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.
The SIIA is pleased to announce that Howard Ratner of Nature Publishing Group will be our guest for the upcoming Executive FaceTime. This live webcast series features one-on-one conversations between leading industry executives and host Hal Espo. Participation is encouraged, the web audience is invited to submit questions posed through the host. Past guests include Tad Smith, CEO of Reed Business Information and L. Gordon Crovitz, EVP of Dow Jones & Company. Registration is free to SIIA members and non-members alike; to participate, you must register by the end of the day on Tuesday, March 27th.
Howard Ratner
Howard Ratner is Chief Technology Officer, Executive Vice-President, for the Nature Publishing Group. Based in New York, Howard is in charge of NY operations and has global responsibilities for Production and Manufacturing, Web Development, Web Services, Content Services, and Information Technology across all NPG products. Howard’s prior positions include Director, Electronic Publishing & Production for Springer-Verlag New York, as well as the North American Manager for LINK, and a member of the production staff at John Wiley & Sons. He also serves on the Crossref board, PubMed Central, CORDS and LOCKSS advisory committees, and is a former chair for both the AAP/PSP DOI subcommittee and the DOI-X project.
Hal Espo
Hal Espo is President of Contextual Connections, LLC, a NYC-based consultancy which focuses exclusively in the digital services arena, including digital content, distribution, and applications. Hal has more than 25 years experience as an operating executive as well as a business and product development professional in the electronic information industry. He served as Chief Operating Officer of Index Stock Imagery, Inc., a web-based commercial stock photography and illustration vendor, and previously was the Chief Operating Officer at CORSEARCH, Inc., a trademark research firm serving Fortune 500 companies and law firms.
