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Today, we take an emotional journey through scholarly publishing and aim to understand how emotions impact authors', reviewers', and editors' experiences in the scholarly communications lifecycle.
The post The Emotional Rollercoaster of Scholarly Publishing appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Since December last year, when we decided DWeb Camp would take place in Europe, we’ve been hard at work to evolve the spirit of our unique event and adapt it […]
Last Updated on July 2, 2026, 4:25 pm ET ARL Public Policy Briefing (June 2026) In June, ARL and member libraries advocated for college accreditation standards to retain key elements...
The post June 2026 appeared first on Association of Research Libraries.
Last Updated on July 2, 2026, 9:15 am ET The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) are hosting a workshop before the 2026...
The post Join ARL and CARL for a Charleston Preconference Workshop: The Right to Research in the Age of AI appeared first on Association of Research Libraries.
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The America 250 Semiquincentennial Web Archive documents how Americans are commemorating and reflecting on the nation’s 250th anniversary. In this interview, Malea Walker discusses how the collection evolved from a project focused on government websites into a broader effort to document the many ways communities across the country are marking this historic milestone.
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SSP's latest Pulse Check survey offers a community-wide snapshot of social media in scholarly publishing as it stands today.
The post Social Media in Scholarly Communications — SSP Pulse Check Report appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Through user experience research (UXR) initiatives that take into account our diverse membership and community, we can have a continuous, deeper understanding of the role of metadata in our members’ workflows, and ensure that our work continues to meet our community’s needs. Your support is the key to this process, and will positively impact the wider community - and if you’d like to start today, you can take part in our latest initiative: help us improve our Events page by sharing your thoughts on the page’s feedback form.
Hi, everyone! I’m Leandro Contreras, UX Researcher here at Crossref, since February 2026. In previous roles, I helped to design, build and manage digital products and workflows for universities and academic publishers, and now I’m dedicated to bridging the gap between our community’s needs and the tools we build together.
At Crossref, we’re committed to collecting diverse community input, and ensuring our system is representative and useful for everyone that interacts with it. In this blog post, I’d like to introduce you to how we’re kickstarting a more systematic approach to user research processes at Crossref, and invite you to take part in a new research initiative. First, let’s quickly revise some key concepts:
User experience (UX) is the exploration of how we, as humans, interact with products and services: whether that’s a physical tool or, in our case, the invisible systems holding our metadata, or the visible interfaces that support our community - for example, our Participation Reports.
Good user experience can positively affect people’s day-to-day lives, produce quality results, and champion inclusion: we are more likely to return to a product or a service if it’s tailor-made for us, for our advantages and shortcomings.
User experience research (UXR) is the methodical study of users of a product, service or system, using methods to learn about their behaviours, needs, and preferences. While user experience is the design of the experience, UXR is the evidence-based study used to inform those designs and prove they actually work.
In practice, user experience researchers gather this evidence through a variety of methods that seek to capture quantitative and qualitative data. But what are these methods? And how do they apply in the context of an organisation like Crossref, with a growing membership building the research nexus with rich metadata using many different technologies?
To understand the role and the impact of metadata across our vast community, we are currently mixing qualitative and quantitative research methods to help us get the right answers:
In 2026, we’ve already put these methods to work:
Looking ahead, we’ll continue setting up usability testing sessions, open quick feedback channels on our website, and investigate the impact of research integrity across our membership through surveys. However, these initiatives are only as effective as the community behind them! When you engage in our UXR initiatives, you actively shape current and future Crossref experiences, ensuring they fit your needs.
If you are curious about participating, we’ve just launched a new feedback form on our Events page to detect new improvement opportunities, and we invite you to be part of it. This is a great opportunity to see how our initiatives work in practice, so we hope you’ll jump in!
Over time, you will see the impact of your participation come to life in future improvements to our tools and services through future project updates on our blog, and in the community forum as well. We welcome everyone to join the conversation there. If you have any further questions, suggestions, or collaboration ideas, you can also get in touch via email.
Launching new UX research initiatives at Crossref has been a wonderful way to get to know our community on a deeper level. I’m looking forward to bringing you closer to more initiatives in the future, and learning more from your feedback!
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As more of our cultural heritage moves online, a troubling question is emerging: what happens when the things we create, share, and cherish simply disappear? In the first episode of […]
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Today's guest post introduces the YCR-index as an alternative to measuring value with raw citation counts.
The post Guest Post — Beyond the Prestige: Why Scientific Impact is More Than a Numbers Game appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Digital preservation isn’t just about protecting files. It’s about ensuring that digital collections remain accessible, understandable, and trustworthy for decades—even as technologies, vendors, and infrastructures evolve. Yet for many institutions, one of the biggest long-term risks isn’t media degradation or file obsolescence. It’s becoming locked into a preservation system that makes future migration difficult. This […]
The post What Is Oxford Common File Layout (OCFL)? Why Open Standards Matter for Digital Preservation appeared first on LIBNOVA.
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Scaling federated open science infrastructure across Latin America
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Vanishing Culture is a special six-part series from the Future Knowledge podcast, produced by the Internet Archive and Authors Alliance, exploring what happens when our shared cultural heritage disappears, and […]
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Today's post asks us to acknowledge the role of AI in peer review and ensure practical guidance and policies that help scholars respond with consistency and confidence.
