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.
The act of registering a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) for scholarly content is sometimes conflated with the notion of conferring a seal of approval or other mark of good quality upon an item of content. This is a fundamental misunderstanding.
A DOI is a tool, not a badge of honor.
The presence of a Crossref DOI on content sends a signal that:
The owner of the content would like to be formally cited if the content is used in a scholarly context.
The owner of the content considers that it is worthy of being made persistent.
Beyond the DOI
For Crossref, a DOI is just one of several types of metadata we register, albeit an important one.
Metadata about scholarly works extends beyond the DOI. In addition to bibliographic details, layers of information accompanying published works may now extend to data that describes the research, such as the source of research funding. It may also include non-descriptive information that facilitates usage, such as copyright and access permissions.
In fact, this “richer” metadata can tell you more about the context of the content deposited for a published work than you might realize.
For example:
Author data - Crossref metadata may include information specifying the author’s unique ORCID, allowing you to find other works by the same person.
Copyright and access indicators - You can view the license terms under which the full content may be available, which is very helpful for scholars who want to access the full content for research and teaching or for text and data mining.
Funding data - Metadata may also include the identity of the grant-making institution that funded the research, so that the funder and, in the case of publicly funded research, the general public and other researchers, have visibility on the resulting research outputs.
Clinical Trials data - Similarly, when research involves a clinical trial, (testing of medicines and treatments on human beings), Crossref metadata can enhance output visibility by displaying the clinical trial number and the related clinical trial registry.
Like the full content they describe, these metadata have become research resources in their own right. Unfortunately, too much metadata is entered into Crossref with missing, incomplete, or duplicated fields. This “bad” metadata slows the pace of discovery, confounding attempts to find and understand scholarly content and its context.
As a community, we really need to do something about that.
“The Map is not the Territory”
And the metadata is not the content. In Metadata (MIT Press), Jeffrey Pomerantz quotes Alfred Korzybski’s insight that a map is a simplified representation of a territory, a tool of abstraction that allows us to find our way. Jennifer Lin contributed the concept of the scholarly road map as a useful metaphor for the way we use metadata about scholarly works to find our way between and among them in the digital world.
Metadata deposited with Crossref amounts to pieces of information-structured, descriptive, administrative, contextual-about published works that humans can read and machines can use to automate linking and retrieval. The systematic development of such metadata allows us to make sense of such complex information by finding, linking, citing, and assessing scholarly content.
If you want to understand how Crossref acts as a map of scholarly metadata, try searching for content on search.crossref.org (our human API interface). Or simply talk with us @CrossrefOrg and via member@crossref.org.
