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.
A bit different from our traditional meetings, Crossref LIVE16 next week is the first of a totally new annual event for the scholarly communications community. Our theme is Smart alone; brilliant together. We have a broad program of both informal and plenary talks across two days. There will be stations to visit, conversation starters, and entertainment, that highlight what our community can achieve if it works together.
We’re now opening the doors to all parties—our 5,000+ members of all shapes and sizes—as well as the technology providers, funders, libraries, and researchers that we work with. Our aim is to gather the ‘metadata-curious’ and have more opportunities to talk face-to-face to share ideas and information, see live demos, and get to know one another.
Mashup Day - Tuesday 1st November 12-5pm. An ‘open house’ vibe, we’ll have several stations to visit each Crossref team, a LIVE Lounge, good food, and guest areas run by our friends at DataCite, ORCID, and Turnitin. We’ll have some special programming too, on-the-hour lightning talks, including a wild talk at 2pm from a primatologist who speaks baboon!
Conference Day - Wednesday 2nd November 9am-5pm. There is more of a formal plenary agenda this day, with keynote speakers from across the scholarly communications landscape. Our primary goal is to share Crossref strategy and plans, alongside thought-provoking perspectives from our guest speakers. We’ll hear from many corners of our community including:
Funder program officer, Carly Strasser (Moore Foundation) on “Publishers and funders as agents of change“,
Data scientist, Ian Calvert (Digital Science) on “You don’t have metadata“,
Open knowledge advocate, Dario Taraborelli (The Wikimedia Foundation) on “Citations for the sum of all human knowledge“, and
Scholarly communications librarian, April Hathcock (New York University) on “Opening up the margins“.
For our part, we will set out Crossref’s “strategy and key priorities” (Ed Pentz), “A vision for membership” (me, Ginny Hendricks), “The meaning of governance” (Lisa Hart Martin), “The case of the missing leg” (Geoffrey Bilder),”New territories in the scholarly research map” (Jennifer Lin), and “Relationships and other notable things” (Chuck Koscher).
We will also set aside thirty minutes for the important Crossref annual business meeting, when we will announce the results of the membership’s vote, and welcome new board members.
I can’t wait to welcome you all.
Have you voted?
If you’re a voting member of Crossref you’ll have cast your vote already I hope! I’m so happy to see that people have voted in record numbers although it’s under 7% of our eligible members which is not high… more on member participation next week.
