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.
This project - https://web.archive.org/web/20061004011422/www.journalsupplychain.com/ - (which needs a new name or clever acronym) has released a Mid Year Report. The pilot is being extended into 2007 and there is clearly value for publishers in having an unique ID for institutions at the licensing unit level. Ringgold, one of the project partners, has a great database with a validated hierarchy of institutions from consortia down to departments - I had a demo at Frankfurt. The report has some info on benefits for publishers and on possible business models. I think a central, neutral registry of unique IDs would be a real benefit to the industry.
From the report:
“Publishers
Certainly publishers are already using an institutional identifier internally with major
marketing and customer communication benefits. The main areas where the proposed
identifier could add value to the communication between the publisher and customer
should be in areas such as:
• accurate COUNTER usage reports
• institutional renewals being unrecognized as such and therefore appearing as
new subscriptions
• easier ability to track institutional end-users of consolidated subscriptions
(especially those where the agent does not deliver orders via ICEDIS
structured FTP with Type 2 addresses incorporated in the complete record)”
On business models:
“A sensible business model would have those that receive the most economic benefit
from a respective service providing a respective level of funding to support costs. It is
clear that publishers are the primary beneficiaries of the institutional identifier, with
clear benefits, thereby suggesting they should bear the proportionate cost. Ultimately
the subscriber pays anyway; economies are reflected in reduced cost to the subscriber
in a competitive market.
Other participants would see service improvements, but not the same clear benefits. It
would therefore be reasonable to ask the publishers to bear the major cost of the
establishment of such an identifier, and to a certain extent they have already done so
by subscribing selectively to Ringgold’s existing auditing and database services.
The various and relevant business revenue streams might be reflected as follows:
• Free service: limited search only, with number of searches per day restricted,
possibility of searchers to edit or input information using a “response form”
designed for such purposes
• Basic subscription: unlimited search access to the database
• Database license for hosting services: download of standard selected metadata
• Database license for publishers: access for download of selected metadata, and
