In early 2011 CrossRef will be launching a new service, CrossMark, which will have a major impact on scholarly publishing. Scholarly publishers play important roles by both certifying the scholarly literature and providing ongoing stewardship of content by making corrections, amendments, enhancements and even withdrawals and retractions. Researchers find it increasingly difficult to distinguish between different versions of a publication on the web and can’t easily determine whether something is a version of record and what the current status of a document is.
From a practical standpoint, the publisher can only make these updates to copies of the work that they control and are responsible for. This means researcher can only expect the publisher-maintained copies of a publication to be completely up-to-date. Unfortunately, researchers have no standard way in which to determine whether they are looking at a publisher-maintained copy of a publication. The CrossMark service from CrossRef is designed to address these issues.
