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.
A persistent identifier (PID) is an ongoing, long-lasting digital reference to a resource. Digital object identifiers (DOIs) are persistent identifiers for entities such as journal articles, books, and datasets. You may have heard of ORCID iDs, which are persistent identifiers for researchers, Research Organization Registry IDs, and DataCite, which assigns DOIs for datasets. Crossref, ORCID, DataCite, and many other PID organizations work together to build trusted connections between DOIs, ORCID iDs, and other identifiers.
An identifier is a label which gives a unique name to an entity: a person, institution, or research work. Though a DOI is just a label, the value lies in its associated metadata, which is registered with the DOI and gives information about the work.
When a work is published online, there’s no guarantee that the work will always be in the same place on the internet. The URL may change as publisher or hosting websites evolve, or the content might be acquired by a different publisher and be hosted on their site. If we refer to or cite a work using just the URL, this may not always go to the current location of the content, and we risk the work being lost from the scholarly record.
To keep the scholarly record persistent, we encourage publishers and scholars to use a persistent identifier to identify and cite works, rather than a URL. A Crossref DOI that you register with us is a persistent identifier for one of your works. If the resource resolution URL of the content changes in the future, you just update this information in the metadata, and the DOI will resolve to the new URL. That way, as long as scholars and publishers use a DOI to cite a work, they know they can reliably and accurately identify and find the work in the future.
A DOI becomes active once it and its metadata record have been registered with Crossref. Though the DOI doesn’t change, its associated metadata is kept up-to-date by the owner of the record.
DOIs are one of the most-used persistent identifiers in scholarly communication, and are used across disciplines. Read on to learn more about DOIs, their structures, and how to register them with Crossref.
Page owner: Laura J. Wilkinson | Last updated 2020-April-08
