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’s funding data initiative (FundRef) encourages publishers to deposit information about the funding sources of authors’ research as acknowledged in their papers. The funding data comprises funder name and identifier, and grant number or numbers. Funding data can be deposited on its own or with the rest of the metadata for an item of content.
There are two ways that publishers can collect this funding information for any given piece of content: by asking authors to input the funder name(s) and award number(s) via their submission system, or extracting the funder names and award numbers from the acknowledgements in the paper.
The funding data is only useful if it is standardised, and so it is absolutely critical that funder names are deposited with their associated funder IDs from the Funder Registry.
For publishers considering or about to start collecting and depositing funding data, and for those already doing so, we have drawn up some guidelines that will help you to ensure good quality metadata.
If you are collecting funding information from authors via your submission system:
Provide very clear instructions for your authors. Your submission system should prompt the author towards the canonical name from Crossref’s Funder Registry as they type, or guide them through a pick-list. Make it clear to authors that they should choose funder names from this list and not copy and paste from their manuscript.
Work with your submission system vendor or adapt your in-house system to make it easy for authors to select from the Funder Registry, and more difficult to paste incorrect names or ignore the suggested names. Consider a warning message if an unknown name is entered, and offer a list of close matches.
Instruct authors to look for the name of the funding body rather than a specific program or project.
If you or one of your vendors is extracting funding information from papers:
Provide the same clear instructions to your vendor(s). Stress the importance of matching the funder names in the acknowledgements to the names in the Funder Registry.
Look for common text-extraction errors such as concatenated funder names, punctuation errors, and stop words such as “of/for” that are commonly used interchangeably, or the presence or absence of “the” at the start of a funder name.
For both workflows:
Add QA into your workflow. Many of the names sent to Crossref without IDs are very obviously funders that are in the Registry, and a check by editorial or production staff could correct misspellings or fill in blanks. Check that grant numbers have been separated and are not being deposited as one long string.
Be aware that funder names deposited without IDs are not valid funding data and will be hidden from Crossref’s search tools and APIs until such time as they are updated with a funder ID.
The funding data section of a deposit (but not the rest of the deposit) will be rejected by the Crossref deposit system if
The funder_name field contains a numerical string longer than 4 digits
The funder_id field contains a number that is not an ID from the Funder Registry
The funder_name contains text that exceeds 200 characters
Consider only depositing data that has funder IDs and holding the rest to re-poll against the Funder Registry at a later date when more funder names have been added. The Funder Registry is updated at approximately two-monthly intervals. You can sign up to be alerted to updates here.
If there are funders that appear regularly in your particular subject or geographical area that are not in the Registry, send a list to funder.registry@crossref.org.
