Presentation by Ed Pentz at Crossref London LIVE, 26th September 2017.

2. Crossref:
future
direction
London LIVE17, 26 September 2017
Ed Pentz
Executive Director
@epentz

3. Best
Practice
References, Abstracts
ORCID iDs
Funding, licenses
Crossmark: corrections &
retractions
DOI Display

4. https://doi.org/10.5468/ogs.2016.59.1.1
doi:10.5468/ogs.2016.59.1.1

5. Strategic
Scenario Planning

6. Distinctive Competencies
• What an organization does better than anyone else that
also is not easily replicated

7. Reputation as Trusted, Neutral One-Stop Resource
• Crossref has developed a transparent and trusted
relationship within the scholarly communication community.
They are considered a one-stop resource for those working
within scholarly communication. As the scholarly
communication space and community continues to evolve,
how can Crossref most effectively invest in and apply this
reputation in service of improved scholarly communication?

8. Manage Scholarly Communication Infrastructure through Technical
Knowledge and Innovation
• By “developing and running a scholarly infrastructure that
enables scholarly content to be cited, linked and assessed,”
Crossref has developed a distinctive competency around
managing the scholarly communication infrastructure by
expertly applying technical and innovative skills to what are
a wide range of problems and opportunities for
improvement.

9. Convene and Facilitate Scholarly Communication Community
Collaboration
• With its trusted and neutral reputation, Crossref is uniquely
positioned to be the convener and facilitator for critical
areas that require collaboration across the publishing and
scholarly communication community.

10. Critical Uncertainties
•Scholarly Communications Landscape - financing
•Geopolitical Stability and Stance
•Cybersecurity
•Tracking and Privacy
•Publisher Sustainability
•Policy and Regulation

11. Critical uncertainties
•Source of Prestige, Recognition
•Rise of preprint and new content sources
•Machine Learning and AI
•Quality and Accuracy of Content
•Impact of Open
•Rise of the Citizen Scientist

12. Core Strategies

13. Expanding constituency and services
• Crossref must expand its constituency and the services its
offer to grow in relevance. Through this strategy, Crossref
can insure the organization is representative of an
increasingly diverse set of producers and consumers of
scholarly communication and content.
• Funders, small publishers, new service providers,
researchers, citizen science.

14. Strategic collaboration and partnering
• The primary focus of this strategy is to continue collaborating
with existing organizations on metadata and identifiers and
focus on expanding existing infrastructure and organizations
rather than creating things from scratch. New services should
focus on establishing relationships between scholarly research
objects, researchers and institutions via metadata and identifiers
• Collaboration around metadata and services could lead longer
term to the consolidating of various organizations in the
scholarly communication and identifier space…this strategy can
be accomplished through strategic partnerships on the merger
and consolidation of the metadata itself.

15. Enabling
Strategies

16. Radically simplifying our services
• Crossref’s existing and future offering must be increasingly
easy to access and use by an expanding pool of users with
varying levels of skill in metadata access, use, deposit, and
extraction. A significant capital investment is required to
radically simplify Crossref’s services and offerings. In the
end, however, Crossref will save on costs. New skills and
capabilities associated with simplification and front-end
development will needed to be employed.

17. Tracking provenance and relationships with metadata
• Provenance tracking requires trusted content and metadata,
which Crossref has already achieved. This strategy builds
on the work already underway within Crossref with
Crossmark and relationships, to allow provenance to be
tracked within metadata

18. Building Quality Control and Validation of Metadata
• Crossref is enhancing quality control and validation of
metadata when it is registered. This strategy needs to
expand that activity as content is registered earlier and
earlier in the research and publishing process. Publishers
are looking to reduce costs, gain efficiency in workflows and
to build in house capabilities in new technologies and AI.

19. Implementing Open Source across scholarly communication
• Some parts of the publisher workflow could be
commoditized and standardized around Open Source
systems and allow publishers to focus investments in areas
that add value to scholarly communication in new and
innovative ways. Crossref can use its neutrality and
convening capability to get key stakeholders to address
Open Source, which is collectively beneficial to the full
scholarly publishing industry and scholarly communication
more broadly.

20. Discussion
1. React to the critical uncertainties and strategic
priorities
2. Is your own organization recognizing similar trends?
3. What other opportunities could you see Crossref
taking on?
4. What keeps you up at night?

21. Thank you for
joining us today

22. Outputs to Outcomes
• The is a world in which funders are the major purchasers of
publishing driven by unstable geopolitics and protectionism.
With funders driving the agenda, the focus turns to research
outcomes and metrics and impact factors associated with
research work.

23. Oligopolization
• This is a scenario in which the scholarly communication
landscape is consolidating and publisher sustainability is in
question, leading to the privatization of publishing by large
and influential private players such as Amazon and Google.
The majority of publishing is published on a few mega
platforms controlled by oligarchs and billionaire private
funders. Research is primarily funded by private sources
and foundations with significant influence.

24. Rise of the Machines
• This is a world in which publishers are looking to save
costs. They are focused on where they can bring value.
They focus on brand prestige and quality. To succeed in this
world Crossref needs to move into the space of AI enabled,
interoperability, and publishing workflow to save research
time and publisher costs. The scholarly space is open,
seamless, connected, and is poised to disintermediate
publishing, linking, and identifiers.

25. Beyond the Death Spiral
• This is a world in which publishing is in place, but has less
dominance. With the rise of pre-prints and other new
content sources and the entrants of machine learning,
publishing transforms dramatically and is being processed
by an increasingly new and diverse set of players in an ever-
expanding array of content formats and types. The industry
will continue to consolidate as there will be less money in
the market. Machine learning replaces curated data, quality
evaluation and traditional peer review.

26. Dawn of Democratization
• This is a scenario on the democratization of research; where
citizen scientists, researchers, research groups,
consultancies, and hyper new outlets emerge and transform
the scholarly communication space into a broader public
space of understand and knowledge development. In this
scenario, data is expanding very quickly, but navigating the
many sources and types of content from highly informal
forms to traditional publications in increasingly difficult.