Test out the early preview of Event Data while we continue to develop it. Share your thoughts. And be warned: we may break a few eggs from time to time! Want to discover which research works are being shared, liked and commented on? What about the number of times a scholarly item is referenced? Starting today, you can whet your appetite with an early preview of the forthcoming Crossref Event Data service.

As of this week, there are 80,000,000 scholarly items registered with Crossref! By the way, we update these interesting Crossref stats regularly and you can search the metadata.

It was with great sadness and shock that I learned that Dr Norman Paskin had passed away unexpectedly on the 27th March. This is a big loss to the DOI, Crossref and digital information communities.

Back in 2014, Geoffrey Bilder blogged about the kick-off of an initiative between Crossref and Wikimedia to better integrate scholarly literature into the world’s largest knowledge space, Wikipedia. Since then, Crossref has been working to coordinate activities with Wikimedia: Joe Wass has worked with them to create a live stream of content being cited in Wikipedia;

I’m a co-founder with rOpenSci, a non-profit that focuses on making software to facilitate reproducible and open science. Back in 2013 we started to make an R client working with various Crossref web services. I was lucky enough to attend last year’s Crossref annual meeting in Boston, and gave one talk on details of the programmatic clients, and another higher level talk on text mining and use of metadata for research.

TL;DR: We will proceed with implementing the proposed support for registering content before online availability. Adopting the workflow will be optional and will involve no extra fees. Background At the end of January, Crossref issued a “request for community comment” on a proposed new process to support the registration of content including DOIs before online availability.

What happens to a research work outside of the formal literature? That’s what Event Data will aim to answer when the service launches later this year. Following the successful DOI Event Tracker pilot in Spring 2014, development has been underway to build our new service, newly re-named Crossref Event Data.

We’re reviving the Books Interest Group, and inviting new members! After a hiatus, Crossref’s Books Interest Group is back.  We’re excited to announce that Emily Ayubi of the American Psychological Association has agreed to chair the group. In reviving the group, our intention is to create opportunities to talk about issues that are important to scholarly book publishers.

Crossref is proposing a process to support the registration of content—including DOIs and other metadata—prior to that content being made available, or published, online. We’ve drafted a paper providing background on the reasons we want to support this and highlighting the use cases.

We will shortly be adding a new feature to Crossmark. In a section called “Clinical Trials” we will be using new metadata fields to link together all of the publications we know about that reference a particular clinical trial. Most medical journals make clinical trial registration a prerequisite for publication.

In the 2015 Crossref Annual Meeting, I introduced a metaphor for the work that we do at Crossref. I re-present it here for broader discussion as this narrative continues to play a guiding role in the development of products and services this year. Metadata enable connections At Crossref, we make research outputs easy to find, cite, link, and assess through DOIs.