We talk so much about more and better metadata that a reasonable question might be: what is Crossref doing to help?

Join us for the first in our Perspectives blog series. In this series of blogs, we will be meeting different members of our diverse, global community at Crossref.

So here I am, apologizing again. Have I mentioned that I hate computers? We had a large data center outage. It lasted 17 hours. It meant that pretty much all Crossref services were unavailable - our main website, our content registration system, our reports, our APIs.

In collaboration with California Digital Library and DataCite, Crossref guides the operations of the Research Organisation Registry (ROR). ROR is community-driven and has an independent sustainability plan involving grants, donations, and in-kind support from our staff.

The ecosystem of scholarly metadata is filled with relationships between items of various types: a person authored a paper, a paper cites a book, a funder funded research. Those relationships are absolutely essential: an item without them is missing the most basic context about its structure, origin, and impact.

Background Perhaps, like us, you’ve noticed that it is not always easy to find information on who is on a journal’s editorial board and, when you do, it is often unclear when it was last updated.

Just over a year ago, Crossref announced that our board had adopted the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI). It was a well-timed announcement, as 2021 yet again showed just how dangerous it is for us to assume that the infrastructure systems we depend on for scholarly research will not disappear

Some context The Similarity Check Advisory Group met a number of times last year to discuss current and emerging originality issues with text-based content. During those meetings, the topic of image integrity was highlighted as an area of growing concern in scholarly communications, particularly in the life sciences.

TL;DR We inadvertently deleted data in our authentication sandbox that stored member credentials for our Test Admin Tool - test.crossref.org. We’re restoring credentials using our production data, but this will mean that some members have credentials that are out-of-sync. Please contact support@crossref.org if you have issues accessing test.crossref.org.

Earlier this year, Ginny posted an exciting update on Crossref’s progress with adopting ROR, the Research Organisation Registry for affiliations, announcing that we’d started the collection of ROR identifiers in our metadata input schema.

Event Data is our service to capture online mentions of Crossref records. We monitor data archives, Wikipedia, social media, blogs, news, and other sources.