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.
Great news to share: our Executive Director, Ed Pentz, has been selected as the 2024 recipient of the Miles Conrad Award from the USA’s National Information Standards Organization (NISO). The award is testament to an individual’s lifetime contribution to the information community, and we couldn’t be more delighted that Ed was voted to be this year’s well-deserved recipient.
During the NISO Plus conference this week in Baltimore, USA, Ed accepted his award and delivered the 2024 Miles Conrad lecture, reflecting on how far open scholarly infrastructure has come, and the part he has played in this at Crossref and through numerous other collaborative initiatives.
Established in 1965, the Miles Conrad Award gives recognition to those who’ve made substantial contributions to the information community over a lifetime. Named after the founder of the National Federation of Abstracting and Indexing Services (NFAIS)—an association that since merged with NISO—the award encourages innovation in content management and dissemination. Over the years, leaders and innovators who have significantly influenced the field of information exchange have been honored with the award. Ed has joined an illustrious group!
Ed’s leadership in collaboration and diplomacy has led to Crossref’s success in making research objects more accessible and useful to a wide global audience, including publishers, researchers, funders, societies, libraries, and more. Crossref’s founding purpose is stated as:
“To promote the development and cooperative use of new and innovative technologies to speed and facilitate scientific and other scholarly research”.
Acknowledging his privilege as a Western, university-educated, white man, which he comments has helped his career, Ed prioritises collaboration, open communication, teamwork, and equity in creating a positive, trusted environment that has brought together a diverse team of 49 colleagues from 11 countries. The organisation’s culture allows everyone to grow and contribute to the mission of a connected research nexus by including and developing solutions for community members across the globe.
Before his journey with Crossref, Ed held a number of roles at Harcourt Brace, including launching Academic Press’s first online journal. This experience led to his involvement with the DOI-X pilot project, which became the foundation for Crossref. Since its launch in 2000, under his leadership, Crossref has become an important component of the research ecosystem, an open scholarly infrastructure with nearly 20,000 members across more than 150 countries. Crossref is now the main source of >155 million records about all kinds of research objects and this open metadata registry is relied upon by thousands of tools and services across the whole research system.
Ed’s influence is also evident throughout the wider world of open scholarly infrastructure; aside from establishing Crossref, he co-founded ROR and was a founding member of ORCID, where he also served as board Chair. Further, he has engaged with the community by holding various advisory positions, including the DOI Foundation, the Digital Object Naming Authority (DONA), and the Coalition for Diversity in Scholarly Publishing (C4DISC).
Ed also emphasised that the long-term success of community initiatives lies in patience and the ability to agree on high-level principles of purpose and governance, which oil the wheels of collaboration, encourage participation, and enable more progressive change that builds and lasts over time. He says, “to solve collective problems it takes collaboration and diplomacy, bringing together a group of stakeholders, balancing their different concerns, building trust, and reaching consensus.”
The adoption of the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI), along with (so far) 14 other organisations, was a key turning point for Crossref, Ed said, and one which has already paved the way for more openness of key metadata for the community, including references and retractions, as well as closer partnerships with many of the other POSI adoptees, given their shared understanding and experience.
Referencing the current “peak hype” around artificial intelligence (AI), Ed points to the challenge of research integrity and the “growing field of science sleuthing” as a forthcoming area that Crossref and open metadata may help tackle at scale, including through Crossref’s Integrity of the Scholarly Record (ISR) Program and—of course—community-wide collaboration.
In concluding his talk, Ed describes his hopes and dreams for scholarly communications in the future. He would like to see more balance in diversity in the leadership of open scholarly infrastructure, extended integrations among the various foundational infrastructures, and a fully connected system where the scholarly record is inclusive globally.
Ed, on behalf of all your proud colleagues at Crossref, thank you and congratulations!
