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.
Well, we may not be the first but wanted anyway to report that Nature has now embedded metadata (HTML meta tags) into all its newly published pages including full text, abstracts and landing pages (all bar four titles which are currently being worked on). Metadata coverage extends back through the Nature archives (and depth of coverage varies depending on title). This conforms to the W3C’s Guideline 13.2 in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 which exhorts content publishers to “provide metadata to add semantic information to pages and sites”.
Metadata is provided in both DC and PRISM formats as well as in Google’s own bespoke metadata format. This generally follows the DCMI recommendation “Expressing Dublin Core metadata using HTML/XHTML meta and link elements, and the earlier RFC 2731 “Encoding Dublin Core Metadata in HTML”. (Note that schema name is normalized to lowercase.) Some notes:
The DOI is included in the “dc.identifier” term in URI form which is the Crossref recommendation for citing DOI.
We could consider adding also “prism.doi” for disclosing the native DOI form. This requires the PRISM namespace declaration to be bumped to v2.0. We might consider synchronizing this change with our RSS feeds which are currently pegged at v1.2, although note that the RSS module mod_prism currently applies only to PRISM v1.2.
We could then also add in a “prism.url” term to link back (through the DOI proxy server) to the content site. The namespace issue listed above still holds.
The “citation_” terms are not anchored in any published namespace which does make this term set problematic in application reuse. It would be useful to be able to reference a namespace (e.g. “rel="schema.gs" href="..."“) for these terms and to cite them as e.g. “gs.citation_title“.
The HTML metadata sets from an example landing page are presented below.
If you view the page source you should see something like the text below. (Note that you may have to scroll past whitespace which is emitted by the HTML template generator.)
While it is not expected that search engines will index these terms directly and that no direct SEO is intended, we think there is enough value for applications to make use of these terms. The terms are reasonably accessible to simple scripts, etc. Note that even in [RFC 2731][4] (published in 1999) there is a Perl script listed in Section 9 which allows the metadata name/value pairs to be easily pulled out. Running this over the example page yields the following output:
<pre>@(urc;
