At Crossref and ROR, we develop and run processes that match metadata at scale, creating relationships between millions of entities in the scholarly record. Over the last few years, we’ve spent a lot of time diving into details about metadata matching strategies, evaluation, and integration. It is quite possibly our favourite thing to talk and write about! But sometimes it is good to step back and look at the problem from a wider perspective.
This year’s public data file is now available, featuring over 156 million metadata records deposited with Crossref through the end of April 2024 from over 19,000 members. A full breakdown of Crossref metadata statistics is available here.
Like last year, you can download all of these records in one go via Academic Torrents or directly from Amazon S3 via the “requester pays” method.
Download the file: The torrent download can be initiated here.
Earlier this year, we reported on the roundtable discussion event that we had organised in Frankfurt on the heels of the Frankfurt Book Fair 2023. This event was the second in the series of roundtable events that we are holding with our community to hear from you how we can all work together to preserve the integrity of the scholarly record - you can read more about insights from these events and about ISR in this series of blogs.
Crossref is undertaking a large program, dubbed 'RCFS' (Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability) that will initially tackle five specific issues with our fees. We haven’t increased any of our fees in nearly two decades, and while we’re still okay financially and do not have a revenue growth goal, we do have inclusion and simplification goals. This report from Research Consulting helped to narrow down the five priority projects for 2024-2025 around these three core goals:
We aim to fix that. Crossref and Wikimedia are launching a new initiative to better integrate scholarly literature in the world’s largest public knowledge space, Wikipedia.
This work will help promote standard links to scholarly references within Wikipedia, which persist over time by ensuring consistent use of DOIs and other citation identifiers in Wikipedia references. Crossref will support the development and maintenance of Wikipedia’s citation tools on Wikipedia. This work will include bug fixes and performance improvements for existing tools, extending the tools to enable Wikipedia contributors to more easily look up and insert DOIs, and providing a “linkback” mechanism that alerts relevant parties when a persistent identifier is used in a Wikipedia reference.
In addition, Crossref is creating the role of Wikimedia Ambassador (modeled after Wikimedian-in-Residence) to act as liaison with the Wikimedia community, promote use of scholarly references on Wikipedia, and educate about DOIs and other scholarly identifiers (ORCIDs, PubMed IDs, DataCite DOIs, etc) across Wikimedia projects.
Starting today, Crossref will be working with Daniel Mietchen to coordinate Crossref’s Wikimedia-related activities. Daniel’s team will be composed of Max Klein and Matt Senate, who will work to enhance Wikimedia citation tools, and will share the role of Wikipedia ambassador with Dorothy Howard.
Since the beginnings of Wikipedia, Daniel Mietchen has worked to integrate scholarly content into Wikimedia projects. He is part of an impressive community of active Wikipedians and developers who have worked extensively on linking Wikipedia articles to the formal literature and other scholarly resources. We’ve been talking to him about this project for nearly a year, and are happy to finally get it off the ground.
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]7 Matt, Max and Daniel at #wikimania2014. Photo by Dorothy.