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The American Society for Microbiology (ASM) has earned recognition in Crossref’s Participation Reports for its exceptional metadata coverage among large publishing members––an achievement built on intentional change, technical investment, and collaborative work. In this Q&A, the ASM team shares what that journey looked like, the challenges they’ve tackled, and how centering metadata has helped them better connect research with the global scientific community.

If you are reading this blog on our website, you may have noticed that alongside each post we now list a Crossref DOI link, which was not the case a few months ago (though we have retroactively added DOIs to all older posts too). You can find the persistent link for this post right above this paragraph. Go on, click on it, we’ll wait.

If you take a peek at our blog, you’ll notice that metadata and community are the most frequently used categories. This is not a coincidence – community is central to everything we do at Crossref. Our first-ever Metadata Sprint was a natural step in strengthening both. Cue fanfare!. And what better way of celebrating 25 years of Crossref?

We designed the Crossref Metadata Sprint as a relatively short event where people can form teams and tackle short problems. What kind of problems? While we expected many to involve coding, teams also explored documenting, translating, researching—anything that taps into our open, member-curated metadata. Our motivation behind this format was to create a space for networking, collaboration, and feedback, centered on co-creation using the scholarly metadata from our REST API, the Public Data File, and other sources.

The Crossref2024 annual meeting gathered our community for a packed agenda of updates, demos, and lively discussions on advancing our shared goals. The day was filled with insights and energy, from practical demos of Crossref’s latest API features to community reflections on the Research Nexus initiative and the Board elections.

Our Board elections are always the focal point of the Annual Meeting. We want to start reflecting on the day by congratulating our newly elected board members: Katharina Rieck from Austrian Science Fund (FWF), Lisa Schiff from California Digital Library, Aaron Wood from American Psychological Association, and Amanda Ward from Taylor and Francis, who will officially join (and re-join) in January 2025. Their diverse expertise and perspectives will undoubtedly bring fresh insights to Crossref’s ongoing mission.

The meeting started with a recap of our mission and priorities. Ed Pentz reiterated the Research Nexus vision of increasing transparency of the connections that make up the scholarly record and underpin the research ecosystem.

In June 2022, we wrote a blog post “Rethinking staff travel, meetings, and events” outlining our new approach to staff travel, meetings, and events with the goal of not going back to ‘normal’ after the pandemic. We took into account three key areas:

1. The environment and climate change
2. Inclusion
3. Work/life balance

We are aware that many of our members are also interested in minimizing their impacts on the environment, and we are overdue for an update on meeting our own commitments, so here goes our summary for the year 2023!

Great news to share: our Executive Director, Ed Pentz, has been selected as the 2024 recipient of the Miles Conrad Award from the USA’s National Information Standards organisation (NISO). The award is testament to an individual’s lifetime contribution to the information community, and we couldn’t be more delighted that Ed was voted to be this year’s well-deserved recipient.

During the NISO Plus conference this week in Baltimore, USA, Ed accepted his award and delivered the 2024 Miles Conrad lecture, reflecting on how far open scholarly infrastructure has come, and the part he has played in this at Crossref and through numerous other collaborative initiatives.

Our Perspectives blog series highlights different members of our diverse, global community at Crossref. We learn more about their lives and how they came to know and work with us, and we hear insights about the scholarly research landscape in their country, the challenges they face, and their plans for the future.

Notre série de blogs Perspectives met en lumière différents membres de la communauté internationale de Crossref. Nous en apprenons davantage sur leur vie et sur la manière dont ils ont appris à nous connaître et à travailler avec nous, et nous entendons parler du paysage de la recherche universitaire dans leur pays, des défis auxquels ils sont confrontés et de leurs projets pour l’avenir.

Our Perspectives blog series highlights different members of our diverse, global community at Crossref. We learn more about their lives and how they came to know and work with us, and we hear insights about the scholarly research landscape in their country, the challenges they face, and their plans for the future.

As a distributed, global, and community-led organisation, sharing information and listening to our members both online and in person has always been integral to what we do.

For many years Crossref has held both in-person and online meetings and events, which involved a fair amount of travel by our staff, board, and community. This changed drastically in March 2020, when we had to stop traveling and stop having in-person meetings and events. Due to the hard work and creativity of our team and the support of our Ambassadors and Sponsors, we were able to move to exclusively online meetings and events and maintain connections with colleagues, members, and much of the scholarly research community.

Join us for the first in our Perspectives blog series. In this series of blogs, we will be meeting different members of our diverse, global community at Crossref. We learn more about their lives, how they came to know and work with us, and we hear insights about the scholarly research landscape in their country, challenges they face, and plans for the future.