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.
Unfortunately, Bryan Vickery has moved onto pastures new. I would like to thank him for his many contributions at Crossref and we all wish him well.
I’m now pleased to announce that Rachael Lammey will be Crossref’s new Director of Product starting on Monday, May 16th.
Rachael’s skills and experience are perfectly suited for this role. She has been at Crossref since 2012 and has deep knowledge and experience of all things Crossref: our mission; our members; our culture; and our services.
In all her roles at Crossref Rachael has demonstrated how community-focused product development can be done.
Starting as a Product Manager for Similarity Check and Crossmark, she then led community discussions on text and data mining and taxonomies, introduced our support of preprints, and led the very successful ORCID Auto-update integration. She initiated our important partnership with the Public Knowledge Project including scoping and overseeing the joint plugin development work over the years. She helped to grow the Sponsors program, establish the LIVE informational events, oversaw the founding of our ambassador program, engaged more research funders and institutions, and became a go-to person for data citation expertise in our community.
In her brief time in our Research & Development team, she helped to kick off that group’s reinvigoration and has engaged with numerous new community and technical initiatives. Such relationships—together with her knowledge of our systems and API—have enabled her to be a key driver in the development and adoption of ROR and grants - two of the highest strategic priorities of recent years.
Rachael says:
“Alignment in planning and focusing on delivering outcomes will be my initial priorities. I’m conscious that we have a lot in play and I want to support the product team in their existing and ambitious goals while working with the leadership team and our very diverse community to focus and prioritise our development roadmap. I’m really grateful for this opportunity and I am looking forward to working with our members, users, and other open infrastructure organisations in this new capacity”.
Our staff and the board are very enthusiastic about Rachael’s appointment and we know our community will be too. Please join us in congratulating Rachael!
