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 spent the past year building Crossref Event Data, and hope to launch very soon. Building a new piece of infrastructure from scratch has been an exciting project, and we’ve taken the opportunity to incorporate as much feedback from the community as possible. We’d like to take a moment to share some of the suggestions we had, and how we’ve acted on them.
We asked a focus group “What one thing would you change?”. In hindsight, we could have done a better job with the question. We did get some enlightening answers but—for legal and practical reasons—we are unable to end either world hunger or global conflict, or do any of the other things we were invited to do. So we went back to our focus group and asked “What one thing would you change about Crossref?”.
The answers were illuminating. Some of you wanted mundane things like more data dumps. A disappointing number of people wanted us to put the capital ‘R’ back in our name. But two things we heard consistently, loud and clear, were:
“I want to hear more from Crossref”
“I want to know more about what’s going on inside Crossref”
One respondent said:
I like the newsletters, and the Twitter visuals are nice enough, but I want to hear, you know, more from them.
Another:
Crossref is your typical quiet DOI Registration Agency. They make a big thing about being the background infrastructure you don’t notice. But infrastructure doesn’t have to be quiet. I live next to the M25, and I can tell you, that’s the sound of success. I mean, it’s loud.
One final quote which clinched it for us:
The outreach team is doing a great job with their multilingual videos. But you can never cover every world language. In today’s connected world, you should be thinking about the universal language.
She clarified:
No, I don’t mean XML.
We took this advice to heart. When we were building Crossref Event Data, we baked these features right in. Now you can hear what’s going on inside Crossref, any time, day or night.
Introducing the Crossref Thing Action Service!
Turn up your speakers (about half-way, it would be foolhardy to turn them too high) and visit:
It’s optimized for Google Chrome, but we’ve tested it in Firefox and Safari.
The Thing Action Service shows you, in excruciating sonorous detail, every single action that happens inside the Crossref Event Data system. Every time we receive live data from Twitter or Wikipedia. Every time we check a DOI. Every time we check an RSS feed. Every time we find a link to our Registered Content on the web.
In a pioneering move within the scholarly publishing space, you can hear the data as it’s being processed, live. Furthermore, we think we are the first DOI Registration Agency to offer our services in stereo.
John Chodacki, Professional Working Group Chair, said:
We welcome this innovation. From my experience Chairing, well, everything, I’m certain that hearing-impaired users will like it especially.
So sit back, put the Thing Action Service on the speakers, and relax. You may find it difficult at first, but as you let the sound waves wash over you, think of all that data in flight. That beep could be someone criticizing the article you wrote on Twitter. But don’t worry, the next one might be someone defending it.
Think of it as musique concrète. That’s the Art of Persistence.
