This month marks one year since the Dutch Research Council (NWO) introduced grant IDs—an important milestone in our journey toward more transparent and trackable research funding. We created over 1,600 Crossref Grant IDs with associated metadata. We are beginning to see them appear in publications. These early examples show the enormous potential Grant IDs have. They also highlight that publishers could extend their efforts to improve the quality of funding metadata of publications.
eLife recently won a Crossref Metadata Award for the completeness of its metadata, showing itself as the clear leader among our medium-sized members. In this post, the eLife team answers our questions about how and why they produce such high-quality open metadata. For eLife, the work of creating and sharing excellent metadata aligns with their mission to foster open science and supports their preprint-centred publication model, but it also lays the groundwork for all kinds of exciting potential uses.
Hablamos con Nacho Pérez Alcalde, Vicedirector Técnico de Editorial CSIC, la editorial al mando de ´Boletín Geológico y Minero’, ganadora del Crossref Metadata Award en la categoría de Metadata Enrichment. Miembro de Crossref desde 2008, Editorial CSIC publica 41 revistas en acceso abierto Diamante, y juega un papel esencial en la diseminación del conocimiento científico a nivel internacional. Exploramos lo que este premio ha significado para Editorial CSIC y qué planes para el futuro tienen para seguir mejorando la calidad y uso de sus metadatos.
TLDR: We’ve successfully moved the main Crossref systems to the cloud! We’ve more to do, with several bugs identified and fixed, and a few still ongoing. However, it’s a step in the right direction and a significant milestone, as, whilst it is a much larger financial investment, it addresses several risks and limitations and shores up the Crossref infrastructure for the future.
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 organisation in such a short time, and how much we’re already missing her. But here it goes.
It was 2015 when some of us first met Chris, and we immediately saw how much of an asset she could be to our organisation. She was very active in the community and well-known in many academic and publishing circles around the world. And she had an enviable combination of technical skills, a scientific mind, and a natural ability to engage people.
We tried to recruit her back then but she was in demand by others and it wasn’t until early 2018 that we succeeded. We finally got her! She became the Product Manager for a very advanced and complex system but she took to it perfectly, with real excitement and a complete understanding of how we (and therefore she) could help the research community all over the world see and make connections.
Christine’s official Crossref headshot 😊
With colleagues spread around the world, she joined an organisation that had exciting opportunities and its share of challenges. Chris engaged with all of this head-on. She handled a constant stream of queries from people spread across time zones, whilst at the same time getting to grips with a service that was difficult to pin down. She balanced these tasks which were at very opposite ends of the spectrum. She added so much and with such energy and intelligence to everything she got involved in, always bringing human attention and creativity.
Chris was also on the winning team at 2018’s UKSG quiz!
Ed, Amanda, and Chris: the Crossref contingent of the winning quiz team
In her talk at the 5:AM altmetrics conference she brought together technical detail, big-picture ideas, and her own particular passion. Her opening words were “My name is Christine and I’m a recovering fish scientist”. Never afraid to bring her personal brand of humour into the workplace, her opening slide was a photograph of her covered in rats. That presentation was the first time that much of the audience really understood our service. Having cracked the messaging for us, she was due to give the same talk at our annual meeting in Toronto a few months later…
Chris’s opening slide at her 5:AM talk
Chris giving her now legendary talk at 5:AM on Event Data
Many of us were in Toronto for that meeting; it was two weeks after we’d heard the news of her diagnosis. Some of us were able to visit her in the hospital where she told us of her and Dave’s decision to bring forward their wedding plans. It was a bittersweet announcement but, clearly, they adored each other and were determined to be happy together despite the challenging times ahead.
Over the last few months, even when she had little energy to spare, Chris popped in (virtually) to chat and update us, share pictures and, selflessly, to see how we were doing. Even people who never met or worked closely with her started to follow her vlog and exchange notes and news directly.
Always checking in with us, an update from Chris shortly before she passed
We have all been rocked by the news and there is a lot of sadness and grief among the Crossref staff and community. Even in the last moments we shared together Chris always asked about how her projects were going. Her passion for her products was a big part of what animated her when she first joined. Throughout her late-stage illness, this remained constant. She yearned to return to work. This zeal will forever be an inspiration to us all at Crossref.
