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 first announced plans to investigate identifiers for grants in 2017 and are almost ready to violate the first rule of grant identifiers which is “they probably should not be called grant identifiers”. Research support extends beyond monetary grants and awards, but our end goal is to make grants easy to cite, track, and identify, and ‘Grant ID’ resonates in a way other terms do not. The truth is in the metadata, and we intend to collect (and our funder friends are prepared to provide) information about a number of funding types. Hopefully we encompass all of them.
Our technical & metadata working group (a subset of the broader Funder Advisory Group) includes folks from Children’s Tumor Foundation, Europe PMC, European Research Council, JST, OSTI (DOE), Smithsonian, Swiss National Science Foundation, UKRI, Wellcome, as well as colleagues at DataCite and ORCID.
They have provided a wealth of funding data and feedback, and together we’ve come up with a metadata schema that works for us. Just as important - does this set of metadata meet your needs? Did we miss something? Let us know.
The details
For those of you familiar with Crossref Content Registration, Grant IDs will have their own dedicated schema that differs from our publication schema. The Grant ID schema will follow some of the same conventions as we’ll be using the same system to process the files (which will be XML) but since we are collecting metadata for a new community and moving beyond published content, this is an opportunity to rethink how we handle some basics like person names and dates.
Each Grant ID can be assigned to multiple projects. The metadata within each project includes basics like titles, descriptions, and investigator information (including affiliations) as well as funding information. Funders will supply funder information (including funder identifiers from the Crossref Funder Registry) as well as information about funding types and amounts.
A major accomplishment of the group was to develop a simple taxonomy of types of funding. Supported types are:
award
contract
grant
salary-award
endowment
secondment
loan
facilities
equipment
seed-funding
fellowship
training-grant
other
Funding involves more than monetary grants or awards and we’ve attempted to capture the broad categories of funding types. This list is taken from types of funding as defined by our participating funder organizations. We anticipate this list will evolve over time.
Ready to dig in? The schema and documentation are available on GitHub. We will actively take feedback until the end of February 2019. We hope to begin implementation soon after that. Please let us know what you think through GitHub, or feel free to contact me via feedback@crossref.org.
