An Introduction to CrossMark webinar held on Tuesday, September 27, 2011 11:00 am, Eastern Daylight Time(GMT-04:00), New York. The CrossRef member publishers attended the webinar. Patricia Feeney, the metadata quality coordinator of CrossRef, held a presentation on introduction to CrossMark.

CrossMark, is a new service from CrossRef, which will enable publishers to communicate changes and updates of their scholarly content on the web. It will be an optional service that CrossRef provides to its members.

Background:

Researchers find it increasingly difficult to distinguish between different versions of a publication on the web. This is a problem for the researcher because only some of those versions can be legitimately considered to be part of the scholarly record. It is not enough that the researcher looks at any copy of the “final version” of a publication. This is because there is no such thing as a "final version" of a scholarly publication. A scholarly publication can be enhanced, amended, corrected, updated, withdrawn and even retracted. The publisher, in its role of certifying the scholarly literature, has a duty to keep the scholarly record sound and free from fraudulent or incorrect data. They do this by updating the status of the documents that they publish when said documents undergo changes that might conceivably change the reader’s interpretation or understanding of the work. From a practical standpoint, the publisher can only make these updates to copies of the work that they control and are responsible for. This means researcher can only expect the publisher-maintained copies of a publication to be completely up-to-date. Unfortunately, researchers have no standard way in which to determine whether they are looking at a publisher-maintained copy of a publication.

What is the purpose of CrossMark?

From the user perspective, CrossMark is designed to:

• Allow the researcher to easily determine whether they are looking at a publisher-maintained copy of a scholarly document.

• Allow the user to easily ascertain the current status of a scholarly document.

•  Access and use any extra, non-bibliographic metadata that the publisher deems important to the document in question.

From the publisher perspective, CrossMark is designed to:

•   Highlight that the scholarly publisher is responsible for both the initial certification1 of a publication, as well as the ongoing stewardship of said certified publication.

•  Enable the publisher to advertise the otherwise invisible steps that they have taken to ensure the trustworthiness of their content.

What Can CrossMark be applied to?

A CrossMark can be applied to anything with a CrossRef DOI as long as:

•   The publisher applying the CrossMark is the publisher originally responsible for certifying the content or the publisher has formally inherited this responsibility (e.g. through an acquisition.)

•  The publisher applying the CrossMark is willing to assert that they will provide stewardship of the content- updating and correcting it as necessary.

•  The publisher is willing to meet the other terms & conditions associated with assigning a CrossMark to content. For example, that they will submit relevant metadata to CrossRef, adhere to certain standard in the way in which they display and link the logo, etc.

As a member of CrossRef, BioPublisher is considering to apply the CrossMark to its scholarly contents online in the future days.