Blog

We’re happy to note that this month, we are marking five years since Crossref launched its Grant Linking System. The Grant Linking System (GLS) started life as a joint community effort to create ‘grant identifiers’ and support the needs of funders in the scholarly communications infrastructure.

Some organisations at the forefront of adopting Crossref’s Grant Linking System presented their challenges and how they overcame them, shared the benefits they are reaping from participating, and provided some tips about their processes and workflows.

Since we first launched our REST API around 2013 as a Labs project, it has evolved well beyond a prototype into arguably Crossref’s most visible and valuable service. It is the result of 20,000 organisations around the world that have worked for many years to curate and share metadata about their various resources, from research grants to research articles and other component inputs and outputs of research.

The REST API is relied on by a large part of the research information community and beyond, seeing around 1.8 billion requests each month. Just five years ago, that average monthly number was 600 million. Our members are the heaviest users, using it for all kinds of information about their own records or picking up connections like citations and other relationships. Databases, discovery tools, libraries, and governments all use the API. Research groups use it for all sorts of things such as analysing trends in science or recording retractions and corrections.

In collaboration with California Digital Library and DataCite, Crossref guides the operations of the Research Organization Registry (ROR). ROR is community-driven and has an independent sustainability plan involving grants, donations, and in-kind support from our staff.

ROR is a vital component of the Research Nexus, our vision of a fully connected open research ecosystem. It helps people identify, connect, and analyze the affiliations of those contributing to, producing, and publishing all kinds of research objects. Crossref added support for ROR to its schema and REST API in 2021 and we are asking Crossref members to use ROR IDs for author affiliations in the metadata they deposit with Crossref. But this post is about how the Crossref community can support ROR in another way.

Just over a year ago, Crossref announced that our board had adopted the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI).

It was a well-timed announcement, as 2021 yet again showed just how dangerous it is for us to assume that the infrastructure systems we depend on for scholarly research will not disappear altogether or adopt a radically different focus. We adopted POSI to ensure that Crossref would not meet the same fate.

POSI proposes three areas that an Open Infrastructure organization can address to garner the trust of the broader scholarly community: accountability (governance), funding (sustainability), and protection of community interests (insurance). POSI also proposes a set of concrete commitments that an organization can make to build community trust in each area. There are 16 such commitments.

Earlier this year, Ginny posted an exciting update on Crossref’s progress with adopting ROR, the Research Organization Registry for affiliations, announcing that we’d started the collection of ROR identifiers in our metadata input schema. 🦁

The capacity to accept ROR IDs to help reliably identify institutions is really important but the real value comes from their open availability alongside the other metadata registered with us, such as for publications like journal articles, book chapters, preprints, and for other objects such as grants. So today’s news is that ROR IDs are now connected in Crossref metadata and openly available via our APIs. 🎉

Tl;dr: Metadata for the (currently 26,000) grants that have been registered by our funder members is now available via the REST API. This is quite a milestone in our program to include funding in Crossref infrastructure and a step forward in our mission to connect all.the.things. This post gives you all the queries you might need to satisfy your curiosity and start to see what’s possible with deeper analysis. So have the look and see what useful things you can discover.

TL:DR;

• Hi, I’m Joel
• GitLab UI unsatisfactory
• Wrote a UI to use the API
• Wrote a missing API
• Open company contributes changes back to another open company
• Now have a method for getting work done much easier
• Hurrah!

I’m Joel, a Senior Site Reliability Engineer here at Crossref. I have a long background in open source, software development, and solving unique problems. One of my earliest computer influences was my father. He wrote software to support scientists in search of things like the top quark, the most massive of all observed elementary particles.

TL;DR

On November 11th 2020, the Crossref Board voted to adopt the “Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure” (POSI). POSI is a list of sixteen commitments that will now guide the board, staff, and Crossref’s development as an organisation into the future. It is an important public statement to make in Crossref’s twentieth anniversary year. Crossref has followed principles since its founding, and meets most of the POSI, but publicly committing to a codified and measurable set of principles is a big step. If 2019 was a reflective turning point, and mid-2020 was about Crossref committing to open scholarly infrastructure and collaboration, this is now announcing a very deliberate path. And we’re just a little bit giddy about it.

If you manage a publishing system or workflow, you know how crucial—and how challenging!—it is to have clean, consistent, and comprehensive affiliation metadata. Author affiliations, and the ability to link them to publications and other scholarly outputs, are vital for numerous stakeholders across the research landscape. Institutions need to monitor and measure their research output by the articles their researchers have published. Funders need to be able to discover and track the research and researchers they have supported. Academic librarians need to easily find all of the publications associated with their campus. Journals need to know where authors are affiliated so they can determine eligibility for institutionally sponsored publishing agreements.

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. A lot of this money comes from the public - 22c in every dollar spent on R&D in the USA comes from government funds, for example. Funders really do support a LOT of research.