This is the first post in a series designed to showcase what we do in the Crossref R&D group, also known as Crossref Labs, which over the last few years has been strengthened, first with Dominika Tkaczyk and Esha Datta, last year with part of Paul Davis’s time, and more recently, yours truly. Research and development are, obviously, crucial for any organization that doesn’t want to stand still.

The Crossref Nominating Committee invites expressions of interest to join the Board of Directors of Crossref for the term starting in March 2024. The committee will gather responses from those interested and create the slate of candidates that our members will vote on in an election in September. Expressions of interest will be due Monday, June 26th, 2023.

We were delighted to engage with over 200 community members in our latest Community update calls. We aimed to present a diverse selection of highlights on our progress and discuss your questions about participating in the Research Nexus. For those who didn’t get a chance to join us, I’ll briefly summarise the content of the sessions here and I invite you to join the conversations on the Community Forum.

We have some exciting news for fans of big batches of metadata: this year’s public data file is now available. Like in years past, we’ve wrapped up all of our metadata records into a single download for those who want to get started using all Crossref metadata records.

In 2022, we flagged up some changes to Similarity Check, which were taking place in v2 of Turnitin’s iThenticate tool used by members participating in the service. We noted that further enhancements were planned, and want to highlight some changes that are coming very soon. These changes will affect functionality that is used by account administrators, and doesn’t affect the Similarity Reports themselves.

We’ve been spending some time speaking to the community about our role in research integrity, and particularly the integrity of the scholarly record. In this blog, we’ll be sharing what we’ve discovered, and what we’ve been up to in this area.

Do you want to help make research communications better in all corners of the globe? Come and join the world of nonprofit open infrastructure and be part of improving the creation and sharing of knowledge. We are recruiting for three new staff positions, all new roles and all fully remote and flexible. See below for more about our ethos and what it’s like working at Crossref.

The Publishers Learning And Community Exchange (PLACE) at theplace.discourse.group is a new online public forum created for organisations interested in adopting best practices in scholarly publishing. New scholarly publishers can access information from multiple agencies in one place, ask questions of the experts and join conversations with each other.

We believe in Persistent Identifiers. We believe in defence in depth. Today we’re excited to announce an upgrade to our data resilience strategy. Defence in depth means layers of security and resilience, and that means layers of backups. For some years now, our last line of defence has been a reliable, tried-and-tested technology. One that’s been around for a while. Yes, I’m talking about the humble 5¼ inch floppy disk.

Recording data citations supports data reuse and aids research integrity and reproducibility. Crossref makes it easy for our members to submit data citations to support the scholarly record. TL;DR Citations are essential/core metadata that all members should submit for all articles, conference proceedings, preprints, and books. Submitting data citations to Crossref has long been possible.

At Crossref, we care a lot about the completeness and quality of metadata. Gathering robust metadata from across the global network of scholarly communication is essential for effective co-creation of the research nexus and making the inner workings of academia traceable and transparent. We invest time in community initiatives such as Metadata 20/20 and Better Together webinars.