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.
You might recognize my name if you’ve ever applied for Crossref membership on behalf of your organization. It recently occurred to me that, since I’ve been working in our membership department for eight years, I’ve been a part of shepherding new members for half of our history. And my, how we’ve grown.
Membership growth by country
Though it may be easy to see our membership growth by looking at the numbers, I think it’s interesting to consider where we’ve grown. The top ten member countries have dramatically changed since Crossref began sixteen years ago. At the end of our first year of operations, our membership included 54 publishers and affiliated organizations. The majority were from the US and the UK, with a small number from Germany, the Netherlands, and Japan.
In 2012, participation in our sponsors program began to increase. Sponsors are affiliated organizations that act on behalf of smaller publishers and societies who wish to register their content with Crossref. Several organizations from Turkey and South Korea were among the first sponsors to join and were very successful in representing a large number of publishers and societies from their regions. Soon to follow were sponsors from India, Ukraine, Russia and Brazil. In 2014, the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) became a sponsoring affiliate, focusing on smaller publishers with the aim of increasing the quality and global reach of scholarly publishing. With the introduction of our sponsor program, the past few years have seen a steady increase in the geographical diversity of our members.
There are 194 countries in the world. It’s pretty amazing that organizations in 112 of the world’s countries are now represented in our membership. Do I think we’ll see members joining from the other 82 nations? I don’t know but I hope so.
A look at our trending nations chart shows the diversity of our membership as we’ve grown, depicting the countries that produced the most new members over the last two years. There has been tremendous growth from South Korea! What I find just as interesting is that we have new members from so many different nations that they form their own special bloc, shown here as “Other.”
Our growth has taken place at a remarkable rate. When I joined Crossref in 2008, we had over 1800 publishers and affiliates and we were adding about 300 new members per year. In 2015, nearly 1500 members joined and we are seeing even larger numbers so far in 2016. Counting all publishers, affiliates, libraries, sponsors and represented members, our new member total through the end of August is nearly 1200 and will most certainly overtake the 2015 figure.
Member perceptions
With such a range of new members each month it’s even more important that we help people understand the benefits of joining Crossref. That it’s not just registering metadata and DOIs but maintaining and improving records over time, and participating in reference linking. We are adding and improving some educational tools that will help everyone understand how our services can enhance the discoverability of content, and why sharing richer metadata supports their full participation in the scholarly community. We are in the process of developing a new, cleaner website with videos that better explain our services-to be released in the next few weeks,-a new onboarding experience, and new and improved query and deposit tools.
Connected metadata isn’t like beer
Sometimes inviting more people to a party means there is less beer to go around. Fortunately for everyone, metadata isn’t like beer. In fact, the more metadata you draw from the tap, the more useful it becomes. So inviting new members to join Crossref makes our community better and more valuable for everyone. Every member uses that metadata to link their content to every other member’s content. This makes all members’ content easier to find, link, and cite, not just at the moment it is published, but over time.
Members from around the globe join Crossref everyday and help guide our growing community. If you are interested in joining please contact me at member@crossref.org.