The post Guest Post — Now is the Time for AI in Peer Review, and Publishing Policies Need to Recognize This appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
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Building a public tool to help funders and adopters find the open infrastructure they need
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Expanding open access to African scholarship through a regional repository network
Our 2026 Community Update took place on 13 May. Two calls, one for the eastern and one for the western time zone, highlighted how our global community is growing, how we’re refining the metadata that supports trust in the scholarly record, and connecting records more effectively through our latest tools.
Our Chief Operating Officer, Lucy Ofiesh and Executive Director, Ed Pentz, opened each session with an update on operations and governance, starting with the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI). We adopted POSI in 2020. Recently, the Principles were updated by a group of adopters, following a community consultation, and four new principles were added: periodic review of purpose and community value; transparent operations as a distinct principle; refined guidance on financial reserves; and attention to volunteer labour and transition planning. Recordings and slides are also available.
Infrastructure organisations can use POSI to assess themselves and demonstrate to the community how they’re adhering to the principles, which support forkability, long-term sustainability, open assets, and transparent, community-led governance. We published a biannual report on how we measure up against them, so we’ll publish our next self-audit against the new set at the end of 2026.
Financially, we’re in good shape. With so many new members joining every month, our revenue grew 8% last year, while expenses came in 3% under budget, and Content Registration was up 13% year-on-year at the end of March, well above our long-term average of around 7%. We’ve used our operating surplus to build up and maintain a reserve fund of 12-months of operating expenses, which matters for long-term sustainability. We use additional surplus funds beyond our reserves to reinvest in our mission and community.
We had our call for board nominiations in May. Seven seats are up this year, one large and six small, and any member can stand. Voting runs for around five weeks, one vote per member, regardless of size. Last year, just 6% of members voted, and we’d like to see that increase. The call for expressions of interest is now closed for 2026, and candidates will be announced by our Nominating Committee in the coming months in advance of the election and annual meeting, which will be held on 22nd October 2026.
Robbykha Rosalien and Maryna Kovalyova from our membership team then took us through the membership picture. We’re now 25,000 organisational members from 167 countries, with around 51% based in Asia. The majority of our new members are universities, scholar-led publishers, societies, small journal publishers, and government agencies. We have help from 140 sponsoring organisations and 42 ambassadors, and we’re grateful for all the support they offer our members.
The metadata corpus and its use have grown alongside the community
Turning to new members, over 3,000 have joined from 142 countries since the last community update. 54% are from Asia, with Indonesia accounting for 17.5% of the total and India next at 9.5%. We continue to have members joining from the US and the UK, and we also have over 100 new members from Türkiye, with strong growth in Brazil and Pakistan as well.
January 2026 brought a major change with the introduction of a new fee tier for members with annual revenue or expenses (whichever is higher) of under USD 1,000. Since then, 40% of the new members joined under this new tier. 40% of our new members identify themselves as publishers and 40% as universities or scholarly organisations, with plenty of societies (13%), governmental agencies or NGOs (4%), and others, such as hospitals. The most popular publishing platform choice among the new members remains Open Journal Systems by PKP at 55%, with 30% saying they have no platform, and WordPress (4%) and Scholastica (2%) following. Notably, we’re working with PKP this year to help members transition to OJS 3.5, which supports richer metadata.
We also extended our Global Equitable Membership (GEM) program at the start of the year to include 18 additional countries. GEM offers Crossref membership and Content Registration without any fees. Since the last community update, we’ve gained our first members in Haiti, South Sudan, and Niger, and 20% of all independent members who have joined since then are GEM-eligible.
Our Membership Director, Amanda Bartell, introduced our new Member Practices Working Group with a reminder of Crossref’s role in preserving the Integrity of the Scholarly Record (ISR). We’ve always aimed to keep barriers to membership as low as possible, because the best way to support a healthy scholarly ecosystem is to make metadata about published content as open and transparent as possible. That openness lets members demonstrate their practices through metadata, signalling trustworthiness to the scientific community as a whole, and when practices fall short, the metadata itself can surface those issues. Our member terms already make the importance of accurate metadata clear: if the community identifies inaccurate metadata, we can suspend or revoke membership. That is a last resort, and our first approach is always to contact the member, explain the problem, and work with them to get the metadata record corrected.
But what if the reports we receive from the community don’t relate to metadata, and instead to the member’s broader practices? This is an increasing issue, and it has been unclear how and when we should respond.
In consultation with our board, we updated our member terms last year and added an obligation for members to comply with a set of published member practices. The role of the working group is to draft this set of practices and provide clear guidelines on what we expect of Crossref members. In rare situations where issues can’t be resolved, the Member Practices will provide the basis for acting decisively, including suspending or revoking membership.
The Crossref Member Practices Working Group brings together differently sized members from different regions, metadata users, bibliometricians, and scholarly sleuths. Once drafted, we’ll take the Member Practices out for community consultation, with a board vote expected at their November meeting. It’s particularly important to us that the practices are achievable for all types of members, and we don’t want to create any extra barriers to entry or to continue membership for less experienced or less well-resourced members.
