This year, metadata development is one of our key priorities and weâre 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; weâve added a âtypeâ 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, weâre 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. Itâs 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 worldâs least economically advantaged countries. Eligibility for the program is based on a memberâs 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 provides infrastructure services and therefore we support scholarly communications as it evolves over time. Today, preprints are increasingly discussed as a valuable part of the research story (beyond physics, math, and a small set of sub-disciplines). Preprints might play a positive role in catalyzing research discovery, establishing priority of discoveries and ideas, facilitating career advancement, and improving the culture of communication within the scholarly community.
As we shared in an earlier blog post last month, members will be able to register Crossref DOIs for preprints later this year. We will connect the full history of a research work, and ensure the citation record is clear and up-to-date. As we build out this new record/resource type, weâd love to hear how the research community envisions what preprints will do.
Whatâs your story, preprint?
So we can develop a service that supports the whole host of potential uses for all stakeholders, we ask the entire research community to contribute preprints user stories . User stories are concrete descriptions of a specific need, typically used in technology development: As a [x], I want to [y] to that I can [z]. User stories take the âend-userâsâ perspective as they focus on a discrete result and its value. They are essential when implementing solutions that must meet a wide range of needs, across a diverse set of constituents. For example:
As an author, I want to share results before my paper is submitted to a journal so that I can get rapid feedback on it and make improvements before publication.
As a researcher who is part of a tenure and promotion committee or funder review panel, I want to know the reach of early results published from the candidate so that I can more quickly track the impact of results, rather than relying only on journal articles that take much longer to publish.
As a journal publisher, I want to know whether a preprint exists for a manuscript submitted to me so that I can decide whether I will accept the submission based on my editorial policy.
We aim to assemble a full catalog that cuts across research disciplines and stakeholder groups. We want to hear from you: researchers, publishers, funding agencies, scholarly societies, academic institutions, technology providers, other infrastructure providers , etc .
Tell us your story here
To ensure that your needs are included, please send us your user stories via this user story âdepositâ form . They will be added to the full registry of contributions from the community, which we hope will serve as a key resource for all those developing preprints into a core part of scholarly communications (e.g., ASAPbio, etc.).
