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.
Everyone is invited to our free annual event this 1-2 November in London. (Register here)!
In years past, only Crossref members typically attended the [Crossref Annual Meeting](/crossref-live-annual). This year, we looked at the event with new eyes. We realized that we’d have even richer conversations, more creative energy, and the meeting would be even better for our members if we could rally the entire community together. So we decided to re-develop our annual event from the ground-up.
The result is Crossref LIVE16, an event with a new format and a new focus on the entirety of the scholarly communications community. We are opening doors for the whole community, welcoming publishers, librarians, researchers, funders, technology providers, and Crossref members alike.
1st November - Mashup Day, from 12 noon: an afternoon of interactive activities including mingling with the Crossref team and special guests, trying out our services, live troubleshooting, and exclusive previews of some exciting things we’re working on. Plus entertainment and refreshments at an early evening reception.
2nd November - Conference Day: a full-day plenary session with distinguished keynote speakers including April Hathcock (NYU), Carly Strasser (Moore Foundation), Ian Calvert (Digital Science), and Dario Taraborelli (Wikimedia Foundation). We will provide the most important updates about our services, and share our vision and strategies for the future.
Note: You are welcome to join us for both days or just one day, as you like.
Location: The Royal Society, London, UK.
We hope you will join us, and extend this invitation to your colleagues.
