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.
I’m happy to announce that Lucy Ofiesh has joined Crossref as our new Director of Finance and Operations. Lucy has experience supporting the sustainability and governance of not-for-profit organizations having held roles such as Executive Vice President of the Brooklyn Children’s Museum and for the last few years as Chief Operating Officer at Center for Open Science, a Crossref member.
At Center for Open Science, Lucy built her knowledge of the research communications community; she is knowledgeable about how diverse this community has become and the challenges of planning and scale that this comes with. She knows how to manage the complexities of an expanding global operation, where members, users––and staff––in several locations need fair, timely, and accurate information, whether it’s about how invoices relate to their use of our services or information about our approach to health benefits.
Finance underpins all that Crossref does and is crucial to long term sustainability while ‘Operations’ is a varied function and it is only becoming more so as Crossref grows. The role encompasses human resources, organization culture, governance (including serving as secretary of the organization), and working as part of the senior leadership team. Lucy will bring community focus to our operations, putting member experience first so that it becomes easier to work with us, from implementing systems and processes that work for multiple languages and currencies to providing personable billing support.
She will also play a vital role on the Crossref leadership team, working with me and the other directors Bryan, Ginny, and Geoffrey to hone the strategies, goals, and metrics that will allow us to track progress and meet our ambitious goals.
A word from Lucy…
I am excited to be joining Crossref as its next Director of Finance and Operations. I previously worked for an organization that was a Crossref member and two qualities stood out to me: first, the focus with which Crossref has provided solutions to shared challenges across scholarly publishing; and second, the ways Crossref operates transparently and from a values-driven perspective.
My past experience has been in helping organizations run as effectively as they can, navigate change and growth, and build and support high functioning teams. Specifically, my work has focused on strategic and sustainability planning, financial forecasting, organizational governance, and staff management. My goal in finance and operations is to ensure that the working experience at Crossref––both for external partners and members and internal staff––is as frictionless as possible so we can have the greatest impact on our community.
I am only the second person to step into this role. Lisa Hart Martin has led finance and operations for the first twenty years of Crossref’s existence. I am fortunate to be overlapping with her for a couple of weeks and grateful for the trust of the Crossref team to help guide us into our third decade. I really want to hear from our members so please reach out to me with your thoughts on Crossref’s finance and operations.
Please join us in welcoming Lucy to the Crossref community!
