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.
Whenever we send out our quarterly deposit invoices, we receive queries from members who have registered a lot of backlist content, but have been charged at the current year’s rate. As the invoices for the first quarter of 2019 have recently hit your inboxes, I thought I’d provide a timely reminder about this in case you spot this problem on your invoice.
This problem is usually the result of metadata being registered that makes it look as though the content was current, despite the fact that it was backlist. This post will show you what to do if you spot this problem in your latest invoice - and more importantly, how you can avoid this situation in the future.
About current and backlist Content Registration fees
There are different fees for registering content depending on whether it’s current (this year and the previous two years - 2017, ‘18, and ‘19) or backlist (older than that). As an example, it’s $1 each for a current journal article, and $0.15 for each backlist article. So, if you’ve incorrectly registered your content as published in 2019 when actually it was published in 2012, your quarterly invoice will overcharge you based on the metadata discrepancy.
We send you the quarterly deposit invoice at the end of each quarter. This example is an invoice for all deposits of the first quarter of 2018 for username ‘test’ - months January, February, and March.
The BY code represents backlist (or, back year) content (journal article, in this example). Backlist content is charged at $0.15 per content item.
The CY code represents current year content (journal article, in this example, although you can see that this invoice has charges for other content items as well). Current year content is charged at $1 per content item.
Determining whether content is current or backlist
A record is determined to be either a backlist or current year deposit based on the metadata that you deposit with us. If you use our helper tools - Metadata Manager or the web deposit form - the system looks at the information you’ve entered into the “publication date” field. If you deposit XML with us, it looks at the date in the <publication_date> element. And we look at each individual item separately—so even if you’ve put a publication date at journal level, you still need to put it at the journal article level too.
Additionally, sometimes we find that deposits mistakenly include the deposit date in place of the publication date. These two dates - the deposit date and the publication date - are not necessarily one and the same, especially if you are depositing backlist content. Please take care to double check this before you submit your deposit(s).
What to do if you think you’ve registered the wrong publication date
As you can only update a publication date by running a full redeposit, it’s important to get it right the first time. If you’ve registered the wrong publication date and have received an invoice for the wrong amount, please redeposit your content and then get in contact with us. If you do this as soon as you spot the error, we’ll be able to send a new invoice for the correct amount.
