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.
In January, I wrote about how we’ve simplified the journal title transfer process using our new Metadata Manager tool. For those disposing publishers looking for an easy, do-it-yourself option for transferring ownership of your journal, I suggest you review that blog post. But, whether you choose to process the transfer yourself via Metadata Manager or need some help from Paul, Shayn, or myself, there’s more to a transfer than just the click of a transfer button or the submission of an email to support@crossref.org, as I’m sure those of you who have been through a title transfer can attest.
Prepping your title transfer
Sometimes members get on the other side of a title transfer and find you’re encountering problems even if you followed the process for transferring titles. You might find you can register new content for the new title against your own prefix without any issues. But you are not able to update the metadata for backfile content after we’ve made the transfer.
When we investigate, the problem is usually that the DOIs you’re trying to update don’t exist in our system yet. This means the deposit isn’t considered an update to the content, it’s considered a new deposit. And you don’t have permission to do that, since you’re effectively attempting to register new content to a prefix that is not your own.
This problem is because the former publisher didn’t ever register the DOIs with us - even though they’ve been displaying them on their website. This is bad practice and isn’t in keeping with our membership terms, but it does sometimes happen.
Before you request a title transfer, do check with the former publisher that they’ve definitely registered all the DOIs that they’ve been displaying and distributing to their readership. You can spot check this yourself by following a few of the DOI links and checking that they resolve to the right place. If you want a full list of DOIs registered to a journal title, our depositor reports are the place to start. Depositor Reports list all DOIs deposited for a title on a publisher-by-publisher basis. Or, alternatively, if you know the journal cite ID, the unique internal, Crossref identifier for the journal, you can bypass the publisher-by-publisher title list (in my example you’d need to replace my fictional 123456 journal ID with your journal’s cite ID):
If your organization has gained new titles, you’ve checked the depositor report for your new journal and are happy that all the existing DOIs have been registered, then you’re ready to process the transfer. Here are three key steps to ensure a pain-free transfer.
If you are not acquiring all existing journal articles as part of this transfer, you’ll need to contact us at support@crossref.org to confirm the details. Once we have those details sorted, we’ll transfer ownership for the select, specified articles.
Carefully check the existing metadata associated with your new titles - some metadata provided for text and data mining or Similarity Check are publisher-specific and must be updated or removed when content is acquired by another member.
If the metadata supplied is fine, you just need to update the URLs to direct DOIs to your content. You can do this by sending us a URL update file or by redepositing the metadata with the correct URLs.
If you need to update more than the URLs, you should redeposit the metadata with the correct information plus the correct URLs.
Note: If you, as the disposing publisher, are prepared to transfer your journal to an acquiring publisher, and would like to transfer ownership of the journal and all existing journal articles, please try your new title transfer via Metadata Manager.
On the other side
If you follow the steps I’ve outlined above, you should get to the other side of your title transfer with few problems and are likely to encounter smooth metadata seas ahead. That said, some of our members follow these steps to a tee and still are faced with occasional transfer-related problems.
Perhaps the previous journal owner used a different scheme to assign timestamps and now you’re receiving mysterious timestamp errors when you deposit. Or, that same previous owner made a mistake with a previous deposit and accidentally submitted more than one journal title record. Or, you encounter a strange, new error in Metadata Manager when working with your new titles (yes, we’re still in beta!). If so, please reach out to us at support@crossref.org and we’ll help solve what are surely confounding problems, since you’ve undoubtedly read this post in its entirety and taken heed of the above advice.
As always, if you have questions, need guidance as you’re working through this process, or have recommendations on how we can improve title transfers, please contact us at support@crossref.org.
