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.
There has been a steady increase in the growth of our membership in Latin America—and in Brazil in particular—over the past few years. We currently have more than 800 Brazil-based members; some as individual members, but most are sponsored by another organization. As part of our LIVE Local program Chuck Koscher and I traveled to meet some of these members in Goiânia and Fortaleza, where we co-hosted events with Associação Brasileira de Editores Científicos do Brasil (ABEC Brasil)—one of our largest Sponsors.
These events always provide a great opportunity for us to update our members on new and upcoming Crossref developments. They are also an important way for us to discover more about the varied needs of our members’ communities and learn how we can work together better.
The LIVE Brazil events were attended by more than two hundred members and were held at the Universidade Federal de Goiás and the Universidade de Fortaleza respectively. Chuck and I enthusiastically demonstrated two new tools from Crossref— Participation Reports and Metadata Manager, we discussed our newest record types—preprints and peer review reports, and continually highlighted the importance (and the uses) of quality metadata.
We were joined by some fantastic guest speakers; Milton Shintaku from ABEC explained how to register content using the Crossref/OJS deposit plugin and Crossref ambassador, Edilson Damasio, spoke about Similarity Check and gave a demonstration of how to use the iThenticate interface when checking papers for originality.
The vibrant Q&A sessions reflected the varying needs of the audience. We talked generally about the different Crossref services and went more in-depth with discussions around submitting relationship metadata for peer review and preprints. Crossmark and its implementation was also a hot topic, as was how to benefit from Similarity Check—and in particular how to address cases of duplication in submitted manuscripts, and the setting up of plagiarism policies for each journal. There was also a lot of discussion around OJS integrations, and we were able to share that PKP/OJS is currently in the process of enhancing the Crossref/OJS integration, including the ability for publishers to deposit references.
We were also pleased to see so much interest in supplementing Crossref metadata with references, Similarity Check URLs, license information, etc. To address this we’re running a webinar in Brazilian Portuguese entitled: “Registering content and adding to your Crossref metadata in Portuguese” on 26th November. You can sign up here if you’d like to attend.
I’d like to thank Universidade Federal de Goiás and the Universidade de Fortaleza for hosting the events, providing the venues and the translation team, and of course, thanks to everyone who came!
A special mention of ABEC for their help in organizing and promoting the events. As a Sponsor, they relieve our team of an intense amount of technical support, billing, and other administrative burdens, saving us time and expense, while offering a localized service to Brazilian publishers.
Crossref staff with co-hosts ABEC and representatives from UFG who helped with the event - thank you!
