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.
After 20 years in operation, and as our system matures from experimental to foundational infrastructure, it’s time to review our documentation.
Having a solid core of education materials about the why and the how of Crossref is essential in making participation possible, easy, and equitable.
As our system has evolved, our membership has grown and diversified, and so have our tools - both for depositing metadata with Crossref, and for retrieving and making use of it.
Our new documentation gives the full picture, with each chapter explaining an aspect of Crossref and why it matters, followed by instructions on how to participate. As far as possible, these instructions are given for each of our deposit and retrieval methods.
The revised documentation has been edited for use of simple English, and consistent terminology. Specialist vocabulary is explained as it is introduced. Understanding what’s involved across the full range of Crossref services can often seem complicated. This makes the documentation easier for readers, and provides a good basis for human and machine translations.
The chapters and sections are modular, so you can approach and combine them in different ways according to your existing knowledge and what you wish to learn. This Choose Your Own Adventure style means that sections don’t overlap, avoiding problems of repetition and versioning, and helping us to keep the information current.
The revised documentation includes several new topics, including:
The importance of metadata, explaining why you might register metadata for different purposes (discoverability, research integrity, reproducibility, and reporting and assessment)
Metadata stewardship, including maintaining your metadata, reports, understanding your member obligations, and maintaining your Crossref membership.
This new documentation is part of our efforts to make Crossref participation possible, easy, and rewarding for our members large and small, all over the world. It provides a concrete basis on which to build further education and outreach projects in the future. New members will start to see our paced member onboarding program, introducing them to parts of the documentation as and when it’s useful to them. And like the rest of the Crossref website, it’s all licensed for reuse under CC-BY.
I would like to say a big thank you to the members of the Education Task Force, who helped guide the development of the new documentation, representing a diverse range of Crossref members large and small from around the world:
Anjum Sherasiya - India, Editor-in-Chief of Veterinary World, Crossref Ambassador
Budi Setiawan - Indonesia, Poltekkes Kemenkes Yogyakarta
Caroline Breul - USA, BioOne
Isabel Recavarren - Peru, Consejo Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación Tecnológica (CONCYTEC), Crossref Ambassador
Mike Nason - Canada, Public Knowledge Project (PKP) and University of New Brunswick
Nadine van der Merwe - South Africa, Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf)
Roberto Camargo - Brazil, Associação Brasileira de Editores Científicos (ABEC)
Sioux Cumming - UK, INASP
Taeil Kim - South Korea, Korean Association of Medical Journal Editors (KAMJE)
and from Crossref: Amanda, Esha, Geoffrey, Ginny, Isaac, Kirsty, Patricia, and Susan.
Please explore the new documentation, give us your feedback using the yellow “Docs feedback” button at the bottom of each page, and share this update to spread the word!
