This year, metadata development is one of our key priorities and weâre 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; weâve added a âtypeâ 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, weâre 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. Itâs 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 worldâs least economically advantaged countries. Eligibility for the program is based on a memberâs 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.
After a busy Online Information conference, Friday was the STM Innovations Meeting in London (presentations not online yet). There was a very nice selection of tea which helped get the morning off to a good start.
Patricia Seybold kicked off with a review of Web 2.0 that mentioned lots of sites and some good case studies:
The most interesting parts of the talk were the case studies of how National Instruments and Staples have built a vibrant community of customers. Staples invited top purchasers on the their site to create product categories and sales went up 30% and now they use the categorization in physical stores and customer reviews from the web are used in stores.
NI has a whole suite of tools that allow customers to build products and get their jobs done (using NI products and services).
Five steps to Web 2.0 success â
Focus on findability
Solicit sutomersâ reviews, ratings and opinions
Empower users to classify and organize content
Nurture community, social networks, communities of practice
Get lead users to strut their stuff, using your IP to build their IP
The most useful part came in the questions when Geoffrey Bilder asked about âastroturfingâ - this is a problem for Web 2.0. Interestingly, the NI and Staples examples are closed communities and other sites have to have moderators to try and track this stuff down. Often you donât hear about these types of issues amid the web 2.0 boosterism.
Joris van Rossum gave an very good overview of Scirusâ wiki-based Topic Pages (https://web.archive.org/web/20071231210906/http://topics.scirus.com/). Itâs interesting to see the creative way Elsevier is experimenting. Joris said that it is Elsevierâs vision that wiki forms a promising topic-centered platform for informal collaboration and the sharing of highly relevant info within STM in addition to the traditional peer-reviewed system. There is a critical issuem though - will researchers go to publishers for this type of thing or will they self-organize using inexpensive tools? The danger here is that publishers will do their own thing leading to a replay of the portal craze in the late 90s.
Geoffrey Bilder gave a very good talk entitled âAnonymous Bosh: Attribution in a Mashed-up Worldâ about trust and CrossReg (contributor ID).
Simon Willison gave a very good explanation and update on OpenID. Some resources for more information - http://openid.net
Mark Bide wrapped things up with an update on ACAP (https://web.archive.org/web/20071019045302/http://www.the-acap.org/)- âan evolving, open, royalty-free standard for expression of permissions in machine readable formâ - that was launched in November. Will the search engines pay any attention?