To seek feedback from the community on emerging themes, Amanda ran two live polls during the call. One of her questions was: for the records you register with Crossref, are you the journal owner, the nominated publisher, or a bit of both? 45% of respondents said a bit of both, with the journal owner as the next most popular response, and the nominated publisher after that. The second poll asked whether the phrase “nominated publisher” accurately describes what those of you in that role do. The result suggested it is broadly acceptable, though we’d still like to hear how you’d phrase it if not.
Patricia Feeney and Helena Cousijn from our programs and services team walked us through a year of schema work and what’s coming next. Schema 5.4 was released in March 2025 with three key features: typed citations, version numbers, and preprint status.
Typed citations give members the chance to indicate in the metadata what type of citation it is, so when an article cites a dataset, it’s now possible to explicitly say so. So far 23 DOI prefixes are using typed citations, so adoption is starting, and we’d really like to see it grow. If this is something you think is useful for you, please take a look, or reach out, and we’ll help you get started.
Version numbers, which 25 DOI prefixes now use and mostly for preprints, let you indicate different versions. We’re not yet seeing much use for articles or other record types, which we’d like to encourage. Notably, when you’re registering new versions of the same record, there’s no separate content registration fee, as long as you include the relationship in the metadata.
Preprint status lets you indicate that a preprint has been retracted or withdrawn, for example.
Earlier this year, we added the ability to include grant DOIs in funding metadata. When you register metadata for any research output, you can now include the persistent identifier to indicate which grant funded the work. The number of grants registered as part of the Grant Linking System by our funder members grows (with now over 200,000 grant DOIs in existence). This dedicated new field provides an opportunity for members registering works to unambiguously identify the grants that funded the work. The grant DOI links to a full grant record, including funding type, project information, investigator details, funder and program/schema details, and institutional relationships.
We’re working on Schema 5.5. The main thing we know many of you have been waiting for is support for the CRediT taxonomy and its 14 contributor roles. We’re also enabling multiple roles for a single contributor, and within the Crossref vocabulary, which we still support, it will be possible to specify the corresponding author.
After 5.5 comes the update to our dedicated grant schema. Grant Schema 0.3.0 adds the ability to indicate that a grant was awarded to an institution (via a ROR affiliation ID), reflects that roles can change over time, and adds support for a persistent project identifiers, RAiD – a service that functions as a project identifier to indicate how a grant relates to one or more projects.
We’re also deprecating older schema versions. We’re supporting over 27 at the moment, which is too many and not helpful to members. The fundamental structures need updating, and we also need to tighten some of our requirements to obtain better and more complete metadata. We started the project at the end of last year, and we’ll be saying goodbye to a set of versions at the end of this year. Everyone using those versions has already been contacted, so if this concerns you, you should have heard from us. The project continues over the coming years, and we’ll work on deprecating other Schema 4 versions, so that by the end, we’ll only be supporting the different Schema 5 versions and the upcoming Schema 6. We’ll notify everyone impacted and let you know how to transition.
Once 5.5 and the grant schema are out, we’ll start working on remodelling contributor names, which is a really big project. A proposed model was circulated for feedback in May. The same update will also work on statements, currently for funding, acknowledgments, ethics, accessibility, AI use, data availability, copyright, and conflict of interest.
Dominika Tkaczyk and Jason Portenoy from our technology and data science team gave an update on the Metadata Matching work, framed around the vision of the Research Nexus: a rich and open network of relationships connecting organisations, people, outputs, and activities within the scholarly record. First up for the project is funder matching, and Dominika and Jason took us through the new methodology and progress on implementing the work.
Funding metadata involves three main entities: funders, grants, and research outputs. Organisations are identified by Open Funder Registry (OFR) IDs or ROR IDs, and research grants and outputs have DOIs. These entities should be linked in order for provenance and attribution to be determined, which is important for evidence but also for things like research assessment and compliance.
The three entities: Funding and academic organisations→recipients are awarded grants→ repositories and publishers support outputs.
In practice, many of those relationships are missing when metadata is deposited. The new Crossref funder matching identifies the funding organisation from the name in the metadata and, when successful, inserts the correct organisation identifier, disambiguating the relation between the research output and its funder. Applying matching over the years has added around 2.8 million funder identifiers to records, shrinking the gap.
So why rebuild what we already have? Two reasons. We’re committed to supporting ROR more deeply across our services, and as part of that, we want to switch to ROR IDs as the main identifier for funders. Second, our current funder matching is part of our legacy system, which lacks transparency, thorough evaluation, or flexibility.
The new strategy is part of our metadata matching project. The core architecture is built, and the new strategy has been tested; we’re now adding features such as sending redeposits, with more testing later this quarter and a release aimed for around the middle of the year. After that, we’ll move on to a grant-matching workflow to link outputs to grant records where that link is missing.
They closed with a live demo covering four cases. Starting with a simple example of Wellcome, which matched cleanly because the input name matched the official organisation name exactly, they then moved on to more complex examples, showing increasing discrepancies between the input and the name variant in ROR, yet the strategy still resolved it. However, some names are not possible to match in this way, such as the “Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences,” which is a very generic name that many organisations might use as part of their structure. That matters too: the strategy recognises when no match should be returned, limiting the level of incorrect information that might be introduced into the metadata.
