Smart alone, brilliant together

As a not-for-profit membership organization for scholarly publications, Crossref allows users to find, link, cite, and assess a range of content with ease. Along with more than 5,000 publishing members of all shapes and sizes, the company embraces technology providers, funders, libraries, and researchers as well. Unlike many other traditional annual meetings, the one for Crossref this year, named Crossref LIVE16, was a 2-day event filled with both quite casual and plenary sessions with the underlying theme of 'smart alone, brilliant together.' On the first day of November, Crossref LIVE16 had a grand opening with a mashup day, where scholars were welcomed and had time to chat with Crossref staff in an open-house atmosphere. Attendees were able to see the latest projects by the Crossref team members, ask questions, and share ideas. The second day of the event mainly revolved around different sessions, with a series of presentations by invited speakers as well as the Crossref team, including its executive director, Mr. Ed Pentz, one of my close colleagues. All of the talks were highly informative. For example, Mr. Dario Taraborelli, the Director of Research at the Wikimedia Foundation, conveyed a powerful message about the importance of text and content mining rights and open metadata for scientific literature, which can enable biocurators and open knowledge contributors to share information with the public. Mr. Ian Clavert, a senior data scientist at Digital Science, also discussed his thoughts on the current trends and patterns of published metadata using the Crossref metadata application programming interfaces. Crossref has been pursuing its mission in 5 ways: rallying the community; tagging metadata; running a shared infrastructure; playing with new technology; and creating tools and services to improve research communication. We are currently expecting the release of Crossref Event Data, a community-led service that will provide open data on events that occur around scholarly research objects on the web. Event Data will track shares, mentions, and likes from social media, sharing platforms, and blogs, as well as links to datasets. Incorporating all Crossref projects starting with relevant working groups, Crossref can build a framework that will make scholarly content more discoverable in order to accomplish the goals of a new initiative, known as Metadata 2020. As Editor-in-Chief of JPIS and Vice Chairman of the Korean Association of Medical Journal Editors Committee for Information Management, I deeply appreciated the aim of Crossref LIVE16, which was to gather the …