements that Metadata Manager provides to those who currently use the Web Deposit form.

UPDATE, 12 December 2022 Due to the scheduled sunsetting of Metadata Manager, this title transfer process has been deprecated.

Running a smooth event is always the goal, but not always the case! No matter how well managed an event is, there is always a chance that things will not go according to plan. And so it was with LIVE18. For the first day we were without the tablecloths we had ordered, which actually gave the room quite a nice, but unintentional, ‘rustic’ look. When they finally did arrive the following day, we realized we preferred the rustic look!

In my previous blog post, Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match, I compared four approaches for reference matching. The comparison was done using a dataset composed of automatically-generated reference strings. Now it’s time for the matching algorithms to face the real enemy: the unstructured reference strings deposited with Crossref by some members. Are the matching algorithms ready for this challenge?

As the end of the year approaches it’s useful to look back and reflect on what we’ve achieved over the last 12 months—a lot! To be honest, there were some things we didn’t get done—or didn’t make as much progress with as we hoped—but that happens when you have an ambitious agenda.

In its July 2018 meeting, the Crossref Board voted unanimously to approve and introduce a new set of membership terms. At the same meeting, the board also voted to change the description of membership eligibility in our Bylaws, officially broadening our remit beyond publishers, in line with current practice and positioning us for future growth. Tl;dr It’s a very good thing to have clearer terms;

Good governance is important and something that Crossref thinks about regularly so the board frequently discusses the topic, and this year even more so. At the November 2017 meeting there was a motion passed to create an ad-hoc Governance Committee to develop a set of governance-related questions/recommendations.