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.
Preprints have become an important tool for rapidly communicating and iterating on research outputs. There is now a range of preprint servers, some subject-specific, some based on a particular geographical area, and others linked to publishers or individual journals in addition to generalist platforms. In 2016 the Crossref schema started to support preprints and since then the number of metadata records has grown to around 16,000 new preprint DOIs per month.
Preprints aren’t the same as journal articles, books, or conference papers. They have unique features, and how they are viewed and integrated into the publishing process has evolved over the past six years. For this reason, we have been revisiting the preprint metadata schema and decided that the best approach would be to form an advisory group (AG) of preprint practitioners and experts to help us.
The AG has identified a number of areas in which preprint metadata could be improved. Four of these were considered to have the highest priority:
Withdrawal and removal of preprints.
Preprints as an article type (not a subtype of posted content) in the schema.
Relationships between preprints and other outputs.
Could the origin of a withdrawal be included in the metadata, in particular whether it was requested by an author or another party?
Can the metadata represent when a preprint has been submitted to a journal and what stage it is in the editorial process?
Crossref is not alone in looking at preprint metadata, and several NISO groups are also engaged in related work.
Interoperability and the ability to create relationships with identifiers beyond DOIs is important to maintain an accurate and comprehensive record of research outputs.
These will form the basis for ongoing discussions.
What happens next?
There are three next steps that we will be taking.
The recommendations outline only the outcomes of discussions in a relatively brief format. We have been working on a more detailed paper to communicate more about what was discussed and provide some extra justification and alternatives.
The AG will continue to meet and discuss the points raised during consultation on the recommendations, along with topics that were considered a lower priority at an earlier stage.
We will draw up a set of proposals for specific changes to the metadata schema that will reflect the outcomes of the recommendations and discussions.
Although the initial period for feedback on preprint metadata has ended, we welcome feedback at any time. If you would like to get in touch, please contact me or any member of the advisory group.
