Registry of Editorial Boards: update
In March 2022, we put out a call for feedback on a proposal for Crossref to create a Registry of Editorial Boards, with the aim of encouraging best practice around editorial boards’ information and governance that can easily be accessed and used by the community.
Firstly, thanks to all of you who took the time to give feedback on our idea. We had some very positive comments along the lines of:
Some more cautious:
And some cautioning against creating more bureaucracy and barriers to entry for publications, publishers and editors:
This variety of responses was reflected in the survey responses we received.
We owe you an update.
We’ve been evaluating your feedback and discussing the ‘how’. We have also been progressing other strands of work around the Integrity of the Scholarly Record (ISR). And we’ve been talking to other groups who are working on complementary initiatives so that we don’t duplicate effort.
We have also been working on a ton of other stuff. Prioritization is not our forte, especially when everything feels important (we’re working on that too). Due to that, we’re pausing this work until we can dedicate the necessary time and resources to it, and will revisit where we stand in mid-2023. That doesn’t mean we’re totally abandoning it – it remains on the radar for our Labs team and Dominika, our Head of Strategic Initiatives has joined the advisory board for the Journal Observatory Project who are building an infrastructure to allow different sources like TRANSPOSE, DOAJ, and others (maybe us) to assert everything they have about journals. We’re also talking with PKP about their Publication Facts project.
For those supportive of the project, sorry this might not be the news you were hoping for, but we want to be realistic about what we can achieve in the next few years and what we can get on with right away. For those less supportive, we’ve heard your concerns and will bear them in mind when we come back to this or other similar projects. I want to say ‘watch this space’, we’ll be watching a few spaces and seeing how, where and when we can continue to support efforts around the integrity of the scholarly record.