Oh Crossref | Gabe Stein

Let me preface this by saying I really like and respect Crossref. The people I’ve met and corresponded with who work there are universally nice and well meaning. And I think its potential is drastically underrated, mostly due to its legacy tech stack. I mean, it’s basically living the semantic web/web3 dream as a giant, free-to-query database in the sky that allows machines to understand what’s (supposed to be) living at a given URI independent of the content itself — and, increasingly, what other people are saying about that URI. That’s a pretty amazing feat. But woof, where it falls short, it really falls short, and ends up hampering innovation as a result. Today, I learned that the service only supports depositing peer reviews with isReviewOf relationships to content already registered at Crossref. This means that if you review, for example, an arXiv preprint (arXiv uses DataCite to provide DOIs), and you want to publish it openly, you have deposit that peer review to Crossref without the metadata link to the reviewed content.undefined This limitation will have a stifling effect on the growing open peer review movement, especially when it comes to preprint reviews, by making it harder for researchers to get credit for reviewing work openly, for authors to find feedback about their work, and for researchers who study research to understand the impacts and growth of open review. Worse still, the Crossref team tells me that this is not even close to a high priority for them, meaning it will most likely be years before we see it implemented, if we ever do. As a result, even as movements like ASAPBio’s #PublishYourReviews campaign, open evaluation platforms like eLife’s Sciety, and the joint Docmaps effortundefined to capture editorial processes gain steam, they will be limited by the failure of key infrastructure to support their innovations.