Martyn Rittman who heads up our Research Nexus development, and Panos Pandis from our technology team introduced the new data citations API endpoint. It exposes data citations from deposited metadata, with over 700,000 included so far. Among all the reference information we hold, individual data citations are difficult to pick out, and there’s a specific community interest in them, so we’ve put them together and made them available through a dedicated API.
Data citations can be included in two parts of a metadata record: references and relationships. We look for links to datasets registered with a Crossref DOI or a DataCite DOI. Documentation can be found here.
Through March 2026, we typically collected 400 to 600 data citations per day, with some variation, especially on weekends. The new endpoint is still in beta, and we invite feedback: is it useful, what would make it more useful, and what should we do next? Let us know on the forum.
Lena Stoll, who heads up our community trends program and Patrick Vale from technology took us through Metadata Manager. We retired the legacy interface at the end of last year and replaced it with a more modern and flexible helper tool for record registration. It’s already in use by an increasing number of members for grants and journal article records.
A recent addition is a search field, where you can enter the DOI of any supported record (currently a journal article or a grant) and edit it directly, if you have permissions. We’ve also added fields to the journal article registration form to include relationship metadata, which is key to building the Research Nexus.
Plenty more is coming. The new Metadata Manager will expand to support books and chapters, conference proceedings, reports, dissertations, and post-publication updates over the next few months. The interfaces follow a similar workflow: a page or two of work-level metadata, optionally chapter, or paper, or series metadata if applicable, a review step, and submission. We want to keep them as simple and usable as possible.
We hope that the post-publication update form will be welcomed by our members, as it will enable registration of retractions, corrections, and expressions of concern without any knowledge of XML. Lena and Patrick walked through a live demo of a retraction notice end-to-end. The system checks that the DOI being retracted exists, and any errors surface right away rather than later by email. We’re collecting feedback on the new tools on the forum.
The team also shared an update for institutions that use DSpace – its next version (version 10), will include a Crossref integration that lets you register Crossref metadata and DOIs automatically for content such as dissertations hosted in your DSpace repository.
Madhura Amdekar shared our plans to launch a new version of the Crossref Service Providers Program later this year. Service providers are hosting platforms, manuscript submission systems, XML or metadata providers, and general publisher service organisations that work with our members to create, register, or display metadata on their behalf. They’re key partners in promoting metadata best practices, and we’re looking forward to collaborating with these organisations more closely. The program will not charge any fees; it will offer certification in two tiers, depending on the depth of integration with Crossref services.
We’d really like to hear from you: which service providers in this space would you like to see as part of the new program? Drop suggestions on the forum or get in touch with us directly.
Thanks to our speakers and to everyone who joined, asked questions, and voted in the polls. Recordings and slides are available, and the conversation continues on our community forum.
See you at the next one.
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Last Updated on June 29, 2026, 2:27 pm ET In 1983, as fears mounted about an as yet unexplained disorder of the human immune system, the US National Institutes of...
The post Repertoires: How Health Research Becomes Interoperable appeared first on Association of Research Libraries.
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As America celebrates its Semiquincentennial (250th anniversary) this year, explore a curated list of materials preserved at the Internet Archive documenting the nation’s founding, the Declaration of Independence, past ephemera […]
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The future of scholarly communication will not be determined by how powerful AI becomes, but by whether the research community remains clear about the purpose those capabilities are meant to serve and whether it can govern them together.
The post Before the Guardrails: Why AI Governance in Research Must Start with Purpose appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
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Local news is disappearing. Since 2005, the United States has lost nearly 3,500 newspapers. 213 counties have no local news outlet at all and another 1,524 have just one. Newsrooms […]
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This year, libraries and cultural institutions around the nation are celebrating America’s 250th birthday. The 225-year-old Library of Congress is almost as old as the country itself, and this year, we’ve joined forces with the Smithsonian Institution to find new stories about America’s founding in our treasure trove of records and artifacts.
The collaboration, called Revolution Crossroads, is exploring how advanced technologies can surface new connections in history. Staff are working to expand the promise of artificial intelligence (AI) to surface relationships, stories, and context—using some of the nation’s founding digital treasures as a testbed.
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Today, we reprise the talk by outgoing SSP President Rebecca McLeod at last month's SSP Annual Meeting.
The post Guest Post — Milestones that Matter: Celebrating a Wartime SSP Presidential Term appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Funding is one of the key enablers of the research lifecycle, but has been one of the hardest parts of the scholarly record to identify, describe and connect. This is slowly changing as we have recently reached a very exciting milestone for Crossref’s Grant Linking System (GLS). What makes it remarkable is not only the numbers reached, but where the data comes from. Research funders, who joined Crossref as members, have actively contributed more than 200,000 grants to the Research Nexus (Figure 1).
