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 was founded to enable collaboration between publishers. As our membership has grown and diversified over recent years, it’s becoming even more vital that we take input from a representative cross-section of the membership. This is especially important when considering how fees and policies will affect our diverse members in different ways.
About the M&F Committee
The Membership & Fees Committee (M&F Committee) was established in 2001 and plays an important role in Crossref’s governance. Made up of 10-12 organizations of both board members and regular members, the group makes recommendations to the board about fees and policies for all of our services. They regularly review existing fees to discuss if any changes are needed. They also review new services while they are being developed, to assess if fees should be charged and if so, what those fees should be. For example, the committee recently made recommendations to the board about the fees for a new service called Event Data that we’ll launch soon, and the Content Registration fees for preprints. In addition, the board can also ask the committee to address specific issues about policies and services. Increasingly, the committee works with the outreach team to include research and survey insights.
About committee participation
The M&F Committee meets via one-hour conference calls about six times a year, although this can vary depending on what issues the committee is considering. Often proposals are developed by staff and then reviewed and discussed by the committee - so there is reading to do in preparation for the calls.
This is very important work and in order to ensure that the committee is broadly representative of Crossref’s diverse membership we are seeking expressions of interest from members who would like to serve on the M&F Committee for 2017. Appointments are for one year and members can serve multiple terms.
About you
In view of our commitment to be representative of the membership we are refreshing the committee and want to have engaged and interested people from a diverse set of members join.
If you are interested in joining the committee and helping Crossref fulfil its mission please email feedback@crossref.org with your name, title, organization and a short statement about why you want to serve on the committee by December 19th, 2016.
Scott Delman, Director of Group Publishing, ACM is the current Chair of the committee and will review the expressions of interest with me, Ed Pentz, Executive Director, to form the committee.
