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.
About 13-20 billion researcher-hours were spent in 2015 doing peer reviews. What valuable work! Let’s get more mileage out of these labors and make these expert discussions citable, persistent, and linked up to the scholarly record. As we previously shared during Peer Review week, Crossref is lauintroducing support for a new record type to support the registration of peer reviews. We’re one step closer to changing that. Today, we are excited to announce that we’re open for deposits.
If you missed the first episode, here’s a recap:
Publishers have been registering reviews with us for a while (ex: Example 1, Example 2, and Example 3). But these have been shoehorned into other content: article, dataset, or component. So we are extending Crossref’s infrastructure to properly treat this special scholarly artifact. This includes a range of outputs made publicly available from the peer review history (referee reports, decision letters, author responses, community comments) across any and all review rounds. We welcome scholarly discussions of journal articles before or after publication (e.g. “post-publication reviews”).
We collect metadata that characterizes the peer review asset (for example: recommendation, type, license, contributor info, competing interests). We also collect metadata, which offers a view into the review process (e.g. pre/post-publication, revision round, review date).
This special set will support the discovery and investigation of peer reviews as it is linked up to the article discussed. It will also enable the following:
Enable tracking of the evolution of scholarly claims through the lineage of expert discussion
Support enrichment of scholarly discussion
Enable reviewer accountability
Credit reviewers and editors for their scholarly contribution
Support publisher transparency
Connect reviews to the full history of the published results
Provide data for analysis and research on peer review
Please come check out our documentation for more information.
As publishers are implementing this, we are finishing up the delivery of this metadata for machine and human access, across all the Crossref interfaces (REST API, OAI-PMH, Crossref Metadata Search) to enable discoverability across the research ecosystem. We are also working to make it possible for members to get Cited-by data for the peer reviews they register.
If you are interested in registering your peer review content with us, please get in touch.
