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.
We are delighted to report that last year Crossref welcomed a record-breaking 1,939 new members and, because our member base is growing so rapidly in both headcount and geography—with the highest number of new members joining from Asia—we thought it was a good time to reiterate what Crossref is all about, as well as show off a little about the things we are proud to have achieved in 2017.
What is Crossref?
We are an organization that runs a registry of metadata and DOIs of course, but we are much more than that—staff, board, working groups, and committees as well as a broad range of collaborators, users, and supporters in the wider scholarly communications community. Increasingly, our community includes new contributors like scholars, funders, and universities. Together, we are all working toward the same goal—to enhance scholarly communications. Everything we do is designed to put scholarly content in context so that the content our members publish can be found, cited, used, and re-used.
Here’s how we did that over the past year:
We rallied the community
Rallying the community is all about working together to forge new relationships and pave the way for future generations of researchers—in 2017 we were closely involved with the launch of Metadata 2020; a collaboration that advocates richer, connected, and reusable metadata for all research outputs.
We tagged and shared metadata
To make sure that our APIs continue to have real, genuine utility, we introduced a new service called Metadata Plus in 2017 so that platforms and tools can leverage the power of our rich, immense database to increase the value and discoverability of content.
We played with new technology
To keep pace with changes in the industry and stay true to our mission, we often play with new technology with the goal of offering a bigger and better infrastructure. In 2017 we formed a working group and an advisory group for two new identifiers that will see this infrastructure increase; Organization IDs which became ROR, and Grant IDs which became the Crossref Grant Linking System.
We made new tools and services
Combining our own knowledge and experience with input from the wider community, in 2017 we were able to launch in Beta a new and exciting tool called Event Data. Event Data provides a record of where research has been bookmarked, linked, recommended, shared, referenced, commented on etc, beyond publisher platforms—which is a great example of putting scholarly research in a wider context.
So, while richer metadata (including more record and resource types) remains our focus 2018 and beyond, we also hope that as we become a bigger and more global community we can move beyond the basics and work together to make sure that DOIs, are not the be-all and end-all when they are, in fact, just the beginning.
