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.
LIVE18, your Crossref annual meeting, is fast approaching! We’re looking forward to welcoming everyone in Toronto, November 13-14.
This year’s theme “How good is your metadata?” centers around the definition and benefits of metadata completeness, and each half day will cover some element of the theme:
Day one, AM Defining good metadata
Day one, PM Improving metadata quality and completeness
Day two, AM What does good metadata enable?
Day two, PM Who is using our metadata and what are they doing with it?
Both days will be packed with a mixture of plenary and interactive sessions. Speakers include:
Patricia Cruse, DataCite
Kristen Fisher Ratan, CoKo Foundation
Stefanie Haustein, University of Ottawa
Bianca Kramer, Utrecht University
Shelley Stall, American Geophysical Union
Ravit David, University of Toronto Libraries
Graham Nott, Freelance developer of an eLife JATS conversion tool
Paul Dlug, American Physical Society
A ‘meet and mingle’ drinks reception will be held directly after the election results on day one.
About the theme—how good is your metadata?
The reach and usefulness of research outputs are only as good as how well they are described. Metadata is what is used to describe the story of research: its origin, its contributors, its attention, and its relationship with other objects.
The more machines start to do what humans cannot—parse millions of files through multiple views—the more we see what connections are missing, the more we start to understand the opportunities that better metadata can offer.
LIVE18 will focus this year entirely on the subject of metadata. It touches everything we do, and everything that publishers, hosting platforms, funders, researchers, and libraries do.
