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.
Use of our open APIs continues to grow, as does the metadata. Last year’s file was 112 million records and 65GB. Just nine months later (though it feels longer than that!), the new file is over 120 million records and over 102GB. That’s all of the Crossref records ever registered up to and including January, 7, 2021. We continue to see around 10% growth in records each year––and while journal articles account for most of the volume, preprints and book chapters are two of our fast-growing record types. In addition to the growth in the number of records, many of the records are getting bigger and better as members look at their participation report and understand the value of enriching metadata records for distribution throughout the scholarly ecosystem. Elsevier recently opened its references, enriching over 12 million records. A number of members, including Royal Society, Sage, Emerald, OUP, World Scientific and more have started adding <a href="/blog/open-abstracts-where-are-we/" target="_blank"gicabstracts which now number over 9 million.
Help us help you––using the torrent and other important notes
We decided to release these public data files largely to help support COVID-19 research efforts but of course use cases for Crossref metadata vary widely and a few pointers should help all users:
Use the torrent if you want all of these records. Everyone is welcome to the metadata but it will be much faster for you and much easier on our APIs to get so many records in one file.
Use the REST API to incrementally add new and updated records once you’ve got the initial file. Here is how to get started (and avoid getting blocked in your enthusiasm to use all this great metadata!).
‘Limited’ and ‘closed’ <a href="/education/content-registration/descriptive-metadata/references/#00564/" target="_blank"gicreferences are not included in the file or our open APIs. And, while bibliographic metadata is generally required, lots of metadata is optional, so records will vary in quality and completeness.
