At the end of last year, we were excited to announce our renewed commitment to community and the launch of three cross-functional programs to guide and accelerate our work. We introduced this new approach to work towards better cross-team alignment, shared responsibility, improved communication and learning, and make more progress on the things members need.
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.
I’m happy to announce that Bryan Vickery has joined Crossref today as our new Director of Product. Bryan has extensive experience developing products and services at publishers such as Taylor & Francis, where he led the creation of the open-access platform Cogent OA. Most recently he was Managing Director of Research Services at T&F, including Wizdom.ai after it was acquired.
He previously held a range of roles from Publisher to Chief Operations Officer at BioMedCentral, as well as online community and technology leadership roles at Elsevier.
Bryan is a great addition to Crossref and we are lucky to have him. The product team is keen to progress the long list of wishes from our community with his guidance. Bryan will bring focus and clarity to our roadmap and our development processes, making it easier for people to adopt and participate in our services, and ensuring that we are working on the issues that are most important to our members.
He will also be a vital part of the leadership team, working with me and the other directors Geoffrey, Ginny, and Lisa to help us take the organization forward in a transparent way that serves our mission and empowers our excellent staff.
And now a few words from Bryan…
I’m thrilled to be joining Crossref as Director of Product at a time of considerable change in scholarly communication. I’ve worked in, and around, scholarly publishing for more than 20 years.
This is a challenging role. We have many exciting services and collaborations to progress, and also technical debt to address (like everyone else) to upgrade our existing services - it’s essential we balance these. My priority is to stay on top of the issues of the highest value to the scholarly community, now and in the future, and ensure we deliver services that are both useful and usable.
I will be attending Crossref LIVE19 “The strategy one” along with other staff and look forward to meeting many of our members then. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts on where we’ve been (what it’s like working with us and using our services) and where we’re going (what you’d like to see from us). You can reach me via our feedback email.
Please join us in welcoming Bryan to the Crossref community.