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.
A couple weeks back there was a meeting of the Open Archive Initiative‘s Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) Technical Committee hosted in the Butler Library at Columbia University, New York.
Lorcan Dempsey of OCLC blogs here on the report (PDF format) that was generated from that meeting. As does Pete Johnston of Eduserv here.
Background:
OAI-ORE is being positioned as a companion activity to the more familiar OAI-PMH protocol for metadata harvesting. OAI-ORE relates to the expression and exchange of digital objects across repositories rather than just the exchange of metadata about those objects.
The basic problem is that scholarly communication deals in units which are compound resulting from a complex of documents and/or datasets expressed in multiple formats, versions, relationships, etc. The underlying web architecture provides a fairly simple model of resources (identified with URIs) which are interconnected and can be interacted with by retrieving representations of those resources. In practice, this usually results in unique URIs (and thus resources) for each representation - think of one URI for an HTML document, another for a PDF document of the same work, and yet new URIs for those same document formats for a new version of the work. Clearly, all these representations (or documents) are related, and more importantly relate to a single underlying “work”. Web architecture as generally practiced does not provide ready mechanisms to aggregate (and compartmentalize) related documents and datasets.
My fairly simple mental picture is that the web landscape is rather like the early universe in which energy (and matter) is distributed uniformly and there is little local “intelligence” which is gradually built up through time by matter formation and aggregations of this matter leading to the more familiar “clumpy” universe with its recognizable galaxies, stars and other objects. This “clumpiness” is precisely what we are missing in the scholarly web.