Crossref’s GLS was first introduced in 2019, following extensive community consultation with research funders, as a solution to a problem: how to place research funding in the scholarly record as a research entity in its own right, that can be connected with other outputs. Crossref grant DOIs were the first PID that specifically allows for the permanent and unambiguous identification of the support that research funders provide to their grant recipients. It places research funding where it belongs, as a research entity worthy of its own metadata record that can be linked, interpreted, and updated as time goes on. With a funder-designed metadata schema, it facilitates the linking of funding to outputs through relationship metadata, building the Research Nexus, and supporting evidence-driven evaluation.
The active role of funders as owners and stewards of their grants’ description in the metadata, ensuring the records reflect reality, is what makes the resulting links between funding and outputs trustworthy enough to support evidence-driven evaluation, one verifiable data point at a time, as initiatives such as DORA and CoARA are calling on the research community to do.
Reaching 200,000 registered grants with Crossref’s GLS is a milestone that belongs to the entire community. It reflects a strong commitment to open, sustainable and interoperable infrastructure from funders around the world, and a shared conviction that connected metadata makes research more transparent, more accountable and more useful for everyone.
It’s an opportunity to share perspectives from some of our community members helping make this possible.
When Fonds de Recherche du Québec first began registering funding metadata and assigning Crossref grant DOIs to its funding through Crossref’s Grant Linking System, our primary driver was straightforward: traceability. We needed a reliable way to link research outputs back to the funding that made them possible. Crossref grant DOIs provided the missing data point in an interconnected identifier and metadata ecosystem, which includes ROR and ORCID. We hope that Crossref grant DOIs will genuinely improve the researcher experience through interoperability.
The journey hasn’t been without complexity. Establishing metadata governance required careful collaboration with our legal team to determine what information belongs on landing pages, how to handle updates when grant titles change, and how to protect the integrity of evaluated application data.
Our strategy moving forward centres on two pillars: connecting and tracing. Aligned with our Open Science commitments and guided by frameworks like CoARA and DORA, we want to trace not just publications, but the full spectrum of funded outputs, such as artistic works, exhibitions, patents. We’re not fully there yet, and cultural and technical readiness across the community remains a real challenge.
Reaching 200,000 registered grants signals that the infrastructure is maturing. For Fonds de Recherche du Québec, it’s a motivation to keep contributing to the Research Nexus.
– Antoine Drouin, Analyste en gestion stratégique-Fonds de Recherche du Québec
Connecting funding to results at scale is essential for transparent, efficient research. When we began depositing European Commission research grant DOIs with Crossref, we were tackling a practical problem: grant identifiers were used inconsistently across publishers, repositories and reporting tools, making it difficult to trace outputs back to specific EU grants. A persistent, interoperable identifier helps turn fragmented references into durable links.
Grant metadata is central to our open science and open access strategy. Open, machine-readable funding information improves transparency about who funds what, and supports automated monitoring of policy requirements by connecting grants to publications and other outputs across the scholarly ecosystem.
Registering grant DOIs via the Publications Office of the European Union and depositing them with Crossref is now fully integrated into our internal workflows. We have learned that the DOI is just the starting point: long-term value comes from maintaining high-quality, consistent metadata throughout a grant’s lifecycle and updating it as information evolves.
The benefits are clear: improved discoverability of grants, stronger links between funding and outputs, and more robust reporting and analytics. Reaching 200 000 registered grants is a community milestone showing grant identifiers can work at scale and strengthen connections between funding and research results.
– Baya Remaoun, Head of Sector - CORDIS web & data at Publications Office of the European Union
Our motivation to join Crossref’s GLS was to be able to disaggregate research outputs between funders. Funders’ grant identifiers come in a range of formats, funders might change them over time, and there are also similarities between funders’ names, which is a challenge. Permanent identifiers, in this case, Crossref Grant IDs, are an opportunity to avoid some of the confusion if we are able to implement them throughout the research ecosystem.
Open Research information is a core part of our open science strategy, it is critical to both our ability to operate as a funder and to the translation of the research we fund into health impacts. That’s why Wellcome is a signatory of the Barcelona Declaration of Open Research Information. Grant metadata is core part of our work, as well as helping us to understand the outputs from the work we’ve funded, it is critical in enabling funders like Wellcome to position our portfolio effectively within the global landscape and enable equitable funding partnerships. In addition to linking grants through Crossref, our recent investment in OpenAlex to openly index grants is aiming to rapidly bolster the global visibility of grant metadata.
Internally at Wellcome we’re discussing how we can integrate grant DOIs into other workflows now that we have greater flexibility within our grants management system.
Externally we’ve struggled to see adoption of grant DOIs within the wider ecosystem, probably coming from challenges to surface the Crossref grant DOIs to our researchers but also uneven adoption across the ecosystem. Reaching the 200,000 grants registered with Crossref means that there are still huge opportunities to grow and evolve.
– Hannah Hope, Open Research Lead-Wellcome
As the Barcelona Declaration Call to Action on funding metadata makes clear, a rich and interoperable funding metadata landscape is a shared community endeavor. As grant records in Crossref grow, other members of the scholarly community need to ensure that they are included and reported back on their own record, closing the loop on funding reporting and contributing to a richer, more connected Research Nexus.
