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.
We’re excited to say that we’ve finished the work on our infrastructure to allow members to register preprints. Want to know why we’re doing this? Jennifer Lin explains the rationale in detailin an earlier post, but in short we want to help make sure that:
links to these publications persist over time
they are connected to the full history of the shared research results
the citation record is clear and up-to-date
Doing so will help fully integrate preprint publications into the formal scholarly record.
What’s new?
We’ve had to do some work on our own infrastructure to facilitate the inclusion of preprints, enabling:
Crossref membership for preprint repositories by updating our membership criteria and creating a policies for preprints
The deposit of persistent identifiers for preprints to ensure successful links to the scholarly record over the course of time via the DOI resolver.
Content Registration for preprints with custom metadata that reflect researcher workflows from preprint to formal publication (this custom metadata will then be visible to anyone using the Crossref metadata).
Notification of links between preprints and formal publications that may follow (journal articles, monographs, etc.).
It will also allow for the collection of “event data” that capture activities surrounding preprints (usage, social shares, mentions, discussions, recommendations, links to datasets and other research entities, etc.).
Now we’re ready to go!
Early adopters
We have been working with various preprint publishers who are launching (or planning to launch) their own preprint initiatives.
Martyn Rittman, from Preprints, operated by MDPI said: Preprints.org is delighted to be the very first to integrate the Crossref schema for preprints. We believe it is an important step in allowing working papers and preliminary results to be fully citable as soon as they are available. It also makes it easy to link to the final peer-reviewed version, regardless of where it is published. Thanks to the hard work of Crossref and clear documentation, the schema was very simple to implement and has been applied retrospectively to all preprints at Preprints.org.
Jessica Polka, Director, ASAPbio adds: ASAPbio is a scientist-driven community initiative to promote the productive use of preprints in the life sciences. We’re thrilled to see Crossref’s development of a service that enables preprints to better contribute to the scholarly record. This infrastructure lays a necessary foundation for increasing acceptance of preprints as a valuable form of scientific communication among biologists.
Questions?
Get in touchwith any questions or comments, or join our upcoming webinarto talk about preprints, infrastructure and where we go from here.
