This year, metadata development is one of our key priorities and we’re making a start with the release of version 5.4.0 of our input schema with some long-awaited changes. This is the first in what will be a series of metadata schema updates.
What is in this update?
Publication typing for citations
This is fairly simple; we’ve added a ‘type’ attribute to the citations members supply. This means you can identify a journal article citation as a journal article, but more importantly, you can identify a dataset, software, blog post, or other citation that may not have an identifier assigned to it. This makes it easier for the many thousands of metadata users to connect these citations to identifiers. We know many publishers, particularly journal publishers, do collect this information already and will consider making this change to deposit citation types with their records.
Every year we release metadata for the full corpus of records registered with us, which can be downloaded for free in a single compressed file. This is one way in which we fulfil our mission to make metadata freely and widely available. By including the metadata of over 165 million research outputs from over 20,000 members worldwide and making them available in a standard format, we streamline access to metadata about scholarly objects such as journal articles, books, conference papers, preprints, research grants, standards, datasets, reports, blogs, and more.
Today, we’re delighted to let you know that Crossref members can now use ROR IDs to identify funders in any place where you currently use Funder IDs in your metadata. Funder IDs remain available, but this change allows publishers, service providers, and funders to streamline workflows and introduce efficiencies by using a single open identifier for both researcher affiliations and funding organizations.
As you probably know, the Research Organization Registry (ROR) is a global, community-led, carefully curated registry of open persistent identifiers for research organisations, including funding organisations. It’s a joint initiative led by the California Digital Library, Datacite and Crossref launched in 2019 that fulfills the long-standing need for an open organisation identifier.
We began our Global Equitable Membership (GEM) Program to provide greater membership equitability and accessibility to organizations in the world’s least economically advantaged countries. Eligibility for the program is based on a member’s country; our list of countries is predominantly based on the International Development Association (IDA). Eligible members pay no membership or content registration fees. The list undergoes periodic reviews, as countries may be added or removed over time as economic situations change.
100,000,000. Yes, it’s a really big number—and you helped make it happen. We’d like to say thank you to all our members, without your commitment and contribution we would not be celebrating this significant milestone. It really is no small feat.
To help put this number into context; the National Museum of China has just over 1 million artifacts, the British Library has around 25 million books, Napster has 40 million tracks, and Wikidata currently contains 50 million+ items.
And within these record types, more than 69 million records have full-text links, 31 million+ have license information and 3 million+ contain some kind of funding information. An overview of these and other Crossref vital statistics is available on our dashboard.
100 Million—what does your contribution look like?
Our recently-launched participation reports allow anyone to see the metadata Crossref has. It’s a valuable education tool for publishers, institutions and other service providers looking to understand the availability of the metadata they have registered with us.
Through an itemized dashboard Participation Reports allows you to monitor the metadata you are registering, even if this work is done by a third party or another department. You can see for yourself where your gaps are, and what you could improve upon. Next to each metadata element, there’s a short definition, letting you know more about it, and—crucially—what practical steps you can take to improve the score.
The dashboard provides the percentage counts across ten key metadata elements: References, ORCID iDs, Funder Registry IDs, Funding award numbers, Crossmark metadata, License URLs, Text-mining links, Similarity Check URLs, and Abstracts.
And not only can you see your own metadata—the dashboard enables you to view the registered metadata of all our 11,076 members.
How are these 100 Million content records being used?
Every service we provide is based on our metadata, and our APIs expose all of that metadata. Over the past year or so we have been collecting use cases from members that actively utilize the Metadata APIs and have turned these into a Metadata APIs blog series so that we can share these stories of how our metadata is used with the wider community.
A big number. Even bigger ambitions.
Gaps or errors in metadata are passed on to thousands of other services, which causes problems downstream and means we all suffer. So it makes sense for the metadata you deposit to be as accurate and complete as possible. The more elements there are to the metadata, the higher the chance of others finding and using the content. We aim to continually find effective ways to communicate this wider story around the importance of open infrastructure and metadata.
Over the years we’ve made great progress in connecting information about researchers, their affiliations, grants, and research outputs. Imagine how much more powerful this information would be if supplemented by more comprehensive, accurate, and up-to-date metadata.
Sources - all data as of Sept 26, 2018 National Museum of China has 1,050,000 artifacts The British Library has around 25 million books, more than any other library Wikidata currently contains 50,290,632 items NAPSTER currently has 40 million tracks (Napster is known as Rhapsody in the US)
