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 inadvertently deleted data in our authentication sandbox that stored member credentials for our Test Admin Tool - test.crossref.org. We’re restoring credentials using our production data, but this will mean that some members have credentials that are out-of-sync. Please contact support@crossref.org if you have issues accessing test.crossref.org.
The details
Earlier today the credentials in our authentication sandbox were inadvertently deleted. This was a mistake on our end that has resulted in those credentials no longer being stored for our members using our Test Admin Tool - test.crossref.org.
To be clear, this error has had no impact on the production Admin Tool - doi.crossref.org - or any member’s access to registering content therein. If you’re a member who registers content with us using our helper tools (e.g., the web deposit form) or OJS, you’re likely unfamiliar with the Test Admin Tool, and this issue will not affect you or your registration of content.
We don’t configure all member accounts for the Test Admin Tool, so, fortunately, this is an issue for the minority of our members. That said, for those members who do use the Test Admin Tool, this is not a trivial problem. And, we’re going to dedicate additional resources across the organization to ensure it is fixed.
Next steps
We’ve repopulated the credentials in the Test Admin Tool based on our production accounts. It was our best option. While we don’t know your current credentials, our support and membership teams do know that the majority of our members using the Test Admin Tool have historically shared credentials between the Test Admin Tool and our production Admin Tool - doi.crossref.org. That means that many of you will be able to access the Test Admin Tool using those shared credentials; but some of you - who have used different credentials between the two systems - will not.
We also know that for many of you testing submissions is an integral step in your workflow, so we’ve determined this is an all-hands-on-deck situation and our staff, across the organization, will be assisting members who have issues with access to test.crossref.org. Starting today, we’re actively monitoring submissions to the Test Admin Tool for access errors through Friday, 11 February. We’ll be proactively contacting affected members to reset their passwords. If you encounter problems before we reach out to you, please do contact us at at support@crossref.org and include ‘Accessing Test Admin Tool’ in your subject line.
