Earlier this year, Ginny posted an exciting update on Crossrefâs progress with adopting ROR, the Research Organization Registry for affiliations, announcing that we’d started the collection of ROR identifiers in our metadata input schema. đŚ
The capacity to accept ROR IDs to help reliably identify institutions is really important but the real value comes from their open availability alongside the other metadata registered with us, such as for publications like journal articles, book chapters, preprints, and for other objects such as grants.
Event Data is our service to capture online mentions of Crossref records. We monitor data archives, Wikipedia, social media, blogs, news, and other sources. Our main focus has been on gathering data from external sources, however we know that there is a great deal of Crossref metadata that can be made available as events. Earlier this year we started adding relationship metadata, and over the last few months we have been working on bringing in citations between records.
Tl;dr: Metadata for the (currently 26,000) grants that have been registered by our funder members is now available via the REST API. This is quite a milestone in our program to include funding in Crossref infrastructure and a step forward in our mission to connect all.the.things. This post gives you all the queries you might need to satisfy your curiosity and start to see what’s possible with deeper analysis. So have the look and see what useful things you can discover.
Update on the outage of October 6th. In my blog post on October 6th, I promised an update on what caused the outage and what we are doing to avoid it happening again. This is that update.
Crossref hosts its services in a hybrid environment. Our original services are all hosted in a data center in Massachusetts, but we host new services with a cloud provider. We also have a few R&D systems hosted with Hetzner.
Continuing our blog series highlighting the uses of Crossref metadata, we talked to David Sommer, co-founder and Product Director at the research dissemination management service, Kudos. David tells us how Kudos is collaborating with Crossref, and how they use the REST API as part of our Metadata Plus service.
Introducing Kudos
At Kudos we know that effective dissemination is the starting point for impact. Kudos is a platform that allows researchers and research groups to plan, manage, measure, and report on dissemination activities to help maximize the visibility and impact of their work.
We launched the service in 2015 and now work with almost 100 publishers and institutions around the world, and have nearly 250,000 researchers using the platform.
We provide guidance to researchers on writing a plain language summary about their work so it can be found and understood by a broad range of audiences, and then we support researchers in disseminating across multiple channels and measuring which dissemination activities are most effective for them.
As part of this, we developed the Sharable-PDF to allow researchers to legitimately share publication profiles across a range of sites and networks, and track the impact of their work centrally. This also allows publishers to prevent copyright infringement, and reclaim lost usage from sharing of research articles on scholarly collaboration networks.
An example of a Kudos publication page showing the plain language summary
How is Crossref metadata used in Kudos?
Since our launch, Crossref has been our metadata foundation. When we receive notification from our publishing partners that an article, book or book chapter has been published, we query using the Crossref REST API to retrieve the metadata for that publication. That data allows us to populate the Kudos publication page.
We also integrate earlier in the researcher workflow, interfacing with all of the major Manuscript Submission Systems to support authors who want to build impact from the point of submission.
More recently, we started using the Crossref REST API to retrieve citation counts for a DOI. This enables us to include the number of times content is cited as part of the âbasket of metricsâ we provide to our researchers. They can then understand the performance of their publications in context, and see the correlation between actions and results.
A Kudos metrics page, showing the basket of metrics and the correlation between actions and results
What are the future plans for Kudos?
We have exciting plans for the future! We are developing Kudos for Research Groups to support the planning, managing, measuring and reporting of dissemination activities for research groups, labs and departments. We are adding a range of new features and dissemination channels to support this, and to help researchers to better understand how their research is being used, and by whom.
What else would Kudos like to see in Crossref metadata?
We have always found Crossref to be very responsive and open to new ideas, so we look forward to continuing to work together. We are keen to see an industry standard article-level subject classification system developed, and it would seem that Crossref is the natural home for this.
We are also continuing to monitor Crossref Event Data which has the potential to provide a rich source of events that could be used to help demonstrate dissemination and impact.
Finally, we are pleased to see the work Crossref are doing to help improve the quality of the metadata and supporting publishers in auditing their data. If we could have anything we wanted, our dream would be to prevent âfunny charactersâ in DOIs that cause us all kinds of escape character headaches!
Thank you David. If you would like to contribute a case study on the uses of Crossref Metadata APIs please contact the Community team.
