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.
First of all – hello! I’m Vanessa. I’m fairly new to Crossref, having just joined our outreach team a few weeks ago. I previously worked in International Development, enabling individuals and institutions in Africa, Asia and Latin America to access cutting edge scholarly research and knowledge, supporting national development and transforming lives.
A firm belief in the importance of connecting research and information around the world led me to Crossref where my role of International Community Outreach Manager connects me with a range of different people working across diverse disciplines and sectors. I’ll be supporting the coordination of our local LIVE events and helping to set up an ambassador program (more information on this coming soon) to deepen regional connections around the globe. You can read more about myself and my colleagues at Crossref on our People page.
As Crossref membership continues to grow globally, it becomes increasingly important for us to look at new ways to engage with our international membership base.
You may have heard about our LIVE local events, or even attended one in person before. These are free-to-attend, one day, regional events (local to you), providing a tailored program of activities which include information on the key concepts of Crossref, the services we offer and our future plans.
In the past year we have held LIVE local events in Brazil, Beijing, Boston and most recently Seoul. We also have a London LIVE event coming up soon. Next year we are aiming to be even more ambitious, hoping to expand our activities to a number of different countries around the world.
Images left to right, Crossref LIVE participants in Seoul, Crossref LIVE speakers in Brazil, and literature we use at our LIVE events
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When running our LIVE local events, we collaborate with local organizations to ensure they are appropriate, accessible, and applicable to the country context. Members support us by lending their local expertise with regards to venue selection, suggestions for speakers, tailored content, translation of materials and participant enrolment. We collaborate on logistics, content, Crossref speakers and the promotion of the event to our members and the wider community.
When running our LIVE local events, we collaborate with local organizations to ensure they are appropriate, accessible, and applicable to the country context. Members support us by lending their local expertise with regards to venue selection, suggestions for speakers, tailored content, translation of materials and participant enrollment. We collaborate on logistics, content, Crossref speakers and the promotion of the event to our members and the wider community.
We will release more information of upcoming regional events in due course, but we are working on the following countries as priorities for 2018-19:
Asia-Pacific: Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, Australia
If you are interested in hosting a LIVE local event or have any suggestions for one in your region, then we would love to hear from you. View more information on our LIVE locals page or contact us to hear more or get involved.
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