It seems like ages ago, particularly given recent events, but we had our first public request for feedback on proposed schema updates in December and January. The feedback we received indicated two big things: we’re on the right track, and you want us to go further. This update has some significant but important changes to contributors, but is otherwise a fairly moderate update.

TL;DR: We no longer charge fees for members to participate in Crossmark, and we encourage all our members to register metadata about corrections and retractions - even if you can’t yet add the Crossmark button and pop-up box to your landing pages or PDFs. – Research doesn’t stand still; even after publication, articles can be updated with supplementary data or corrections.

Publisher metadata is one side of the story surrounding research outputs, but conversations, connections and activities that build further around scholarly research, takes place all over the web. We built Event Data to capture, record and make available these ‘Events’ –– providing open, transparent, and traceable information about the provenance and context of every Event. Events are comments, links, shares, bookmarks, references, etc.

At Crossref, we’re committed to providing a simple, usable, efficient and scalable web-based tool for registering content by manually making deposits of, and updates to, metadata records. Last year we launched Metadata Manager in beta for journal deposits to help us explore this further. Since then, many members have used the tool and helped us better understand their needs.

Detective Matcher stopped abruptly behind the corner of a short building, praying that his loud heartbeat doesn’t give up his presence. This missing DOI case was unlike any other before, keeping him awake for many seconds already.

Update: Deadline extended to 23:59 (UTC) 13th March 2020. Distributed Usage Logging (DUL) allows publishers to capture traditional usage activity related to their content that happens on sites other than their own so they can provide reports of “total usage”, for example to subscribing institutions, regardless of where that usage happens.

Our paper, Crossref: the sustainable source of community-owned scholarly metadata, was recently published in Quantitative Science Studies (MIT Press). The paper describes the scholarly metadata collected and made available by Crossref, as well as its importance in the scholarly research ecosystem.

Where does the time go… In my blog post on January 14th about Crossref’s 20th anniversary I said, “The one constant in Crossref’s 20 years has been change”. It’s true that there has been constant change, but there has been another constant at Crossref –– me (and DOIs, to be fair). I started as Crossref’s first employee and Executive Director on February 1st, 2000, so I just marked my 20th anniversary with the organisation.

Over the past few years, I’ve been really interested in seeing the breadth of uses that the research community is finding for the Crossref REST API. When we ran Crossref LIVE Kyiv in March 2019, Serhii Nazarovets joined us to present his plans for the Open Ukrainian Citation Index, an initiative he explains below. But first an introduction to Serhii and his colleague Tetiana Borysova.

It seems like only yesterday… On January 19th, 2000 a new not-for-profit organisation was registered in New York State. It was called Publishers International Linking Association, Inc but was more commonly referred to as “CrossRef”. This means that Crossref will be 20 years old on January 19th, 2020 so I wanted to mark the occasion with a short post. We are planning more ways to mark our 20th anniversary later this year so keep a lookout.

It’s been a year since Metadata Manager was first launched in Beta.  We’ve received a lot of helpful feedback from many Crossref members who made the switch from Web Deposit Form to Metadata Manager for their journal article registrations. The most common use for Metadata Manager is to register new DOIs for newly published articles. For the most part, this is a one-time process.  You enter the metadata, register your DOI, and success!