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.
In the next few weeks, authors with an ORCID iD will be able to have Crossref automatically push information about their published work to their ORCID record. It’s something that ORCID users have been asking for and we’re pleased to be the first to develop the integration. 230 publishers already include ORCID iDs in their metadata deposits with us, and currently there are 248,000 DOIs that include ORCID iDs.
What this means for researchers
More visibility for your work! Crossref represents over 5000 scholarly publishers and many of them ask authors for their ORCID iD and include it in the publication information they send us. Also it will mean less manual searching and adding; you’ve always been able to search crossref metadata for your name and/or publications and manually add them to your ORCID record, this auto-update simply means that when your publishers include the info we can update and add work(s) to your ORCID record automatically for you. You can still choose to hide/show whatever works you choose, and, of course, you’ll have the opportunity to authorize or switch off the integration completely (though future publications may trigger a new request). Overall, you’ll benefit from a more complete and up-to-date ORCID record to showcase your work.
What this means for publishers
If you’re one of the 230 Crossref publishers who already supply ORCID iDs along with the usual metadata submissions, then you’re all good. If you don’t offer this yet, you might want to think about starting - it’s beneficial for funders, publishers, other researchers, libraries, and universities to be able to integrate with complete researcher records. You can ask for ORCIDs upon manuscript submission or acceptance and tag it in your metadata deposits with Crossref. We’ll ensure the rest.
Various caveats and important details to be aware of
Apparently not all publishers are members of Crossref (we know, crazy), and in addition only a subset of Crossref publishers (230 in total) are asking authors for ORCID iDs and/or including them in their metadata deposits.
Some publishers may choose to opt out of passing through the details to ORCID using the Crossref auto-update (perhaps they plan to send this directly at some point) but if you’ve included your ORCID with your submission and it isn’t automatically updated, then check with your publisher.
We have a “backlog” of almost 250,000 DOIs that include ORCID iDs so that may mean we do some bulk updates at a later date where authors will receive an email with a long list of works to add. Even if the works have been listed before, it’s worth accepting as it will add the most up-to-date metadata to ensure the most accurate record.
More visibility for your work! Crossref represents over 5000 scholarly publishers and many of them ask authors for their ORCID iD and include it in the publication information they send us. Also it will mean less manual searching and adding; you’ve always been able to