Blog

The ancient Romans performed a purification rite (“lustration”) after taking a census every five years. The term “lustrum” designated not only the animal sacrifice (“suovetaurilia”) but was also applied to the period of time itself. At Crossref, we’re not exactly in the business of sacrificial rituals. But over the weekend I thought it would be fun to dive into the metadata and look at very high level changes during this period of time.

Bruce Rosenblum, CEO, Inera Incorporated talks about the work they are doing at Inera, and how they’re using our metadata as part of their workflow.

At the end of last year, Paul Peters—CEO of our member Hindawi—became the new Chair of the Crossref Board. The announcement was made in Singapore at our first LIVE Annual ever held in Asia. I caught up with Paul back in London, UK, where he answered a few questions about what he hopes to bring to the Board, and to the Crossref community as a whole.

What better way to start our program of LIVE locals in 2018 than with a trip to Japan? With the added advantage of it being Valentine’s Day, it seemed a good excuse to share our love of metadata with a group who feel the same way!

We work with a huge range of organizations in the scholarly communications world—publishers, libraries, universities, government agencies, funders, publishing service providers, and researcher services providers—and you each have different relationships with us.

Some of you are members who create and disseminate your own content, register it with us by depositing metadata, and help steer our future by voting in our annual board elections. Some of you don’t vote in our board elections but do play a vital role by registering content on members’ behalf.

Wellcome, in partnership with Crossref and several research funders including the NIH and the MRC, are looking to pilot an initiative in which new grants would be assigned an open, global and interoperable grant identifier. Robert Kiley (Open Research) and Nina Frentrop (Grants Operations) from the Wellcome explain the potential benefits this would deliver and how it might work.

Second in our Meet the members blog series is Lenny Teytelman, co-founder and CEO of protocols.io, who gives us a bit of insight into his background and why he started protocols.io, what the future plans for protocols.io are, and how they use and benefit from being a Crossref member.

More than 80% of the record breaking 1,939 new members we welcomed in 2017 were from non-English speaking countries, and as our member base grows in its diversity, so does the need for us to share information about Crossref and its services in languages appropriate to our changing audience.

We are delighted to report that last year Crossref welcomed a record-breaking 1,939 new members and, because our member base is growing so rapidly in both headcount and geography—with the highest number of new members joining from Asia—we thought it was a good time to reiterate what Crossref is all about, as well as show off a little about the things we are proud to have achieved in 2017.

Hello from sunny Girona! I’m heading to PIDapalooza, the Persistent Identifier festival, as it returns for its second year. It’s all about to kick off.

One of the themes this year is “bridging worlds”: how to bring together different communities and the identifiers they use. Something I really enjoyed about PIDapalooza last year was the variety of people who came. We heard about some “traditional” identifier systems (at least, it seems that way to us): DOIs for publications, DOIs for datasets, ORCIDs for researchers. But, gathered in Reykjavik, under dark Icelandic skies, I met oceanographic surveyors assigning DOIs to drilling equipment, heard stories of identifiers in Chinese milk production and consoled librarians trying navigate the identifier landscape.