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.
If you’re anything like us at Crossref Labs (and we know some of you are) you would have been very excited about the launch of the Raspberry Pi Zero a couple of days ago. In case you missed it, this is a new edition of the tiny low-priced Raspberry Pi computer. Very tiny and very low-priced. At $5 we just had to have one, and ordered one before we knew exactly what we want to do with it. You would have done the same. Bad luck if it was out of stock.
We love the way DOIs are being used in Wikipedia, but you probably already know that by now. Not only is it a brilliant source of information, mostly well cited, it’s also an organic living thing, with countless people and bots working together on countless articles. Our live stream of edits that cite (or uncite) DOIs shows new scholarly literature unfold, as it happens. From new articles to new references to improved citations to edit wars to bots cleaning up all the mess, it captivates everyone we show it to. The latest version has a live chart to show exactly how much activity is going on.
Crossref works in five ways: Rally, Tag, Run, Play, and Make and this definitely comes under ‘Play’. By the time our Raspberry Pi Zero arrived it was clear what we had to do. We ordered a servo, a driver board and a wireless adapter and got to work.
We have some new neighbours in the basement. Oxford Hackspace is a community of people who want to work on projects from electronics to metalwork, hack things to improve them or find out how they work. A diverse bunch who at the last visit were working on squeezing unprecedented color capabilities from the 30 year old ZX Spectrum, a nixie tube display, a smartphone controlled doorbell and a robotic glockenspiel. They let us use their soldering iron to solder a few header pins.
A bit of hacky Python, a pictureframe and lots of duck tape later, we have a live display of how many DOIs are cited and uncited per hour. It updates live every minute, fetches the latest numbers from the Wikipedia DOI citation stream and moves the hand.
(For the worried engineers amongst you, rest assured that sufficient duck tape was added after this picture)
It’s extraordinary to think that a fully fledged computer with very capable specifications can be manufactured and sold for $5. Within the space of a lunchtime we had it up and running, all connected and fetching data over the internet via wireless. A generation ago you would have had to use punched cards, send them by post and load them in by hand. The live stream would have been at least a month behind.
It now sits in our Oxford office reminding us that DOIs Aren’t Just for Traditional Bibliographies. Below Geoff Bilder’s reminder about what happens when you have too many standards (they’re telephone plugs from round the world).
