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.
How good is your metadata? Find out at the Frankfurt Book Fair…
At the Frankfurt Book Fair this year (Hall 4.2, Stand M82), the Crossref team will be on hand to give you a personal tour of our new Participation Reports tool. Or join us at The Education Stage to hear about how this new tool can help you view, evaluate and improve your metadata participation.
How good is your metadata?
Join us Thursday 11th October at 15.30
at the Education Stage in Hall 4.2 to find out
Lots of reasons to visit our stand
We’ll be located in the same place as last year, Hall 4.2, Stand M82, and there are lots of reasons to visit us:
Get your metadata participation evaluated - Anna Tolwinska and Amanda Bartell will walk you through your own Participation Report and provide guidance on how to improve your results. Discover how complete your metadata is, where the gaps are, and how other publishers compare.
Discuss a technical issue that’s hindering your metadata participation (or any other technical issue) with Isaac Farley and Paul Davis from our Technical Support team.
Jennifer Kemp will also be around to answer all your metadata use and reuse questions. She’s looking forward to chatting with all kinds of service providers and toolmakers.
On the strategy side, Ginny Hendricks will be there on Wednesday 10th if you’d like to discuss any policy stuff, new ideas, or find out what Crossref is planning next.
Ask us anything
Not just Participation Reports—you can ask us about anything. Perhaps about our newer record types such as preprints, pending publications (i.e. DOIs on acceptance), or data citations. Or, ask us how you can:
Advance scholarly pursuits for the benefit of society, through Metadata 2020
Check papers for originality, with our service for editorial rigour, through Similarity Check
Discover where and how research is being discovered, through Event Data
Reveal who is citing your published papers and how platforms can display this information, with our Cited-by service
Provide evidence of trust in published outputs, revealing updates, corrections and retractions, through our Crossmark service
Let us know if you’d like to book in a meeting with one of us, or do just stop by the stand to say “Guten Tag”.
