Lots of exciting innovations are being made in scientific publishing, often raising fundamental questions about established publishing practices. In this guest post, Ludo Waltman and André Brasil discuss the recently launched MetaROR publish-review-curate platform and the questions it raises about good practices for Crossref DOI registration in this emerging landscape.
Crossref and the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) have been working closely together for many years, sharing resources and supporting our overlapping communities of organisations involved in communicating research. Now we’re delighted to share that we have agreed on a new set of objectives for our partnership, centred on further development of the tools that our shared community relies upon, as well as building capacity to enable richer metadata registration for organisations using the Open Journal Systems (OJS).
To mark Crossref’s 25th anniversary, we launched our first Metadata Awards to highlight members with the best metadata practices.
GigaScience Press, based in Hong Kong, was the leader among small publishers, defined as organisations with less than USD 1 million in publishing revenue or expenses. We spoke with Scott Edmunds, Ph.D., Editor-in-Chief at GigaScience Press, about how discoverability drives their high metadata standards.
What motivates your organisation/team to work towards high-quality metadata? What objectives does it support for your organisation?
Our objective is to communicate science openly and collaboratively, without barriers, to solve problems in a data- and evidence-driven manner through Open Science publishing. High-quality metadata helps us address these objectives by improving the discoverability, transparency, and provenance of the work we publish. It is an integral part of the FAIR principles and UNESCO Open Science Recommendation, playing a role in increasing the accessibility of research for both humans and machines. As one of the authors of the FAIR principles paper and an advisor of the Make Data Count project, I’ve also personally been very conscious to practice what I preach.
On behalf of the Nominating Committee, I’m pleased to share the slate of candidates for the 2025 board election.
Each year we do an open call for board interest. This year, the Nominating Committee received 51 submissions from members worldwide to fill five open board seats.
We have four large member seats and one small member seat open for election in 2025. We maintain a balanced board of 8 large member seats and 8 small member seats. Size is determined based on the organization’s membership tier (small members fall in the $0-$1,650 tiers and large members in the $3,900 - $50,000 tiers).
We believe in Persistent Identifiers. We believe in defence in depth. Today we’re excited to announce an upgrade to our data resilience strategy.
Defence in depth means layers of security and resilience, and that means layers of backups. For some years now, our last line of defence has been a reliable, tried-and-tested technology. One that’s been around for a while. Yes, I’m talking about the humble 5¼ inch floppy disk.
This may come as surprise to some. When things go well, you’re probably never aware of them. In day to day use, the only time a typical Crossref user sees a floppy disk is when they click ‘save’ (yes, some journals still require submissions in Microsoft Word).
History
But why?
Let me take you back to the early days of Crossref. The technology scene was different. This data was too important to trust to new and unproven technologies like Zip disks, CD-Rs or USB Thumb Drives. So we started with punched cards.
IBM 5081-style punched card.
Punched cards are reliable and durable as long as you don’t fold, spindle or mutilate them. But even in 2001 we knew that punched cards’ days were numbered. The capacity of 80 characters kept DOIs short. Translating DOIs into EBCDIC made ASCII a challenge, let alone SICIs. We kept a close eye on the nascent Unicode.
Breathing Room
In 2017 the change of DOI display guidelines from http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.csu.edu.au to https://doi-org.ezproxy.csu.edu.au shortened each DOI by 2 characters, buying us some time. But eventually we knew we had to upgrade to something more modern.
So we migrated to 5¼ inch floppy disks.
5¼ Floppy disk in drive
At 640 KB per disk these were a huge improvement. We could fit around 20,000 DOIs on one floppy. Today we only need around 10,000 floppy disks to store all of our DOIs (not the metadata, just the DOIs). Surprisingly this only takes about 20 metres of shelf space to store.
Typical work from home setup. Getting ready to backup some DOIs!
The move to working-from-home brought an unexpected benefit. Staff mail floppy disks to each other and keep them in constant rotation, which produces a distributed fault tolerant system.
Persistence Means Change
But it can’t last forever. DOIs registration shows no sign of slowing down. It’s clear we need a new, compact storage medium. So, after months of research, we’ve invested in new equipment.
Today we announce our migration to 3½ inch floppies.
If it goes to plan you won’t even notice the change.
