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.
Crossref has supported depositing metadata for preprints since 2016 and peer reviews since 2018. Now we are putting the two together, in fact we will permit peer reviews to be registered for any record type.
Currently, peer reviews can be registered for journal articles, but that means that they can only be related to some of the content our members deposit. Preprints, books, chapters, working papers, dissertations, and a host of other works can also be registered with Crossref. A number of these frequently undergo some form of review and many of our members and voices in the community have called for us to widen the net on peer reviews, including journal publishers, book publishers, review platforms, and preprint servers. We’ve listened and taken action, and from now on Crossref members can add relationship metadata that links peer reviews to any record type. The metadata will also contain the type of review, stating whether it is a referee report, author response, or community comment, etc. This allows accurate reporting on whether the peer review is happening within a traditional editorial process or elsewhere.
Reviews for preprints
In the last decade there has been an increase in the number of disciplines using preprints. Since enabling registration of preprint metadata, it has become our fastest-growing record type. Preprints, working papers, and other forms of early publication help to accelerate dissemination of the latest research and discovery. They can also promote discussion on important topics, and help authors to improve papers before an editorial decision for journal publication. During the COVID-19 pandemic, preprints have become invaluable for speeding the publication of vital research and case studies.
On the other hand, preprints do not undergo formal review and editorial approval, leading to concerns about the dissemination of false information. While the issue of misinformation in preprints has been discussed for some time, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought it more sharply into focus. Organizations that post preprints need to balance the benefits of rapid dissemination with promoting their responsible use.
To support the feedback process, preprint servers along with a growing number of other platforms and services offer scholars the opportunity to post public comments on preprints. By doing this, they give extra context for readers, provide suggestions for authors, and raise awareness of work that could be flawed or too preliminary.
Another growing trend is journal publishers adopting editorial processes that involve preprint-first options and open peer review. As Dr. Stephanie Dawson from ScienceOpen says:
“We have long believed in rewarding reviewers by assigning Crossref DOIs to their open reviews to make them citable objects and we were one of the first users of Crossref’s peer review schema. However, a large percentage of the articles reviewed on ScienceOpen are publicly available preprints. The UCL Open: Environment journal hosted on the platform, for example, is based on a workflow of open peer review of preprints. Our customers, editors, reviewers and authors are therefore extremely happy that these reviews can now also be assigned a Crossref peer review DOI for more accountability and transparency in scholarly publishing.”
At Crossref, we’re continually looking to support more record types and relations between them to build trust, support reproducibility and increase discoverability of content. This is another small step in building the research nexus and we look forward to working with members depositing peer reviews of preprints.
