Blog

2020 hasn’t been quite what any of us had imagined. The pandemic has meant big adjustments in terms of working; challenges for parents balancing childcare and professional lives; anxieties and tensions we never had before; the strain of potentially being away from co-workers, friends, and family for a prolonged period of time. Many have suffered job losses and around the world, many have sadly lost their lives to the virus.

2019 has been busy for the Community Outreach Team; our small sub-team travels far and wide, talking to members around the world to learn how we can better support the work they do. We run one-day LIVE local events alongside multi-language webinars, with the addition of a new Community Forum, to better support and communicate with our global membership. This year we held a publisher workshop in London in collaboration with the British Library in February to talk about all things metadata and Open Access, before heading over to speak to members in Kyiv in March at the National Technical University of Ukraine.

In December, Crossref’s Head of Metadata, Patricia Feeney and I headed to Mumbai for our first ever LIVE local event in India, held in collaboration with Editage. Crossref membership in India has escalated in recent years, with a fifth of its 500 members joining in 2017 alone. Around 40% of these new members are smaller organizations who joined through one of the eight sponsors we currently have in the country.

The last few months have been busy for the Crossref community outreach team. We’ve been out and about from Cape Town to Ulyanovsk—and many places in between—talking at ‘LIVE locals’ to members about all things metadata. Our LIVE locals are one-day events, held around the world—but local to you—that provide both deeper insight into Crossref, and information on our services and how to benefit from them. These events are always free to attend, and whether you are a long-established member, totally new, or not even a member at all, we welcome you all to join us.

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!

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.

Following on from our LIVE Annual Meeting in Singapore, my colleague, Susan Collins, and I held a local LIVE event in Yogyakarta thanks to support from Universitas Ahmad Dahlan (UAD), Universitas Muhammadiyah Sidoarjo and one of Crossref’s new Sponsoring Affiliates, Relawan Jurnal Indonesia.

So much has happened since we held LIVE16 (our annual meeting) in London last year that we wanted to check-in with our UK community and share the year’s developments around our tools, teams and services ahead of LIVE17 next month in Singapore.

First of all – hello! I’m Vanessa. I’m fairly new to Crossref, having just joined our outreach team a few weeks ago. I previously worked in International Development, enabling individuals and institutions in Africa, Asia and Latin America to access cutting edge scholarly research and knowledge, supporting national development and transforming lives.

Crossref was founded to enable collaboration between publishers.  As our membership has grown and diversified over recent years, it’s becoming even more vital that we take input from a representative cross-section of the membership. This is especially important when considering how fees and policies will affect our diverse members in different ways.