This month we have officially released a new version of our input metadata schema. As well as walking through the latest additions, I’ll also describe here how we’re starting to develop a new streamlined and open approach to schema development, using GitLab and some of the ideas under discussion going forward.

I’m happy to announce that Bryan Vickery has joined Crossref today as our new Director of Product. Bryan has extensive experience developing products and services at publishers such as Taylor & Francis, where he led the creation of the open-access platform Cogent OA. Most recently he was Managing Director of Research Services at T&F, including Wizdom.ai after it was acquired.

The official countdown to PIDapalooza 2020 begins here! It’s 163 days to go till our flame-lighting opening ceremony at the fabulous Belem Cultural Center in Lisbon, Portugal. Your friendly neighborhood PIDapalooza Planning Committee—Helena Cousijn (DataCite), Maria Gould (CDL), Stephanie Harley (ORCID), Alice Meadows (ORCID), and I—are already hard at work making sure it’s the best one so far!

With a smaller group than usual, we’re dedicating this year’s annual meeting to hear what you value about Crossref. Which initiatives would you put first and/or last? Where would you have us draw the line between mission and ambition? What is “core” for you? How could/should we adapt for the future in order to meet your needs?

Human intelligence and curiosity are the lifeblood of the scholarly world, but not many people can afford to pursue research out of their own pocket. We all have bills to pay. Also, compute time, buildings, lab equipment, administration, and giant underground thingumatrons do not come cheap. In 2017, according to statistics from UNESCO, $1.7 trillion dollars were invested globally in Research and Development.

The Open Funder Registry plays a critical role in making sure that our members correctly identify the funding sources behind the research that they are publishing. It addresses a similar problem to the one that led to the creation of ORCID: researchers’ names are hard to disambiguate and are rarely unique; they get abbreviated, have spelling variations and change over time. The same is true of organizations.

Last year I spent several weeks studying how to automatically match unstructured references to DOIs (you can read about these experiments in my previous blog posts). But what about references that are not in the form of an unstructured string, but rather a structured collection of metadata fields? Are we matching them, and how? Let’s find out.

More and better license information is at the top of a lot of Christmas lists from a lot of research institutions and others who regularly use Crossref metadata. I know, I normally just ask for socks too.

Our friend and colleague Christine Hone (née Buske) passed away in May from a short but brutal illness. Here is our attempt at ‘some words’, which we wrote for her funeral book and are posting here with her husband Dave’s permission. We are devastated to lose Christine as a colleague and friend. It’s hard to put into words the effect she had on our small organization in such a short time, and how much we’re already missing her.

Tl;dr Crossref is taking over the service management of Similarity Check from Turnitin. That means we’re your first port of call for questions and your agreement will be direct with us. This is a very good thing because we have agreed and will continue to agree the best possible set-up for our collective membership.

You can’t go far on this blog without reading about the importance of registering rich metadata. Over the past year we’ve been encouraging all of our members to review the metadata they are sending us and find out which gaps need filling by looking at their Participation Report. The metadata elements that are tracked in Participation Reports are mostly beyond the standard bibliographic information that is used to identify a work.