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Last Updated on June 25, 2026, 5:29 pm ET Celebrate LGBTQ+ Pride Month with ARL libraries by browsing the resources below. Boston Public Library Boston Public Library Celebrates LGBTQ+ Pride...
The post ARL Libraries Celebrate LGBTQ+ Pride Month 2026 appeared first on Association of Research Libraries.
From OCLC: As the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary, OCLC today introduces America’s 250-Year Bookshelf, a collection of 250 nonfiction books about America—one for every year since 1776—identified through data from WorldCat, the world’s most comprehensive source of information about library collections. The list reveals which books, from among the vast number written about America over […]
The post OCLC Releases “America’s 250-Year Bookshelf” Shaped by What Libraries Collect appeared first on Library Journal infoDOCKET.
The Library of Congress recently signed on as a founding member of an international organization devoted to exploring the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in cultural heritage and research contexts “for the benefit of humankind.” The eighth meeting of the organization’s flagship annual conference, Fantastic Futures, is scheduled for September 15-17, 2026. The theme of the conference is Fantastic Futures 2026: Trust in the Loop, and the meeting will be co-hosted by the Library, the National Gallery of Art, and the Smithsonian Institution, with support from staff at these organizations and the AI4LAM D.C. Chapter.
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A Cambridge workshop proposes new standard work to support provenance, attribution and metrics in scholarly communications AI tools.
The post Making AI Use of Scholarly Content Traceable, Measurable, and Trustworthy: A Meeting Report from Cambridge Scholarly AI Workshop appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
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On June 9, the Internet Archive welcomed film lovers, public domain enthusiasts, and fashionably dressed guests for an evening celebrating one of cinema’s enduring classics: Morocco (1930). Our “Top Hat […]
When you're requesting a new ROR ID for an organization, here are the three most important things to do before you fill out the request form: 1) Search the registry to see whether the organization already has a ROR ID, 2) Make sure the organization is in scope for ROR, and 3) Collect links to research outputs that acknowledge the organization as an author affiliation, funder, or publisher.
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Last Updated on June 26, 2026, 1:33 pm ET Amy Deschenes is Harvard Library’s interim director of UX & Discovery and co-chaired the library’s AI Steering Working Group. Katherine Klosek...
The post Stewarding Open Content in the AI Age: A Facilitation Guide from ARL and Harvard Library appeared first on Association of Research Libraries.
About 60 million individuals—roughly 19 percent of the US population—live in rural areas. Rural students graduate high school at higher rates than the national average (90 percent, compared to 87 percent nationally), yet only 19 percent of them go on to obtain a postsecondary degree, below the national average of 33 percent. Fewer rural students enroll in college, and when they do, they are more likely to drop out before obtaining a credential. That’s why Ithaka S+R recently launched the Rural Student Success Network, which aims to support 17 rural-serving institutions in boosting rural student enrollment, support, and workforce outcomes.
The post The Geography of Postsecondary Pursuit appeared first on Ithaka S+R.
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I connected an LLM to search Primo and found it was excellent at academic database discovery to help less experienced users
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Today's post reflects on how scholarly publishing professionals balance camaraderie with market competition, and how 3 "frenemies" navigate complex industry dynamics.
The post Frenemies: A Tale of Scholarly Publishing Marketing appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
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From The Royal Society: An archive of over 1,600 sets of meteorological, magnetic and tidal observations taken from 1706-1915 from across the globe has been digitised for the first time. The treasure trove of historic weather data and imagery is now available for scientists across the globe to study on the Royal Society’s Science in the […]
The post The Royal Society: Historic Weather Data Made Available to Scientists and Public, Spanning Antarctica to Greenland appeared first on Library Journal infoDOCKET.
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by Marie Kochsiek Decentralized technologies have the potential to create a better web: one that upholds people’s privacy, security, and self-determination. Yet, for many communities, the current web has failed to […]
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Please read the current privacy policy and note your rights under it.
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While it’s true that AI may be viewed as "legitimate," it’s far from universally loved. Understanding that distinction tells us something important about how the technology may ultimately be adopted — and governed — within academia.
The post Guest Post — Legitimate but Not Loved: What Academic Librarians Think About AI appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
We are pleased to announce the re-launch of the Crossref Service Providers Program. From today, we are accepting applications from organisations providing tools for metadata registration to Crossref members. Participation in this program is free and the application involves an accreditation process to determine eligibility and the appropriate participation tier.
As a membership organisation, Crossref supports its members to provide rich and complete metadata which facilitates integrity judgements, increases discoverability, linking among scholarly objects and activities, and improves transparency. Service providers are key collaborators in this work because they enable our members to adopt better metadata practices.
We ran an earlier version of this program which was paused in 2022 for review. We are now pleased to reintroduce the program as a new structure for our collaboration with service providers. If you are an organisation that provides tools that enable record registration for Crossref members, we invite you to apply for the program via this application form.
Crossref service providers have historically included organisations such as hosting platforms, manuscript submission systems, grant management systems, XML and metadata providers, and other general publishing services organisations that work with Crossref members to create, register, and/or display metadata on their behalf. As we re-launch the program, the initial focus will be purely on service providers that enable content registration for Crossref members. In the future, and based on community feedback, the program may expand to include additional types of service providers.
