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.
With Library of Congress sometime back (Feb. ’08) announcingLCCN Permalinks and NLM also (Mar. ’08) introducing simplified web links with its PubMed identifier one might be forgiven for wondering what is the essential difference between a DOI name and these (and other) seemingly like-minded identifiers from a purely web point of view. Both these identifiers can be accessed through very simple URL structures:
With Library of Congress sometime back (Feb. ’08) announcingLCCN Permalinks and NLM also (Mar. ’08) introducing simplified web links with its PubMed identifier one might be forgiven for wondering what is the essential difference between a DOI name and these (and other) seemingly like-minded identifiers from a purely web point of view. Both these identifiers can be accessed through very simple URL structures:
So, why does DOI not just present itself as a simple database number which is accessed through a simple web link and have done with it, e.g. a page for the object named by the DOI “10.1000/1” is retrieved from the DOI proxy server at http://dx.doi.org/?
Essentially the typical DOI link presents an elementary web-based URL which performs a useful redirect service. What is different about this and, say a PURL, which offers a similar redirect service? What’s the big deal?
(Continues below.)
Well, the thing about DOI is that it is built upon a directory service - the Handle System - and can be accessed either through native directory calls or more likely through standard web interfaces. From a web point of view we are usually interested in the latter. Differently from a simple lookup and/or redirect service which has a fixed entry point on the Web, the DOI can be serviced at any DOI service access point on the Internet. There are potentially multiple entry points which can be hosted by different organizations with separate IP addresses and/or DNS names.
For example, the [DOI proxy][8] (described [here][9]) is just _one instance_ of such a service. Others could equally exist. And, in fact, they do. The following handle web services will also take the DOI and do the business:
* <http://hdl.handle.net/10.1000/1>
* <http://hdl.nature.com/10.1000/1></ul>
With handle we have in essence a redirect to a redirect. Or in the case of a web service, a redirect (from HTTP to HDL) to a redirect (from HDL to HDL) to a redirect (from HDL to HTTP). That is, switch down from the web interface to the native handle layer, route the call from this local handle sever (via the global handle server) to the DOI handle server, fetch the URL stored with the DOI and switch back to the Web at that location.
But there’s more. The standard URL redirect is just _one_ example of a DOI service. But multiple services can also be provided for the DOI. Currently the DOI travels light and is bound to the minimum of useful data, essentially just the URL for a splash page in the case of many Crossref DOIs. But it could also carry pointers to structured information or to relationships with other objects.
As yet, the DOI is a fledgling in terms of realizing its true potential as a seasoned actor that can play out many roles - assume many guises. A queen bee, in effect, with a hive of worker bees servicing it. It is not joined at the hip with any particular web service as might be commonly understood with the current simple redirect service. It offers much more.
It is, however, true that both for reasons of link persistency and in order to maintain link ranking with search crawlers that a preferred web entry point is via the [DOI proxy][8]. It just doesn’t have to be that way - that’s all. Hard linking is something we are beginning to unlearn and instead we are taking our first steps towards embracing service-mediated links such as OpenURL and DOI can both offer.
