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 few months ago Crossref announced that we will be launching a new service for the community in 2016 that tracks activities around DOIs recording user content interactions. These “events” cover a broad spectrum of online activities including publication usage, links to datasets, social bookmarks, blog mentions, social shares, comments, recommendations, etc. The Event Data service collects the data and make it available to all in an open clearinghouse so that data are open, comparable, audit-able, and portable. These data are all publicly available from external platform partners, and they meet the terms of distribution from each partner.
But Crossref and its members are also concerned about privacy. We recognise that not all data can be made open and public. Particularly if it is sensitive, personally identifiable data about usage. With this in mind, we are also launching an affiliated service, Distributed Usage Logging (DUL), for external parties to transmit sensitive data on user content interactions directly to authorized end points. As researchers are increasingly using “alternative” (non-publisher) platforms to store, access and share literature, publishers are correspondingly interested in incorporating the activity on their publications into their COUNTER reports.
Interested third-party sites might include the following:
Reading environments and tools (e.g. ReadCube, Utopia Documents)
For publishers to process such events via their COUNTER-compliant usage reporting streams, they need private usage information and a secure channel by which to receive the data from the external platforms. Crossref will provide a switchboard that will enable these non-publisher platforms can safely transmit private data directly to the publisher.
The work ahead entails close collaboration between Crossref, COUNTER, and the partners who will be sending and receiving the private data. The cross-organizational team will be working towards the following before launch: technical infrastructure development for production service, semantic definition of the usage logging message, assignment and validation of credentials to participants in the scheme, participant integration of the DUL API, and incorporation of this data type into the COUNTER Code of Practice. We will also continue to consult with data privacy and security authorities to ensure that the scheme respects all governmental obligations and community best practice regarding the processing of personal data.
We will share more about the launch of the service as we make progress along the way. Please contact Jennifer Lin for more information.
