In the first half of this year we’ve been talking to our community about post-publication changes and Crossmark. When a piece of research is published it isn’t the end of the journey—it is read, reused, and sometimes modified. That’s why we run Crossmark, as a way to provide notifications of important changes to research made after publication. Readers can see if the resesarch they are looking at has updates by clicking the Crossmark logo. They also see useful information about the editorial process, and links to things like funding and registered clinical trials. All of this contributes to what we call the integrity of the scholarly record.
We had a great experience integrating the Scholastica Open Access Publishing Platform with Crossmark. The main piece we’ve talked about in terms of user adoption is helping to educate journal editors about article correction/retraction reporting best practices, because we’ve found that the COPE standard process isn’t immediately intuitive to those who’ve never done it before (e.g., publishing an update notice and then linking it to the article vs only updating the article page). We’re working on a new quick guide blog post that we’ll be sure to share with the community.