I was invited recently to present parliamentary evidence to the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee on the subject of Research Integrity. For those not familiar with the arcane workings of the British Parliamentary system, a Select Committee is essentially the place where governments, and government bodies, are held to account. So it was refreshing to be invited to a hearing that wasn’t about Brexit.

Hello there. I’m Amanda Bartell, and I joined the Crossref team in mid-October as the new Head of Member Experience. My new Member Experience team will be responsible for metadata users as well as members, onboarding new accounts, supporting existing ones, and making sure that everyone can make the most of Crossref services - an an easy and efficient way.

Crossref’s Open Funder Registry (neé FundRef) now includes over 15 thousand entries. Crossref has over 2 million metadata records that include funding information - 1.7 million of which include an Open Funder Identifier.

Earlier this year we sent out a short survey inviting members to rate our performance. We asked what you think we do well, what we don’t do so well, and one thing we could do to improve our rating. We were delighted to receive 313 responses and relieved that 93% of those were positive (phew!). It was very useful to hear your thoughts and to get such a variety of comments covering Product, Outreach, Marketing and Member Experience.

Following on from our LIVE Annual Meeting in Singapore, my colleague, Susan Collins, and I held a local LIVE event in Yogyakarta thanks to support from Universitas Ahmad Dahlan (UAD), Universitas Muhammadiyah Sidoarjo and one of Crossref’s new Sponsoring Affiliates, Relawan Jurnal Indonesia.

PIDs’R’Us and if they’re you, too, please join us for the second PIDapalooza, in Girona, Spain on January 23-24, for a two-day celebration of persistent identifiers. Together, we will achieve the incredible - make a meeting about persistent identifiers and networked research fun!

Continuing our blog series highlighting the uses of Crossref metadata, we talked to Sara Girard and Howard Ratner at CHORUS about the work they’re doing, and how they’re using our REST API as part of their workflow. Introducing CHORUS CHORUS (www.chorusaccess.org) is an innovative non-profit organisation that supports funders, publishers, authors and institutions to deliver public access to articles reporting on funded research.

Researchers are adopting new tools that create consistency and shareability in their experimental methods. Increasingly, these are viewed as key components in driving reproducibility and replicability. They provide transparency in reporting key methodological and analytical information.

Crossref Event Data and the importance of understanding what lies beneath the data. Some things in life are better left a mystery. There is an argument for opaqueness when the act of full disclosure only limits your level of enjoyment: in my case, I need a complete lack of transparency to enjoy both chicken nuggets and David Lynch films. And that works for me. But metrics are not nuggets.

Introducing our new blog series Meet the members; where we talk to some of our members and find out a little bit more about them, ask them to share how they use our services, and discuss what their plans for the future are. To start the series we talk to Liam Finnis of Oxfam. Can you tell us a little bit about Oxfam?

About 13-20 billion researcher-hours were spent in 2015 doing peer reviews. What valuable work! Let’s get more mileage out of these labors and make these expert discussions citable, persistent, and linked up to the scholarly record. As we previously shared during Peer Review week, Crossref is lauintroducing support for a new record type to support the registration of peer reviews. We’re one step closer to changing that.