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.
The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) provides a set of guidelines for operating open infrastructure in service to the scholarly community. It sets out 16 points to ensure that the infrastructure on which the scholarly and research communities rely is openly governed, sustainable, and replicable. Each POSI adopter regularly reviews progress, conducts periodic audits, and self-reports how they’re working towards each of the principles.
In 2020, Crossref’s board voted to adopt the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure, and we completed our first self-audit. We published our next review in 2022.
The POSI adopters have continued to review the principles, reflecting on the effects of adopting them and providing a revision to the principles in late 2023. We use the revised principles for this latest review.
Key
We use a traffic light system to indicate where we believe we stand against each of the 16 principles. Now with up/down arrows to show any significant movement, and an ‘i’ where there is something of note with narrative.
red indicates we are not fulfilling the principle.
yellow indicates we are making progress towards meeting the principle.
green indicates we are fulfilling the principle.
or
means this is a new change, where we’ve moved ‘up’ the traffic lights, in comparison to the previous audit. We would use the same if ‘down’ ever happens too.
or
means that something has changed of note and in comparison to the previous audit.
GOVERNANCE
Coverage across the scholarly enterprise
Stakeholder governed
Non-discriminatory participation or membership
Transparent governance
Cannot lobby
Living will
Formal incentives to fulfil mission & wind-down
What’s changed with governance
Stakeholder governed
We’ve been yellow and we’re still yellow, but it has been improving. In the past, we’ve reported that we are working towards this but we’re not there yet because we didn’t have representation on the board from certain types of members, specifically research funders and research institutions. In the incoming 2025 board class, we have both. Six out of our 16 board seats are held by universities, university presses, or libraries. We also look forward to adding a new research funder, the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), to the board in January.
None of this, though, is hardcoded into the structure of the board. We extend an open call for board interest; any active member can apply for consideration. The Nominating Committee prepares a slate with a diverse range of candidates and organizations, and it is then up to the membership to elect board members.
With only 16 board seats and >21,000 members in 160 countries, being fully stakeholder-governed is challenging. Further, there are important contributors to the community that we all rely on who are not eligible for board seats because they are not members, as defined in our by-laws, such as sponsors, service providers, and metadata users.
We don’t consider this principle fulfilled, and that’s a good thing to keep note of; we must keep aspiring to have a broader, more comprehensive representation of our evolving community. The board continues to discuss stakeholder representation.
SUSTAINABILITY
Time-limited funds are used only for time-limited activities
Goal to generate surplus
Goal to create financial reserves
Mission-consistent revenue generation
Revenue based on services, not data
What’s changed with sustainability
Goal to create financial reserves
This was yellow and is now green. In 2023, we met our goal of maintaining a contingency fund of 12 months of operating costs. We also topped up this fund in 2024 to keep pace with our growing operating expenses. The revisions for POSI 1.1 actually removed the specificity of a 12-month timeline, allowing each adopting organisation to set its own goal; in Crossref’s case, 12 months remains appropriate.
INSURANCE
Open source
Open data (within constraints of privacy laws)
Available data (within constraints of privacy laws)
Patent non-assertion
What’s changed with insurance
Open source
This was yellow and still is, but we’re making improvements. In September of this year we migrated our database off of a closed-source solution and onto PostgreSQL. This has improved the performance of the system and is an important step towards paying down technical debt and moving the system fully into the cloud.
Patent non-assertion
This was yellow and is now green. We confirm that we do not hold any patents, and we have a published policy on it that is available for inspection and reuse by anyone in the community.
In summary
These are the main changes of note for our 2024 POSI update. The summary is that we’ve maintained all our greens, and of the four principles that were yellow last time, two have moved to green (financial reserves; patent non-assertion) and two have remained yellow but seen some progress of note (stakeholder governed; open source).
Please let us have any comments or questions; by commenting here it will add a public record of the discussion on our community forum. Here is an image to share, if needed.
We continue to learn from the POSI adopters group—now numbering 23 organisations—and the group will soon share a draft of POSI v2 for community comment. We look forward to the ongoing discussions with this group, and others, to keep improving and holding ourselves to account.
