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.
UPDATE, 12 December 2022 Due to the scheduled sunsetting of Metadata Manager, this title transfer process has been deprecated. Please find detailed guidance for transferring titles on our documentation site here.
When you thought about your resolutions for 2019, Crossref probably didn’t cross your mind—but, maybe it should have…
Because we know—with a high level of certainty—that Shayn, Paul and I will be spending the first few weeks of the year transferring the ownership of many journal titles. Last year we processed almost 60 journal transfer requests during this time, and we’re heading toward a similar number for 2019. There’s no objection; it’s a just a fact. We’re happy to do it, but there is another way.
Unlike previous years, we now have a tool that gives you the control to transfer titles without any intervention from the Crossref support team—Metadata Manager. With just a few clicks, you, as the disposing publisher, can transfer your journal to the acquiring publisher yourself. Here’s how:
Transferring your journal in five easy steps using Metadata Manager:
Log into Metadata Manager using your username and password (the same one you use for the Crossref Web Deposit form).
Find the journal you’re transferring on your Metadata Manager workspace using the “search publications” box and click to load the journal’s container (or, dashboard).
Within the journal container, select Transfer Title from the Action drop-down.
On the transfer title screen select the acquiring (destination) publisher’s name and DOI prefix of where ownership will be transferred to. Click Transfer.
(In addition to transferring ownership of the title itself, all existing journal article DOIs previously registered will also be transferred to the new owner using this mechanism. They will persist on their original prefix, but the acquiring publisher will be able to update the metadata associated with these DOIs).
Confirm the title transfer. It may take up to 24 hours for the transfer to be reflected within Metadata Manager, and we’ll send a courtesy email to the acquiring (destination) publisher’s technical contact when the transfer has been completed.
As always, if you have questions, need guidance as you’re working through this process, or have recommendations on how we can improve title transfers—or anything else within Metadata Manager (the tool is in beta)–please let us know at support@crossref.org. There’s also comprehensive support documentation available for Metadata Manager to help and guide you.