The primary goal of the program is to enable registration and maintenance of high-quality and rich metadata by Crossref members, contributing to a more complete research nexus. We aim to achieve this through a closer collaboration between Crossref and service providers. Participants of the Service Providers Program will make reasonable efforts to accommodate any changes made to the Crossref schema, promote best metadata practices as per Crossref Participation Reports, and share information about the services that they are able to integrate and provide to their clients.
Participants of the Service Providers Program will benefit from learning about changes and new services ahead of time coupled with regular updates about our services and policies. We will also list all accredited service providers on our website, and all participants will receive a digital Crossref badge to display on their website. We look forward to providing participants with credentials to access our test system for testing integrations, and providing training where necessary.
Better metadata support helps improve discoverability, transparency, and the integrity of the scholarly record. We developed two Service Providers Program tiers in order to signal to the community the richness of metadata and support these organisations offer to Crossref members. At the Basic Tier, participants are able to provide members with the core metadata support, while the Advanced Tier includes additional features that enable richer metadata support for Crossref members – the details are laid out below.
Applications to join the program are being accepted via this form. The application form asks for basic organisational information including your contact details and the services you provide to Crossref members. You will then be asked about your organisation’s technical capabilities and workflows, including your ability to support metadata registration, manage multiple client prefixes, and comply with the display guidelines for Crossref DOIs. The form also includes questions about metadata support, such as whether your platform can facilitate the deposit and update of recommended and optional metadata elements, which schema versions you are able to support, and the provision of alternative metadata delivery options.
We recommend reviewing the questions to ensure that the appropriate technical and operational requirements can be met before beginning the application. If you require clarification on any of these questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to us.
In addition to meeting all the Basic Tier requirements, applicants must confirm whether they:
Following a review of application forms, we will schedule accreditation calls from August 2026 onward that will involve demonstrations of the required functionality and an assessment of the applicant’s ability to meet the requirements of the program. This process will help determine the appropriate tier.
We ask that participants on the Service Providers Program renew their accreditation at the beginning of each calendar year, starting in 2028. This will entail the submission of a re-accreditation form which may contain new requirements such as support for newer schema versions.
We look forward to working more closely with service providers to support richer metadata and seamless infrastructure workflows.
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Last Updated on June 26, 2026, 12:47 pm ET The ARL Daily Intelligence is the trusted source of news and analysis for library leaders and advocates. Released Monday through Thursday, the ARL Daily...
The post ARL Daily Intelligence (June 22–25) appeared first on Association of Research Libraries.
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Governments produce an abundance of information and put that information in the public domain, but often the public can’t easily find or access it. The Internet Archive’s Democracy’s Library project […]
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Today's post explores what happens to the scholarly content platform when AI agents become the users.
The post A Platform Comes Apart: Part 1 appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
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From a Crossref Post by Patricia Feeney: A significant update is nearly here. Schema 5.5 will expand contributor metadata to support multiple roles per contributor, and will introduce support for CRediT — the ANSI/NISO taxonomy for contributor roles. This means that an individual’s complete contribution to a research output can finally be described in our metadata, rather […]
The post A Look at the “Story of Crossref’s Metadata Development” appeared first on Library Journal infoDOCKET.
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From PC World: That chaotic, 1995-era state of the web is similar to where we are now with the “agentic” web. Just like users struggled to find URLs back in those days, so do AI agents struggle to find the tools they need to actually get things done online. When you ask an AI agent […]
The post Standards: Say Hello to the Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) Specification appeared first on Library Journal infoDOCKET.
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Last Updated on June 19, 2026, 10:37 am ET Juneteenth is an annual commemoration of the emancipation of enslaved people in the United States of America. Below are events and...
The post ARL Observes Juneteenth 2026 appeared first on Association of Research Libraries.
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Today, we offer reflections on the SSP Annual Meeting from our 2026 Fellowship cohort.
The post Ask the Fellows: SSP’s 2026 Annual Meeting appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Three years ago, we asked our members what they needed from Crossref’s metadata. We received confirmation that we were going in the right direction, as well as some new ideas to explore. This helped set the course for our metadata development work since then, and continues to guide where we’re headed next.
Every metadata update we make is driven by the same set of priorities: supporting metadata that reflects our organizational truths, focusing on what metadata our members can actually provide, and aligning with best practices, vocabularies, and standards that our wider scholarly community has established. More recently our Metadata Advisory Group has helped us explore both the minutia of working with metadata as well as larger ideas around the value and impact of the metadata we support.
Our schema 5.4 update included several new or expanded types of metadata. First, citation metadata can now be labeled with a publication type. This means when a work cites an article, a preprint, a dataset, or software, that distinction is clear, helping make citations without an accompanying DOI metadata record easier to identify. Second, version information is now supported across all record types, giving the scholarly record a more precise handle on exactly which version of a work is being described.
We’ve also made two meaningful improvements to how funding relationships are captured. ROR IDs are now supported as funder identifiers in both our standard metadata schema and our grants-specific schema. Also, Grant DOIs can now be explicitly identified within funding metadata, making it possible to draw clearer lines between research outputs and the grants that supported them.
