Please help us welcome new faces at Crossref! Martyn, Sara, Laura, and Mark joined us very recently and we are happy they’re with us. Both Martyn and Sara have joined the Product team and this has given us the chance to reorganize the team into the following groups: content registration, scholarly stewardship, scholarly impact, metadata retrieval, and UX/UI leadership. Laura joined the Finance and Operations team to help make the billing process simple for our members. Mark joins the Technology team and one of his projects will be improving the Event Data service.
It is exciting to already see the impact of your contributions and look forward to what’s to come!
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.
English version –– Información en español
The Crossref Nominating Committee is inviting expressions of interest to join the Board of Directors of Crossref for the term starting in 2021. The committee will gather responses from those interested and create the slate of candidates that our membership will vote on in an election in September. Expressions of interest will be due Friday, June 19, 2020.
The role of the board at Crossref is to provide strategic and financial oversight of the organization, as well as guidance to the Executive Director and the staff leadership team, with the key responsibilities being:
After 20 years in operation, and as our system matures from experimental to foundational infrastructure, it’s time to review our documentation.
Having a solid core of education materials about the why and the how of Crossref is essential in making participation possible, easy, and equitable.
As our system has evolved, our membership has grown and diversified, and so have our tools - both for depositing metadata with Crossref, and for retrieving and making use of it.
Content registration allows members to register and update metadata via machine or human interfaces.
When you join Crossref as a member you are issued a DOI prefix. You combine this with a suffix of your choice to create a DOI, which becomes active once registered with Crossref. Content registration allows members to register a DOI and deposit or update its associated metadata, via machine or human interfaces.
Benefits of Content Registration
Academic and professional research travels further if it’s linked to the millions of other published papers. Crossref members register content with us to let the world know it exists, instead of creating thousands of bilateral agreements.
They send information called metadata to us. Metadata includes fields like dates, titles, authors, affiliations, funders, and online location. It also includes digital object identifiers (DOIs) that stay with the work even if it moves websites.
Richer metadata makes content useful and easier to find. Through Crossref, members are distributing their metadata downstream, making it available to numerous systems and organizations that together help credit and cite the work, report impact of funding, track outcomes and activity, and more.
Members maintain and update metadata long-term, telling us if content moves to a new website, and they include more information as time goes on. This means that there is a growing chance that content is found, cited, linked to, included in assessment, and used by other researchers.
Participation Reports (beta) give a clear picture for anyone to see the metadata Crossref has. See for yourself where the gaps are, and what our members could improve upon. Understand best practice through seeing what others are doing, and learn how to level-up.
This is Crossref infrastructure. You can’t see infrastructure, yet research—and researchers all over the world—rely on it.
To register content with Crossref, you need to be a member. You’ll use one of our Content Registration methods to give us metadata about your content. Note that you don’t send us the content itself - you create a metadata record that links persistently (via a persistent identifier) to the content on your site or hosting platform. Learn more about metadata, types of metadata, constructing your DOIs, and ways to register your content.
You should assign Crossref DOIs to and register content for anything that is likely to be cited in the scholarly literature.
We store metadata and DOIs for many types of research-related content, and we currently accept these content types:
Books, chapters, and reference works: book title and/or chapter-level records. Books can be registered as a monograph, series, or set. Learn more about our recommendations for book content.
Components: typically assigned to parts of a whole, most commonly including figures, tables, and supplemental materials for a journal article or book chapter. Learn more about components.
Conference proceedings: information about a single conference and records for each conference paper/proceeding. Learn more about our recommendations for conference proceedings.
Dissertations: includes single dissertations and theses, but not collections. Learn more about our recommendations for dissertations.
Journals and journal articles: at the journal title and article level, and includes supplemental materials. Learn more about our recommendations for journal content.
Peer reviews: any number of reviews, reports, or comments attached to an associated article. Learn more about our recommendations for peer reviews.
Preprints: consists of preprints, eprints, working papers, reports, and other types of content that has been posted but not formally published. Learn more about our recommendations for preprints.
Reports and working papers: this includes content that is formally published and is published with an ISSN or ISBN. Learn more about our recommendations for reports and working papers.
Standards: includes publications from Standards Development Organizations and Standards Setting Organizations. Learn more about our recommendations for standards.
It is also possible to create a DOI for a pending publication by depositing metadata before the content is made available. Learn more about pending publication.
If you have a content type that isn’t listed, please contact us.
You pay a one-time Content Registration fee for each content item you register with us. Content Registration fees are different for different types of content and sometimes include volume discounts for large batches or backfile material. You don’t pay to update an existing metadata record. It’s an obligation of membership that you maintain your metadata for the long term, including updating any URLs that change. In addition, we warmly encourage you to correct and add to your metadata, and there is no charge for re-depositing (updating) existing metadata. Learn more about maintaining your metadata, and managing existing DOIs.
Your Content Registration fees are billed quarterly in arrears. This means you’ll usually receive a bill at the beginning of each quarter for the content you registered in the previous quarter. The only exception is if you’ve only registered a small number of DOIs.
