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.
Hi, I’m Isaac. I’m new here. What better way to get to know me than through a blog post? Well, maybe a cocktail party, but this will have to do. In addition to giving you some details about myself in this post, I’ll be introducing our status page, too.
A little about me
In mid-April, I began as the new Support Manager. My goal is to fill the very large shoes left by Patricia Feeney moving into the Head of Metadata role. I know Patricia knows Crossref and the rich community of members (and metadata!) inside and out. I’ll get there too. For now, I have immersed myself in tackling as many of your support questions as possible, so I may have already met some of you on a support ticket. If so, thanks for your patience; you likely have already taught me a thing or two!
Isaac, on the lookout to provide you excellent support
I came to this position from one of our members – the Society of Exploration Geophysicists, where I served as the Digital Publications Manager for the last five years. Like many of you, I was always impressed, intrigued, and excited by the work underway at Crossref and wanted to be a part of the team. So, here I am, very much looking forward to the challenge ahead.
I work remotely from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I live with my wife and two daughters. Tulsa doesn’t have as many members as D.C., London, or Jakarta, but I hope to meet some of you during outreach trips, LIVE events, online in a webinar, or in our support community.
One of the things that attracts me to being a part of this community are our truths. As a quick reminder, the truths are:
Come one, come all
One member, one vote
Smart alone, brilliant together
Love metadata, love technology
What you see, what you get
Here today, here tomorrow
I am drawn to forward-thinking, action-oriented communities that value collaboration and openness. These truths, and the ten weeks I have been at Crossref, have confirmed that this is one of those communities. As your new support manager, I want to emphasize our commitment to transparency: Ask me anything; I’ll tell you what I know. In that spirit, I have the privilege of introducing our new status page—a key piece in furthering our own transparency and openness.
Our new status page provides critical, real-time information about our services—it helps us tell our overall story. If you are looking for metrics on the performance of our APIs, websites, the deposit system, or new beta services, bookmark this page. The system metrics provide daily, weekly, and monthly overviews of each of our services’ response time (in milliseconds) and uptime, or percentage of time that service has been operational during your selected time span (daily, weekly, or monthly).
From this page, we’ll announce planned maintenance and keep you regularly updated when we have an incident. And, we’ll provide regular status updates for these incidents when in progress, updated, and completed.
Our new status page – status.crossref.org
I encourage you to subscribe to the updates from the top-right corner of the page. While we’ll update this page with any service-related outages, subscribing for notifications will allow you to stay current on the latest. We’ll describe maintenance and incidents clearly, simply, and timely when we have them. And, if we don’t, call us on it.
If you have questions about the performance of our services, the status page is a great starting place. If you still have questions, ask us, we’ll tell you what we know.