A significant update is nearly here. Schema 5.5 will expand contributor metadata to support multiple roles per contributor, and will introduce support for CRediT — the ANSI/NISO taxonomy for contributor roles. This means that an individual’s complete contribution to a research output can finally be described in our metadata, rather than flattened into a single role or omitted entirely. The schema isn’t released yet, but the final version of the XML schema is available in our GitLab repository for those who want to get a head start.
We’ll next begin implementation work for a new Grants schema (0.3.0). This update will remodel investigator names to include a new role (beneficiary) as well as an organizational grant recipient, making it possible to include recipient info for grants given to organizations. Grant records include project metadata, so this update will also include support for RAiD, a persistent identifier for projects. The XML schema for this update is also available in a GitLab repository.
Our next planned major update will build substantially on the contributor work in version 5.5. In the next version (6.0) we will remodel names to expand our current limited structure to support a variety of name types as well as alternate names. We’ll also expand the contributor identifiers we collect to include ISNI and Wikidata identifiers, better supporting contributors for whom an ORCID is not possible. Our organizational contributor will be remodeled as well to include organization-level identifiers like ROR.
We’ll also introduce statements to Crossref metadata. Statements will allow members to include free-text statements including funding acknowledgements, ethics declarations, AI usage disclosures, and other important contextual information that doesn’t fit neatly into structured fields.
Other updates include expanding our support for abstracts encoding beyond JATS to include ONIX, BITS, and a generic markup option, and implementing better in-schema validation to avoid surprises at the time of deposit.
Progress means letting go of the past. We’re planning to deprecate all schemas prior to version 5.3.1 by the end of 2027, to be carried out in phases as outlined in our deprecation blog post. This is a necessary step to keep our infrastructure sustainable and to ensure members are working with schemas that reflect current capabilities and standards.
Beyond 6.0, we’re exploring further support for provenance in metadata (to establish who is doing what to a metadata record), a rethinking of how we handle dates so that they better capture the lifecycle of a research object, better support for research objects we don’t yet fully support, and making our metadata inputs more consistent. The Metadata Development roadmap has full details on what’s being explored and prioritized.
Each of these updates contributes to Crossref’s research nexus vision: strengthening connections between funders and research, more accurately capturing and recognizing contributor roles in the scholarly record, and collecting free-text content to fill in the gaps that structured metadata alone can’t address. Better metadata means better research integrity and more trustworthy infrastructure for everyone who depends on it.
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Building robust citation and attribution into generative AI systems are foundational to usage, credit and trust. We need to expect more from AI.
The post Attribution, Provenance, Reference, Citation, and AI for Research Applications – Understanding the Differences appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
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From the Arkansas Advocate: Dozens of Arkansans told the Department of Education that they oppose requiring public libraries to restrict children’s access to “sexually explicit materials” in order to receive state funding. At least 62 people submitted concerns in writing by Friday about the draft rule requiring libraries to ensure patrons age 16 or younger cannot check out materials that […]
The post Report: “Dozens Object to Rule Requiring Arkansas Libraries To Restrict ‘Sexually Explicit’ Materials” appeared first on Library Journal infoDOCKET.
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What does it take to lead a library today? Ithaka S+R and the Chronicle of Higher Education are pleased to offer an innovative professional development program tailored to the needs of prospective and current library leaders. The Library and Institutional Success will run virtually from July 13-23 and offer a variety of seminars and workshops designed to empower participants to develop their leadership skills and drive institutional success.
The post The Library and Institutional Success appeared first on Ithaka S+R.
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A German court ruled against a mandatory article deposit requirement under Germany's "secondary publication right" (SPR). Whatever the intentions, SPR is mainly going to contribute to the degradation of the record of science.
The post Academic Freedom for the Win; Open Access Mandate in Germany Declared Unconstitutional appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
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Last Updated on June 18, 2026, 3:55 pm ET The ARL Daily Intelligence is the trusted source of news and analysis for library leaders and advocates. Released Monday through Thursday, the ARL Daily...
The post ARL Daily Intelligence (June 15–18) appeared first on Association of Research Libraries.
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What 2004 can teach us about 2024 — and the librarians who keep getting the lesson wrong
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This post was authored by Vincent Coltellino from the Library of Congress. Vincent leads the Library’s synthetic DNA data storage initiative, which investigates the feasibility of synthetic DNA as a high-density, scalable, and durable medium for storing the Library’s digital collections. During his first year at the Library, he established a contract with the University of Washington designed to critically analyze the processes required to implement DNA data storage technology on the Library’s digital collections. This partnership has yielded critical lessons that have been relayed to the greater DNA data storage community and a novel contribution to America’s Time Capsule in celebration of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
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The science blogging archive Rogue Scholar launched a new feature this week: author profile pages. This feature is similar to functionality common to blogging platforms, but integrates all blog posts by a given author that were archived in Rogue Scholar.
The functionality depends on an ORCID assigned to the blog
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Today's guest post is an urgent call for the SSP community to push back on the US government (OMB), which is poised to overhaul the concept of federal research grants.
The post Guest Post — The US Government’s New Guidance for Federal Grants and The Case for Scholarly Societies appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.