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.
Rallying the community is a key Crossref role. Sometimes this means collaborating on new initiatives but it is also an ongoing process, a cornerstone of our outreach efforts. Part of rallying the community is bringing people together, literally, in a series of outreach days around the globe. It means we encourage dialog with us and among members and non-publisher affiliates. We want to hear from the community and we hope to facilitate conversations in it. Not just about Crossref, but larger issues of scholarly communications and your particular part in it. The Crossref outreach team is doing a number of events around the world to bring together the community for updates, feedback and discussion.
On 16 June, Crossref hosted an all day session in Washington, DC where we were joined by about 35 attendees from the region, mostly publishers. The size of the group made for lots of discussion, and we are grateful for the feedback. Here is what we took away from the event:
We all need a better understanding of who is using Crossref metadata and how
Sure, we all know that, for example, submission systems, libraries and hosting platforms use Crossref metadata (‘metadata out’), but pinpointing where in workflows (often multiple instances) and the interplay between publishers and these systems? Not so much. Help us change that:take this short survey to tell us how publisher metadata quality affects your systems and workflows and we will, in turn, make use cases (anonymized if you wish) available as part of an ongoing effort to promote the value of more, better and enriched metadata.
Here I must say a big thank you to our guest speaker for the day, Carly Robinson, who provided an excellent presentation on the work of OSTI, of the U.S. Department of Energy. Carly shared examples of how OSTI uses the Crossref metadata in their systems to aid compliance and compliment the DOE public access model. A live use case is a welcome way to partner with our community!
The more things change, the more they emphasize core best practices
One session that did spur a lot of discussion was a simple overview of where Crossref services sit in the publishing process (including pre- and post-). Perhaps this is because it was early in the day but the much-appreciated discussion underscored the need to make the case for enriched metadata in a well-understood workflow that reflects the roles of publishers and affiliate users of metadata.
Outreach is an experiment in which we are all subjects
Finally, it must be noted here that we actively seek feedback on our Community Outreach days! We are not a large team and we can’t do as many outreach days as we’d like, but we are very open to hearing from you: So, tell us in this quick survey: what should we discuss? And where should we head next?
