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The rebranding of Crossref was top priority when I joined in May in a new role called “Director of Member & Community Outreach”. Since then I’ve been working to understand the array of services, attributes, and audiences we have developed; to answer the questions “What do we do, for whom, and why?”

As Crossref prepares to celebrate turning fifteen at our annual meeting next week, I am thrilled to present our new brand identity with key messages and logo. And along with “thrilled” you may also detect “nervous excitement”.

Curious about who will be speaking at Crossref’s Annual Meeting this year? We have a flock of scholarly communications talent gathering at the Taj Hotel in Boston from November 17-18, 2015.  In addition to our line-up of keynote speeches and technical workshops, we will be celebrating Crossref’s 15^th Anniversary with a quindecennial fête on Wednesday evening, November 18^th. There’s still time to register, so please join us!  

Oktoberfest is in full swing and that makes me think that it’s almost Frankfurt Book Fair time again!

This year in addition to individual meetings we’ll have scheduled flash presentations on our booth, M91 in Hall 4.2. These short (10-minute) presentations are great for anyone wanting a quick intro to what Crossref is all about. Running on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday - at the following times each of those days:

The Taxonomies Interest Group would like to invite Crossref members to an informal drop-in at the Frankfurt Book Fair:

4-5pm on Wednesday 14th October at the TEMIS booth H76

We’d like to invite the scholarly publishing community to get together in Boston this November with the Crossref Annual Meeting as a rally point. This is the event we hold just once a year to get the whole team under one roof, host a lively discussion with the leading voices in scholarly communications, present technical workshops, and offer you the chance to get hands’ on with our latest metadata services. Our free two-day event takes place from November 17-18, 2015 in Boston, MA.

I was invited to speak at the Handle System Workshop which was run back to back with an IDF Open Meeting earlier this week in Brussels and hosted at the Office for Official Publications of the European Union. (Location was in the Charlemagne Building, at left in image, within the rather impressive meeting room Jean Durieux, at right.)

My talk (‘A Distributed Metadata Architecture‘) was focussed on how OpenHandle and XMP could be leveraged to manage dispersed media assets. (The OpenHandle work makes the Handle and DOI systems more readily acessible to applications.)

Just posted on Nascent a brief account of a presentation I gave recently on OTMI at BioNLP 2007. The post lists some of the feedback I received. We are very interested to get further comments so do feel free to contribute comments either directly to the post, privately to otmi@nature.com, or publicly to otmi-discuss@crossref.org. And then there’s always the OTMI wiki available for comment at http://opentextmining.org/.

It is important to note that OTMI is not a universal panacea but rather an attempt at bridging the gap between publisher and researcher. We are attempting to provide a framework to enable scholarly publishers to disclose full text for machine processing purposes without compromising their normal publishing obligations.

Apologies to blog yet another of my posts to Nascent, this time on Agile Descriptions - a talk I gave the week before last before the LC Future of Bibliographic Control WG. (Don’t worry - I shan’t be making it a habit of this.) But certain aspects of the talk (powerpoint is here) may be interesting to this readership, in particular the slides on microformats and how these are tentatively being deployed on Nature Network, and also a detailed anatomy of OTMI files.

February 5, 2007, Washington DC Crossref invited a number of people to attend an information gathering session on the topic of Author IDs. The purpose of the meeting was to determine:

• About whether there is an industry need for a central or federated contributor id registry;

• whether Crossref should have a role in creating such a registry;

• how to proceed in a way that builds upon existing systems and standards.

Peter Murray-Rust posts on the SPARC-OpenData mailing list about a Commons for Science Conference (Oct. 3/4 in DC). The meeting is invitation-only but the papers are online (see here) and there should be public reports. The meeting underlines the importance of Open Data. There’s a brief abstract below.