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.
You can now easily search for publications and add them to your ORCID profile in the new beta of Crossref Metadata Search (CRMDS). The user interface is pretty self-explanatory, but if you want to read about it before trying it, here is a summary of how it works.
When you go to to CRMDS, you will see that there is now a small ORCID sign-in button on the top right-hand side of the screen.
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Clicking on this button allows you to connect CRMDS to your ORCID profile and authorises CRMDS to add publications to your profile. First, if you are not already logged into ORCID, CRMDS will ask ORCID to log you in:
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Once you have logged in, ORCID will ask you if you want to allow CRMDS to be able to view and update your ORCID profile:
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After you authorise CRMDS to access your profile, you will be returned to the CRMDS screen and the top right corner of the CRMDS page will indicate that you have connected to your ORCID profile (note, you can always de-authorise CRMDS from accessing your ORCID profile in your ORCID settings):
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Once you are logged in, you can enter search terms that are likely to return records of your publications:
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Each search result will show an icon telling you whether that particular item is visible in your ORCID profile. If the item is not in your ORCID profile, you see an icon like this:
And if the item is already in your ORCID profile, you will see an icon like this:
In the following search results you can see that 1 item is already in Josiah Carberry’s profile, and 2 items are not:
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Clicking on the “Add to Profile” button will confirm that you want to add the specified publication to your ORCID profile:
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After clicking on “Yes” to add the publication to your profile, the search results will refresh to reflect that the item has been added.
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You can then just continue searching for and adding any publications that are not in your ORCID profile.
Note that, occasionally, you may see an orange icon that says that an item is “Not Visible”
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This only occurs when you have previously added an item to your profile using CRMDS and then either:
Set the ORCID privacy for that particular work item to “Private” in your ORCID profile.
Deleted the work from your ORCID profile.
Unfortunately, CRMDS has no way to determine which of these two events occurred However, If you click on the “Not Visible” icon, you will be prompted with two ways to resolve this issue. Either you can:
Reset the privacy settings on the specified work to “Public” or “Limited”
Confirm to CRMDS that you have deleted the item from your profile.
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If the issue was your privacy settings, then once you have changed the privacy settings to public/limited you can simply click on the “Refresh” button and CRMDS will reflect the correct status of the work.
The best way to avoid this kind of confusion is to go to your ORCID settings and set the default privacy level for “works” to either “limited” or “public.”
Crossref Metadata Search is still a “Crossref Labs” project and, as such, we are very interested to hear feedback on this new ORCID functionality for CRMDS. Please send comments, etc. to:
