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.
Crossref member SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online), based in Brazil, celebrated two decades of operation last week with a three-day event The SciELO 20 Years Conference.
The celebration constituted an important landmark in SciELO’s evolution, and an exceptional moment for them to promote the advancement of an inclusive, global approach to scholarly communication and to the open access movement.
As part of the anniversary activities SciELO asked us to write a series of five blogs that would help the organizations of Brazil to better understand the following:
Why all articles should have a DOI
The critical role of the DOI
The basics of record types, translations, preprints, Crossmark, and more
The basics of Crossref sponsorship, and
How to make the most of your Crossref membership
Below you’ll find an abstract of each of these blog posts as well as a link to the published posts in Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish and English.
Why all articles should have a DOI In today’s world, an author’s work needs a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for it to become discoverable, citable, and linkable. This unique alphanumeric string identifies the content of a research work, and remains associated with it irrespective of changes to its web location. Discover the origins of the DOI, how Crossref was founded, and why they continue to exist and persist.
The critical role of the DOI Find out why URL links to research articles are fragile, and how DOIs are essential in building stable, persistent links between research objects. This is achieved through the metadata that members deposit with Crossref, as part of their obligations. Learn how we can all contribute to creating a global, robust research record.
The basics of record types: Preprints, Crossmark, translations, and more What’s the difference between preprints and ahead of print? When should you use each; and, what are the DOI requirements? This article answers those questions and provides a basic overview of how to connect the metadata records of related record types, like translations.
The basics of Crossref sponsorship There are many organizations that want to register content and benefit from the services Crossref provides, but may not be able to do so alone. These organizations use sponsors. Sponsors are organizations who publish on behalf of groups of smaller organizations. Nearly 650 of our 800 Brazilian members are represented by such a sponsor.
How to make the most of your Crossref membership Since Crossref was founded in 2000, its member organizations have registered metadata and persistent identifiers (DOIs) for over 100 million content items. This information is used extensively by the research community—individuals and organizations—who need to find, cite, link and assess research outputs. As a SciELO member, the metadata you provide to Crossref when you register content is key to the discoverability of your journal content.
