Crossmark policy page

DOI: https://doi.org/10.56294/mwcrossmark

The journal Seminars in Medical Writing and Education is committed to ensuring high quality standards in all its publications.

Crossmark is a multi-publisher initiative from Crossref to provide a standard way for readers to locate the current version of a piece of content. Quantum is committing to maintaining the content it publishes, and to alerting readers to changes if and when they occur.

Research doesn’t stand still: even after publication, articles can be updated with supplementary data or corrections. It’s important to know if the content being cited has been updated, corrected, or retracted - and that’s the assurance that publishers can offer readers by using Crossmark. It’s a standardized button, consistent across platforms, revealing the status of an item of content, and can display any additional metadata the member chooses. Crucially, the Crossmark button embeds in PDFs, which means that members have a way of alerting readers to changes months or even years after it’s been downloaded.

With one click, you can see if content has been updated, corrected, or retracted, and access valuable additional metadata provided by the member, such as key publication dates (submission, revision, acceptance), authors’ ORCID iDs, content type, plagiarism screening status, and information about funding, license, peer review, and location of research data.

For the purposes of Crossmark, there are two categories of updates: minor and major changes.

• Minor changes include correcting formatting and spelling. There are no substantive changes you would need to alert the reader to, so the Crossmark status is current. If changes don’t affect the crediting or interpretation of the work, the Crossmark status remains as it is. This also applies to article versioning - if the changes between versions of a work don’t reflect major changes in the content of the paper, keep the Crossmark status as current.
• Major changes affect the Crossmark status of the work, as Crossmark is geared towards letting readers know about significant changes to the published literature. Substantial changes, such as the retraction of an article due to an error, or the addition or removal of an author, should be reflected in a work’s Crossmark status. It is good practice to publish a notice of correction or retraction (with its own DOI) and not put it behind access control. This allows readers to follow the link in the Crossmark button and find further details about the update.