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.
Over the past couple of years, a group of organizations with a shared purpose—California Digital Library, Crossref, DataCite, and ORCID—invested our time and energy into launching the Org ID initiative, with the goal of defining requirements for an open, community-led organization identifier registry. The goal of our initiative has been to offer a transparent, accessible process that builds a better system for all of our communities. As the working group chair, I wanted to provide an update on this initiative and let you know where our efforts are headed.
Community-led effort
First, I would like to summarize all of the work that has gone into this project, a truly community-driven initiative, over the last two years:
A series of collaborative workshops were held at the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) meeting in San Antonio TX (2016), the FORCE11 conference in Portland OR (2016), and at PIDapalooza in Reykjavik (2016).
Findings from these workshops were summarized in three documents, which we made openly available to the community for public comment:
Organization Identifier Project: A Way Forward (PDF)
We then put out a Request for Information that sought expressions of interest from organizations to be involved in implementing and running an organization identifier registry.
There was a really good response to the RFI; reviewing the responses and thinking about next steps led to our most recent stakeholder meeting in Girona in January 2018, where ORCID, DataCite, and Crossref were tasked with drafting a proposal that meets the Working Group’s requirements for a community-led, organizational identifier registry.
Thank you
I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has contributed to this effort so far. We’ve been able to make good progress with the initiative because of the time and expertise many of you have volunteered. We have truly benefited from the support of the community, with representatives from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; American Physical Society, California Digital Library, Cornell University, Crossref, DataCite, Digital Science, Editeur, Elsevier, Foundation for Earth Sciences, Hindawi, Jisc, ORCID, Ringgold, Springer Nature, The IP Registry, and U.S. Geological Survey involved throughout this initiative. And we couldn’t have done any of it without the help and guidance of our consultants, Helen Szigeti and Kristen Ratan.
The way forward
The recommendations from our initiative have been converted into a concrete plan for building a registry for research organizations. This plan will be posted in the coming weeks.
The initiative’s leadership group has already secured start-up resourcing and is getting ready to announce the launch plan—more details coming soon.
We hope that all stakeholders will continue to support the next phase of our work – look for announcements in the coming weeks about how to get involved.
As always, we welcome your feedback and involvement as this effort continues. Please contact me directly with any questions or comments at john.chodacki@ucop.edu. And thanks again for your help bringing an open organization identifier registry to fruition!
References
Bilder, G., Brown, J., & Demeranville, T. (2016). Organisation identifiers: current provider survey. ORCID. https://doi.org/10.5438/4716
Cruse, P., Haak, L., & Pentz, E. (2016). Organization Identifier Project: A Way Forward. ORCID. https://doi.org/10.5438/2906
Fenner, M., Paglione, L., Demeranville, T., & Bilder, G. (2016). Technical Considerations for an Organization Identifier Registry. https://doi.org/10.5438/7885
Laurel, H., Bilder, G., Brown, C., Cruse, P., Devenport, T., Fenner, M., … Smith, A. (2017). ORG ID WG Product Principles and Recommendations. https://doi.org/10.23640/07243.5402047
Laurel, H., Pentz, E., Cruse, P., & Chodacki, J. (2017). Organization Identifier Project: Request for Information. https://doi.org/10.23640/07243.5458162
