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 Simple Text Query form (STQ) allows users to retrieve existing DOIs for journal articles, books, and chapters by cutting and pasting a reference or reference list into a simple query box. For years the service has been heavily used by students, editors, researchers, and publishers eager to match and link references.
We had changes to the service planned for the first half of this year - an upgraded reference matching algorithm, a more modern interface, etc. In the spirit of openness and transparency, part of our project plan was to communicate these pending changes to STQ users well in advance of our 30 April completion date. What would users think? Could they help us improve upon our plans?
About a month ago, I reached out to the 21,000 plus users we had on record of using STQ since January 2018. We received nearly 85 responses from the messages we sent. Questions ranged from: if we were making changes, would PubMed ID matching be supported? To: What about the reliability of the returned reference links? And: Could we better accommodate larger reference lists?
Many of the users we heard from told us how STQ was critical to their work. I read all these messages. The concerns raised by users were legitimate and much appreciated. We reassessed our project timeline and plans, and decided to shift course. So, what are we doing?
What’s changing?
The previous hurdle of having to register your email address simply to return reference links was confusing and unnecessary. We removed it.
We previously limited the number of monthly reference links to 5,000 per email address. Most didn’t reach the limit, but those who did were frustrated by it and/or found ways around it. We want you to match and register as many references as possible, so we removed the monthly limit too.
Many of you with long reference lists found that you were occasionally reaching our limit of 30,000 characters per submission. Once again, we want you to match and register as many references as possible so we removed the character limit altogether and instead are just looking at the number of references per submission. We now provide space for 1,000 references per submission (We checked. The most references we have ever received via the STQ form in one submission was around 750. Thus, we rounded up.).
We did make a change to the backend of the service. We updated the algorithm we use to return reference links. We think it’s an improvement. Let us know how you find it.
What’s remaining the same?
Core functionality. It’s all in the name. Retrieve DOIs for journal articles, books, and chapters by cutting and pasting a reference or reference list into a simple query box.
PubMed ID matching. You use it. You need it. We’re keeping it.
Deposits. You’ll still need an email address for this, but we won’t ask for it until you’re at the deposit screen.
The interface. We’re still eager to give the user interface a much-needed refresh, but, as many users pointed out to us, there’s still some core functionality that’s important that we need to retain with any interface update. For instance, you need to be able to easily copy and paste reference links into your reference list. That functionality isn’t going anywhere.
Resetting reference links. Submit references, match, reset, and repeat. Many users like the reset button. It’s not going anywhere either.
XML queries
The change to the backend of the service that I mentioned above is not confined to reference matching and depositing for STQ users. XML queries for reference matching are also now powered by that new backend. We think it’s a seamless transition, but if you find it is not, please let us know.
I’m excited for these changes and hope you are too. I invite you to try the simpler and improved STQ form, and let us know what you think.
