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.
What better way to start our program of LIVE locals in 2018 than with a trip to Japan? With the added advantage of it being Valentine’s Day, it seemed a good excuse to share our love of metadata with a group who feel the same way!
We’ve worked closely with the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) since 2002, and were delighted when they agreed to collaborate with us on a LIVE event at their offices in Tokyo.
With help from the team at JST, we welcomed around 80 attendees—a mix of editors, publishers and enthusiastic metadata users—who all enjoyed the talks from our guest speakers, Nobuko Miyari from ORCID, Ritsuko Nakajima from JST and Tatsuji Tomioka from Kyoto University Library (who talked about the use of DOIs and metadata in their research information repository, named KURENAI).
Vanessa Fairhurst and I also took part in the days program and talked about the different services that Crossref offers. With many of our members in Japan already well-versed in DOIs, we placed the focus of our sessions around the importance of accurate, complete metadata, and new record types (such as peer reviews and preprints). We also discussed our new community initiatives such as the OI project, identifiers for grants and Metadata2020.
We’d like to say a big thank you to Kentaro Kinoshita from JST for his help with organizing the event. We’d also like to thank the excellent team of translators who assisted us greatly by relaying the content to the audience in Japanese—being able to offer information and take questions in English and Japanese was an invaluable part of the day.
Any questions?
One day is never quite enough to cover all things Crossref, so we were happy to answer questions from the enthusiastic audience:
What metadata is required to register peer review reports with Crossref? To answer this we pointed them to this informative blog on peer reviews.
How can I find information on using your REST API? This is a great starting point, and most information can be found here https://api.crossref.org
Is the forthcoming Metadata Manager tool something I can use? Yes! We hope it will make it much easier for you to deposit good metadata—and if you are in interested in participating in our open beta, let us know.
We’re looking forward to continuing to collaborate with JST, and are really grateful for their help in working with us to make the event go so smoothly. Thank you to those who joined us, and we hope to see you again soon.
