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.
The other day I was out and about and got into a conversation with someone who asked me about my doctoral work in English literature. I’ve had the same conversation many times: I tell someone (only if they ask!) that my dissertation was a history of the villanelle, and then they cheerfully admit that they don’t know what a villanelle is, and then I ask them if they’re familiar with Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do not go gentle into that good night.” So far, everyone has heard of it – it’s a very well-known poem indeed. I then explain that “Do not go gentle into that good night” is a villanelle, and that a villanelle is a poetic form something like a sonnet. So far, everyone also knows what a sonnet is, which is why I use that as a comparison, even though a villanelle isn’t all that much like a sonnet, in my opinion. They’re both poetic forms, however, with a particular standard number of lines and a particular standard rhyme scheme, so in that sense they certainly are alike.
Oddly enough, I think my early background in the study of poetic form is very much of a piece with my new role here at Crossref as Technical Community Manager for ROR, the Research Organization Registry. Both poetic form and metadata are invisible to most people, but both are valuable infrastructure. Both poetic form and metadata involve generally-accepted practices and standards that differ between different groups of people and change over time. Both writing formal poetry and creating rich metadata can seem burdensome and rigid to some people, but to my mind, both are generative. A solid underlying foundation allows for all kinds of creativity to flourish on the surface.
Data and metadata are, let’s admit it, very hard to keep clean and consistent as they travel through multiple systems, and that’s why it’s important to regularize as much as we can through automatic means such as APIs that use agreed-upon standards. Scholarship is a network of networks, and common identifiers like DOIs and ORCIDs enable the interchange of information in those networks about scholarly outputs and scholars, and thus they enable scholarship itself. What could be more important than that?
But the organizations that employ, fund, and publish scholarly researchers have had a hard time keeping track of everything “their” researchers have given to the world. That’s the problem that ROR, “a community-led registry of open, sustainable, usable, and unique identifiers for every research organization in the world,” can help solve. In an ideal world, universities might use ROR IDs to track the research their faculty have produced, certainly, but they might also discover which universities their faculty’s co-authors most often come from. Funders might use ROR IDs to identify the research outputs that have benefited from their funds, certainly, but they might also analyze whether they are funding enough researchers from institutions in rural areas. Publishers might use ROR IDs to offer affiliation searching in their own public interfaces, certainly, but they might also create internal reports on compliance with institution-level transformative Open Access agreements. Once something like ROR is widely adopted, the vision of the Research Nexus becomes closer to reality: “A rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organizations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society.” ROR is all about the “organizations” part of that alluring vision.
If you’re curious about ROR and want to learn more (hey, that rhymes!), you might want to watch the highly informative presentation from September 2021 “Working with ROR as a Crossref Member”, in which you’ll learn several interesting things, including the following:
ROR itself is not an organization, but an initiative supported jointly by Crossref, DataCite, and the California Digital Library;
Crossref members cited institutional affiliation identifiers as one of their top priorities in 2019, second only to abstracts;
The specifics of how one recent ROR integrator, the open access journal publisher Hindawi, used the ROR API to create a typeahead widget in its manuscript submission system that replaces user-supplied free text with a standard institution name and a ROR ID behind the scenes, helping them to generate useful internal reports about institutional payments; and
Crossref supports the submission of ROR IDs in its XML content registration process and makes ROR IDs available in its API.
I’m also enthusiastically inviting you to get in touch with me if you’d like to learn more about ROR or if you’d like to tell me about your previous experience with ROR. And if you don’t get in touch with me, please be aware that I might well reach out to you – I’m eager to hear what you hope for from ROR, but also what you’re skeptical about. For, after all, I learn by going where I have to go – don’t we all?
