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.
We’ve been working on Event Data for some time now, and in the spirit of openness, much of that story has already been shared with the community. In fact, when I recently joined as Crossref’s Product Manager for Event Data, I jumped onto an already fast moving train—headed for a bright horizon.
What’s on the horizon? Well, the reality is you never really reach the horizon. Good product development—in my opinion—is like that train. You keep aiming for the horizon and passing all the stations (milestones) along the way, but the horizon keeps moving as you add features, improve the service, and maybe even review where you are headed. However, for Event Data we are pleased to say we have now arrived at a rather important station.
Technical readiness
Thank you to all the beta testers who have journeyed with us this far—we’ve listened and learned, refined and rebuilt with the help of your feedback. We are now thrilled to say that we are service production ready. We’ve reached the station called ‘technical readiness’, and are eager to see more users board our train!
During this time of building and refining, Event Data has grown to include at least 66,7 million events from sources like (in order of magnitude): Wikipedia, Cambia Lens, Twitter, Datacite, F1000, Newfeeds, Reddit links, Wordpress.com, Crossref, Reddit, Hypothesis, and Stackexchange. Wikipedia alone accounts for 50 million events (and counting).
What does this mean?
Event Data is production ready.
Being production ready means we are not going to make any breaking changes to the code, and we are excited to see more people jump on board to explore where you can go with Event Data, and what product or service you might want to build with it.
Getting started
Having a look at Event Data, and using it, is easy. While the user guide outlines everything you need to know to get fully engrossed, you can get your feet wet with a few sample queries:
Above I mentioned Event Data has about 50 million Wikipedia events, you can check if that has grown by looking at a query that lists all distinct events by source (your browser will need a JSON viewer extension):
For all events registered for a specific content item, you simply query http://api.eventdata.crossref.org/v1/events?obj-id=https://doi.org/XXX, where XXX is replaced with the DOI.
What next?
We are now focusing on the final stretch towards the official roll-out. Beyond this, we will continue to add sources and features and have a healthy roadmap to keep us on track. We value any feedback you have for us about your own journey with Event Data. Your feedback may help shape the direction we take in the future. Most of all, we are all excited to see what people build with it!
We look forward to continuing on our Event Data journey and we welcome you all aboard the train! Please contact me with your ideas.
