Our colleague and friend, Kirsty Meddings, passed away peacefully on 10th December at home with her family, after a sudden and aggressive cancer. She was a huge part of Crossref, our culture, and our lives for the last twelve years.
Kirsty Meddings is a name that almost everyone in scholarly publishing knows; she was part of a generation of Oxford women in publishing technology who have progressed through the industry, adapted to its changes, spotted new opportunities, and supported each other throughout.
Crossref has supported depositing metadata for preprints since 2016 and peer reviews since 2018. Now we are putting the two together, in fact we will permit peer reviews to be registered for any content type.
2020 has been a very challenging year, and we can all agree that everyone needs a break. Crossref will be providing very limited technical and membership support from 21st December to 3rd January to allow our staff to rest and recharge. We’ll be back on January 4th raring to answer your questions. Amanda explains more about why we made this decision.
On November 11th 2020, the Crossref Board voted to adopt the “Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure” (POSI). POSI is a list of sixteen commitments that will now guide the board, staff, and Crossref’s development as an organisation into the future. It is an important public statement to make in Crossref’s twentieth anniversary year. Crossref has followed principles since its founding, and meets most of the POSI, but publicly committing to a codified and measurable set of principles is a big step. If 2019 was a reflective turning point, and mid-2020 was about Crossref committing to open scholarly infrastructure and collaboration, this is now announcing a very deliberate path. And we’re just a little bit giddy about it.
You can now easily search for publications and add them to your ORCID profile in the new beta of Crossref Metadata Search (CRMDS). The user interface is pretty self-explanatory, but if you want to read about it before trying it, here is a summary of how it works.
When you go to to CRMDS, you will see that there is now a small ORCID sign-in button on the top right-hand side of the screen.
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Clicking on this button allows you to connect CRMDS to your ORCID profile and authorises CRMDS to add publications to your profile. First, if you are not already logged into ORCID, CRMDS will ask ORCID to log you in:
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Once you have logged in, ORCID will ask you if you want to allow CRMDS to be able to view and update your ORCID profile:
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After you authorise CRMDS to access your profile, you will be returned to the CRMDS screen and the top right corner of the CRMDS page will indicate that you have connected to your ORCID profile (note, you can always de-authorise CRMDS from accessing your ORCID profile in your ORCID settings):
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Once you are logged in, you can enter search terms that are likely to return records of your publications:
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Each search result will show an icon telling you whether that particular item is visible in your ORCID profile. If the item is not in your ORCID profile, you see an icon like this:
And if the item is already in your ORCID profile, you will see an icon like this:
In the following search results you can see that 1 item is already in Josiah Carberry’s profile, and 2 items are not:
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Clicking on the “Add to Profile” button will confirm that you want to add the specified publication to your ORCID profile:
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After clicking on “Yes” to add the publication to your profile, the search results will refresh to reflect that the item has been added.
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You can then just continue searching for and adding any publications that are not in your ORCID profile.
Note that, occasionally, you may see an orange icon that says that an item is “Not Visible”
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This only occurs when you have previously added an item to your profile using CRMDS and then either:
Set the ORCID privacy for that particular work item to “Private” in your ORCID profile.
Deleted the work from your ORCID profile.
Unfortunately, CRMDS has no way to determine which of these two events occurred However, If you click on the “Not Visible” icon, you will be prompted with two ways to resolve this issue. Either you can:
Reset the privacy settings on the specified work to “Public” or “Limited”
Confirm to CRMDS that you have deleted the item from your profile.
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If the issue was your privacy settings, then once you have changed the privacy settings to public/limited you can simply click on the “Refresh” button and CRMDS will reflect the correct status of the work.
The best way to avoid this kind of confusion is to go to your ORCID settings and set the default privacy level for “works” to either “limited” or “public.”
Crossref Metadata Search is still a “Crossref Labs” project and, as such, we are very interested to hear feedback on this new ORCID functionality for CRMDS. Please send comments, etc. to: