Alert service highlights record changes

CrossRef has launched the CrossMark update identification service to alert researchers to important changes that may occur to published scholarly content and highlight important publication record information. The CrossMark service has been piloted by several CrossRef member publishers for the past year. 

'Finding update and corrections for scholarly documents can be a frustrating business for researchers, especially in an environment where content is available from so many channels,' said CrossRef executive director Ed Pentz. 'Scholarly publishers routinely note changes to their content, but how this is done varies from publisher to publisher, which can make them difficult to locate. Before CrossMark, researchers had no way to tell if any changes had occurred to a PDF that they had downloaded months earlier. Now by simply clicking a single, recognisable logo, any reader can have access to this important information.'

The cost of the CrossMark system will be borne by the CrossRef participating publishers, with the result that the status and publication record information will be openly available to readers, libraries and any organization that might find the data useful. Almost 20,000 documents from 21 journals have live CrossMark logos on their web sites, and working logos will be added to these journals’ PDF files shortly. Of those documents, 290 have noted updates.