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’d like to invite the scholarly publishing community to get together in Boston this November with the Crossref Annual Meeting as a rally point. This is the event we hold just once a year to get the whole team under one roof, host a lively discussion with the leading voices in scholarly communications, present technical workshops, and offer you the chance to get hands’ on with our latest metadata services. Our free two-day event takes place from November 17-18, 2015 in Boston, MA.
Agenda:
Tuesday, November 17 - Tech Workshops:
The morning is an opportunity to get into small groups and talk directly with our development and support teams. We will present best practices around using Crossref’s metadata. After lunch, we will feature member case studies with tips on implementation and lessons learned. If you’re on the technical production side of scholarly publishing, you’ll want to be there — and not just for the beer & pretzels afterwards.
Wednesday, November 18 - Member Meeting:
A day to hear from thought leaders from the larger scholarly publishing community as well as from inside Crossref. Our keynote speaker will be Dr. Ben Goldacre (Bad Science), and our distinguished speakers include Dr. Scott Chamberlain (rOpenSci), Dr. Juan Pablo Alperin (Public Knowledge Project), and Dr. Martin Eve, (Open Library of Humanities). We will share details about the road map for Crossref Labs’ current and future initiatives, hear about the latest organizational developments from new members of our team, and see the debut of our new brand logo and communications strategy. Following the formal discussion, we’ll continue the conversation over cocktails as part of our celebration of Crossref’s milestone 15th Anniversary!
Scholarly publishers, technology providers, librarians, researchers, academic institutions, funders, journalists, and others who are keen to discuss tools and services to advance scholarly publishing are encouraged to attend.
About Crossref Crossref is a not-for profit membership organization that wants to improve research communication. We organize publisher metadata, run the infrastructure that makes DOI links work, and we rally multiple community stakeholders in order to develop tools and services to enable advancements in scholarly publishing.
