A Special Place for Blog Lovers with a Touch of Science!

Credit: crossref.org

Having joined the Crossref team merely a week previously, the mid-year community update on June 14th was a fantastic opportunity to learn about the Research Nexus vision. We explored its building blocks and practical implementation steps within our reach, and within our imagination of the future.

Read on (or watch the recording) for a whistlestop tour of everything – from what on Earth is Research Nexus, through to how it's taking shape at Crossref, to how you are involved, and finally – to what concerns the community surrounding the vision and how we're going to address that.

Credit: Crossref

Always improving services

Written by Martin Rittman, product designer at Crossref

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.

Our members deposit references alongside other metadata, and we have a lot of them. In fact, we have over 1.2 billion, with hundreds of thousands of new references added each day. While our metadata APIs make it easy to see which works are cited, it is much more difficult to find a list of citations to a specific work. We can make this easier by presenting citations as events in Event Data. Now that the huge majority of our members have responded positively to the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) campaign and Crossref's open-by-default reference policy, the move to make this data available via Event Data is a natural step.

Image credit: Crossref

Crossref to Hold Elections for Board Members

Crossref has always been a great example of democracy in terms of governance. Giving equal opportunity to both "small" and "big" in terms of finance members to become part of the board of the organization ensures, that as diverse a representation of the scholarly community as possible is achieved. Now it is time to say goodbye to five of the current board members and to elect the new ones.

Image credit: Pixabay

To Serve and Protect

Having infrastructure is important, but it is nothing without somebody, who will operate it. The service provider for the Registrants is the Registration Agencies. They allocate prefixes, register the DOI names and provide the means for the Registrants to declare and maintain metadata and state data. In addition, some of the Registration Agencies offer many other related services like database management and take care of the quality assurance connected with the DOI registration.

Image credit: Wikipedia

The Three Letters That Brought Change in the Scientific World

DOI or Digital Object Identifier - can we imagine today's scientific world without it? A simple combination of numbers, letters, and symbols provided the smooth incorporation of scientific publication into the modern world. Today, more than 230 million DOIs have been assigned by more than 5000 authorized agents and the number keeps growing.

Image credit: www.crossref.org

For years Crossref is striving to improve, following the feedback of its members. This includes the support of more and more content types and the possibility to build relations between them. Now an important step has been taken by featuring the possibility to register peer reviews for preprints and other types of content.