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.
OK, after a number of delays due to everything from indexing slowness to router problems, I’m happy to say that the first public beta of our WordPress citation plugin is available for download via SourceForge. A Movable Type version is in the works.
And congratulations to Trey at OpenHelix who became laudably impatient, found the SourceForge entry for the plugin back on February 8th and seems to have been testing it since. He has a nice description of how it works (along with screenshots), so I won’t repeat the effort here.
Having said that, I do include the text of the README after the jump. Please have a look at it before you install, because it might save you some mystification.
Description
A WordPress plugin that allows you to search Crossref metadata using citations or partial citations. When you find the reference that you want, insert the formatted and DOI-linked citation into your blog posting along with supporting COINs metadata. The plugin supports both a long citation format and a short (op. cit.) format.
Warnings, Caveats and Weasel Words
Please note the following about this plugin:
We are releasing this as a test. It is running on R&D equipment in a non-production environment and so it may disappear without warning or perform erratically. If it isn’t working for some reason, come back later and try again. If it seems to be broken for a prolonged period of time, then please report the problem to us via sourceforge.
There is currently a 20 item limit on the number of hits returned per query. This might seem arbitrary and stingy, but please remember- we are not trying to create a fully blown search engine- we’re just trying to create a citation lookup service. Of course, if, after looking at how the service is used, it looks like we need to up this limit, we will.
If you look in the plugin options (or at the code), you will see that the system includes an API key. At the moment we have no restrictions on use of this service, but have included this in case we need to protect the system from abuse.
The bulk of the functionality we have developed is actually at the back-end. This plugin is just a lightweight interface to that back-end. You can examine the guts of the plugin in order to easily figure out how to create similar functionality for your favorite blog platform, wiki, etc. If you do create something, please let us know. We’d love to see what people are building.
We are continuing to experiment with the metadata search function in order to increase its accuracy and flexibility. Again, this might result in seemingly inconsistent behavior. Did we mention that this is a test?
Please note that this API is not meant for bulk harvesting of Crossref metadata. If you need such facilities, then please look at our web site for information about our metadata services.
The data currently behind the plugin is *just* a December 2007 snapshot of our our complete journal article metadata. We have not added books or proceedings yet. We will do so soon and we will start updating the metadata weekly.
We welcome your ideas for tools that we can provide to help researchers. Please, please, please send comments, requests, queries and ideas to us at:
