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.
If you follow this blog, you are going to notice a theme over the coming months- Crossref supports the deposit and distribution of a lot more kinds of metadata than people usually realise.
We are in the process of completely revamping our web site, help documentation, and marketing to better promote our metadata distribution capabilities, but in the mean time we think it would be useful highlight one of our most under-promoted functions- the ability to distribute references via Crossref.
One of the questions we most often get from members is- “can we distribute references via Crossref?” The answer is an emphatic yes. But to do so, you have to take an extra and hitherto obscure step to enable reference distribution.
[EDIT 6th June 2022 - all references are now open by default with the March 2022 board vote to remove any restrictions on reference distribution].
How?
Many members deposit references to Crossref as part of their participation in Crossref’s CitedBy service. However - for historical reasons too tedious to go into- participation in CitedBy does not automatically make references available via Crossref’s standard APIs. In order for publishers to distribute references along with standard bibliographic metadata, publishers need to either:
Contact Crossref support and ask them to turn on reference distribution for all of the prefixes they manage.
Set the reference_distribution_opt element to any for each content item registered where they want to make references openly available.
Either of these steps will allow references for the affected member DOIs to be distributed without restriction through all of Crossrefs APIs and bulk metadata dumps.
Note that by doing this, you are not enabling the open querying of your CitedBy data- you are simply allowing the references that you already deposit to be redistributed to interested parties via our public APIs.
Who?
So who does this now? Well, at the moment not many members have enabled this feature. How could they? They probably didn’t know it existed. At the time of writing this 29 publishers have enabled reference distribution for at least some of their DOIs.
But that’s why we are writing this post. Given the interest expressed by our members, we expect the list to start growing quickly over the next few months. Particularly now that they know they can do it and have clear instructions on how to do it. 🙂
If you are of a geeky persuasion and want to see the list of publishers who are doing this, you can check via our API.
The following query will just show you the total number of members who are distributing references for at least some of their DOIs.
That cool, but can you see how many total DOIs have reference distribution enabled? No, but will will be adding that capability to our API soon.
OMG! OMG! OMG! Does this mean I can get references from api.crossref.org?
Yep. But before you get too excited- note above that not many of our members are doing this yet and that our API is still being updated to allow you to better query this information. At the moment references are not included in our JSON representation- they are only included in our XML representation. You can get the XML for a Crossref DOI either through content negotiation, or by using the following incantation on our API (using an eLife DOI as an example):
