Blog

Ginny Hendricks

In 2015, Ginny Hendricks established the community and membership functions at Crossref to encompass community engagement & comms, member experience, technical support, and metadata strategy. In 2024 she developed the Program group as our CPO and incorporated product/program management within the group. Before joining Crossref, she ran ‘Ardent’ for a decade, where she consulted within scholarly communications for awareness and growth strategies, developed and launched online products, and built virtual global communities. In 2018 she founded the Metadata 20/20 collaboration to advocate for richer, connected, reusable, and open metadata, and she helps guide several open infrastructure initiatives such as ROR and POSI. She recently co-founded FORCE11’s Upstream community blog for all things open research, and she was an early contributor to the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Informationhttps://barcelona-declaration.org/

Read more about Ginny Hendricks on their team page.

A progress update and a renewed commitment to community

Looking back over 2024, we wanted to reflect on where we are in meeting our goals, and report on the progress and plans that affect you - our community of 21,000 organisational members as well as the vast number of research initiatives and scientific bodies that rely on Crossref metadata. In this post, we will give an update on our roadmap, including what is completed, underway, and up next, and a bit about what’s paused and why.

Metadata beyond discoverability

Metadata is one of the most important tools needed to communicate with each other about science and scholarship. It tells the story of research that travels throughout systems and subjects and even to future generations. We have metadata for organising and describing content, metadata for provenance and ownership information, and metadata is increasingly used as signals of trust. Following our panel discussion on the same subject at the ALPSP University Press Redux conference in May 2024, in this post we explore the idea that metadata, once considered important mostly for discoverability, is now a vital element used for evidence and the integrity of the scholarly record.

Update on the Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability research

We’re in year two of the Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability (RCFS) research. This report provides an update on progress to date, specifically on research we’ve conducted to better understand the impact of our fees and possible changes. Crossref is in a good financial position with our current fees, which haven’t increased in 20 years. This project is seeking to future-proof our fees by: Making fees more equitable Simplifying our complex fee schedule Rebalancing revenue sources In order to review all aspects of our fees, we’ve planned five projects to look into specific aspects of our current fees that may need to change to achieve the goals above.

Celebrating five years of Grant IDs: where are we with the Crossref Grant Linking System?

We’re happy to note that this month, we are marking five years since Crossref launched its Grant Linking System. The Grant Linking System (GLS) started life as a joint community effort to create ‘grant identifiers’ and support the needs of funders in the scholarly communications infrastructure. The system includes a funder-designed metadata schema and a unique link for each award which enables connections with millions of research outputs, better reporting on the research and outcomes of funding, and a contribution to open science infrastructure.

Rebalancing our REST API traffic

Since we first launched our REST API around 2013 as a Labs project, it has evolved well beyond a prototype into arguably Crossref’s most visible and valuable service. It is the result of 20,000 organisations around the world that have worked for many years to curate and share metadata about their various resources, from research grants to research articles and other component inputs and outputs of research. The REST API is relied on by a large part of the research information community and beyond, seeing around 1.

Seeking consultancy: understanding joining obstacles for non-member journals

Crossref is undertaking a large program, dubbed 'RCFS' (Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability) that will initially tackle five specific issues with our fees. We haven’t increased any of our fees in nearly two decades, and while we’re still okay financially and do not have a revenue growth goal, we do have inclusion and simplification goals. This report from Research Consulting helped to narrow down the five priority projects for 2024-2025 around these three core goals:

DOAJ and Crossref renew their partnership to support the least-resourced journals

Crossref and DOAJ share the aim to encourage the dissemination and use of scholarly research using online technologies and to work with and through regional and international networks, partners, and user communities for the achievement of their aims to build local institutional capacity and sustainability. Both organisations agreed to work together in 2021 in a variety of ways, but primarily to ‘encourage the dissemination and use of scholarly research using online technologies, and regional and international networks, partners and communities, helping to build local institutional capacity and sustainability around the world.

News: Crossref and Retraction Watch

https://0-doi-org.lib.rivier.edu/10.13003/c23rw1d9 Crossref acquires Retraction Watch data and opens it for the scientific community Agreement to combine and publicly distribute data about tens of thousands of retracted research papers, and grow the service together 12th September 2023 —– The Center for Scientific Integrity, the organisation behind the Retraction Watch blog and database, and Crossref, the global infrastructure underpinning research communications, both not-for-profits, announced today that the Retraction Watch database has been acquired by Crossref and made a public resource.

Open Funder Registry to transition into Research Organization Registry (ROR)

Today, we are announcing a long-term plan to deprecate the Open Funder Registry. For some time, we have understood that there is significant overlap between the Funder Registry and the Research Organization Registry (ROR), and funders and publishers have been asking us whether they should use Funder IDs or ROR IDs to identify funders. It has therefore become clear that merging the two registries will make workflows more efficient and less confusing for all concerned.

Open funding metadata through Crossref; a workshop to discuss challenges and improving workflows

Ten years on from the launch of the Open Funder Registry (OFR, formerly FundRef), there is renewed interest in the potential of openly available funding metadata through Crossref. And with that: calls to improve the quality and completeness of that data. Currently, about 25% of Crossref records contain some kind of funding information. Over the years, this figure has grown steadily. A number of recent publications have shown, however, that there is considerable variation in the extent to which publishers deposit these data to Crossref.