TL;DR: We have a Community Forum (yay!), you can come and join it here: community.crossref.org.
Community is fundamental to us at Crossref, we wouldn’t be where we are or achieve the great things we do without the involvement of you, our diverse and engaged members and users. Crossref was founded as a collaboration of publishers with the shared goal of making links between research outputs easier, building a foundational infrastructure making research easier to find, cite, link, assess, and re-use.
Event Data uncovers links between Crossref-registered DOIs and diverse places where they are mentioned across the internet. Whereas a citation links one research article to another, events are a way to create links to locations such as news articles, data sets, Wikipedia entries, and social media mentions. We’ve collected events for several years and make them openly available via an API for anyone to access, as well as creating open logs of how we found each event.
2020 wasn’t all bad. In April of last year, we released our first public data file. Though Crossref metadata is always openly available––and our board recently cemented this by voting to adopt the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI)––we’ve decided to release an updated file. This will provide a more efficient way to get such a large volume of records. The file (JSON records, 102.6GB) is now available, with thanks once again to Academic Torrents.
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.
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!
And now a few words from each of them.
Martyn Rittman
I am a former university researcher who worked on interdisciplinary projects around life sciences and analytical chemistry, with positions in the UK and Germany. I spent seven years at open access publisher MDPI doing everything from running journals to handling production, developing services for authors and publishers, and supporting preprints. I’m very excited to be joining Crossref as a Product Manager and developing some great products and services that focus on how Crossref-indexed research creates impact. This includes supporting the use of preprint metadata. I’m also looking forward to getting my teeth into event data, which looks at how those in the research community and beyond reference, use, and reuse research. If you are interested in making use of event data or have examples of event data applications, I would like to hear from you.
Sara Bowman
I’m thrilled to have joined Crossref at this exciting time in the organization. As a member of the Product team, my primary area of focus is content registration, building, and improving tools for our members to deposit rich metadata. I’m particularly interested in how we can create a unified user experience for content registration while supporting the needs of our diverse membership. A scientist by training, I’ve spent the last 6 years working on open source technologies to support scholarly communication, most recently in the role of Product Manager at the Center for Open Science. I’m passionate about open tools and using data to drive product development, building innovative solutions to improve research and scholarly communication.
Laura Cuniff
I joined Crossref two months ago as a part-time Billing Support Specialist on the Finance and Operations team. With the help of my supportive and knowledgeable colleagues, I took on learning the various systems. My goal is to make the billing process as simple as possible for our members by researching, retrieving, and relaying billing information. This allows our members to focus on the reason for their engagement with Crossref. With several part-time jobs cobbled together at different times of the day, I have the flexibility to volunteer with a few organizations in my hometown of Ipswich, MA. If you find yourself at the Ipswich Visitor Center, I may greet you, recommend the most beautiful spots in town, give you a tour of the Ipswich Museum, or send you off with a wonderful Ipswich Humane Group cat or dog! I’m very excited to be here!
Mark Woodhall
I am an open-source enthusiast who has worked in a range of technology roles at a variety of companies as a polyglot programmer with experience in Clojure(Script), Java, C#, and JavaScript. It’s really exciting to be working at Crossref as a Senior Software Developer on the Technology team and I’m proud to be part of a team with open source at its heart. I’m really looking forward to getting more involved with event data and building a scalable solution to support its future uses.
Welcome to the Crossref community Martyn, Laura, Sara, and Mark.
