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.
It’s been a year since Metadata Manager was first launched in Beta. We’ve received a lot of helpful feedback from many Crossref members who made the switch from Web Deposit Form to Metadata Manager for their journal article registrations.
The most common use for Metadata Manager is to register new DOIs for newly published articles. For the most part, this is a one-time process. You enter the metadata, register your DOI, and success!
But everything doesn’t always go quite as expected. Humans make mistakes, and typos in metadata are bound to happen on occasion, even for the most careful users.
We always want to make it as easy as possible for our members to find and correct metadata errors, and to add additional metadata when it becomes available. Our Schematron, Conflict, and Resolution reports can help you identify existing metadata errors. We never charge content registration fees for metadata updates, additions, or corrections, so cost won’t be a barrier to getting the most accurate and thorough metadata possible. And, now, Metadata Manager can make those corrections easier to do.
Correcting Errors
Because accurate and comprehensive metadata is so important for the linking and discoverability of your publications, it’s important to catch these occasional errors and correct them.
The “Review all” feature in Metadata Manager also allows you to do a final check of all the metadata you entered right before you’re about to submit your deposits. So, we also rely on you to evaluate your own accuracy there as well.
Once you’ve identified an error, you’ll need to correct it. To do that, you must resubmit a whole new metadata deposit for the affected item. The newly deposited metadata will entirely overwrite the previously deposited metadata.
If you’re used to using the Web Deposit Form, you know that the redeposit can be a little tedious. For example, if you find that you misspelled an author’s last name, you’d have to manually type in or copy-paste not just the corrected last name, but all of the journal-level, issue-level, and article-level metadata that applies to the article.
Using Metadata Manager, the process is much simpler. The full metadata record is retained or imported and you only need to correct the error itself.
For articles originally registered using Metadata Manager
If you find a metadata error in an article which you initially registered in Metadata Manager itself, you can locate the article in one of two ways:
Navigate through the list of Accepted articles within a given journal
Or, search by article title in the Deposit History
Once you’ve located the relevant article, click on the article title to open the article’s metadata record. From there, you can make the necessary corrections. With the corrections complete, click “Continue” and then “Add to deposit.” After that, the process is exactly the same as depositing a new article.
For articles registered using the Web Deposit Form or any other deposit method
If you registered an article using the Web Deposit Form, an XML deposit, or the OJS plugin, you can still use Metadata Manager to quickly correct an error. But, first you have to import the article’s metadata into Metadata Manager.
To do this, click into the relevant journal from your Metadata Manager home page. Then, search for the article title using the “Add existing article” search box. Select “Add” next to the article title in the search results, which will import the article’s metadata record into Metadata Manager.
From here, make any necessary corrections and click “Continue” and then “Add to deposit.” Navigate to the “To deposit” tab and “Review all” to ensure that your metadata record is accurate. Then select “Deposit” to finalize your submission. You’ll receive immediate feedback as to whether your metadata deposit was successful or not.
Adding additional metadata
Perhaps there are no problems with your metadata, and everything is completely accurate. That’s great! But, we encourage our members to submit metadata that is not just accurate, but also as thorough as possible. Check your Participation Report to see if there are any types of metadata that you haven’t been submitting yet, or that you haven’t been submitting for certain journals.
Metadata Manager allows you to deposit references, licenses, and relationships between your articles and other DOIs, which weren’t possible to add using the Web Deposit Form. The same process described above for corrections will allow you to import previously registered articles and add in these new metadata elements.
We also know that many of our members register DOIs for their articles when they’re first published online, but aren’t yet included in an issue. When the articles are published in their final versions, there is important metadata added which wasn’t yet available when the DOI was first registered. This includes things like volume number, issue number, page numbers, and full publication date, all of which are extremely important for linking and discoverability. Sometimes the resolution URL changes when the article is moved from its pre-publication status to its final version.
So, when each issue is published, you can use Metadata Manager to pull up all the already-registered articles included in that issue and add in the newly relevant metadata like page numbers, issue number, URL, etc. Then add them to a new deposit, review, and submit.
