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.
Today two new record types were added to dx.doi.org resolution for Crossref DOIs. These allow anyone to retrieve DOI bibliographic metadata as formatted bibliographic entries. To perform the formatting we’re using the citation style language processor, citeproc-js which supports a shed load of citation styles and locales.
In fact, all the styles and locales found in the CSL repositories, including many common styles such as bibtex, apa, ieee, harvard, vancouver and chicago are supported. First off, if you’d like to try citation formatting without using content negotiation, there’s a simple web UI that allows input of a DOI, style and locale selection. If you’re more into accessing the web via your favorite programming language, have a look at these content negotiation curl examples. To make a request for the new “text/bibliography” record type:$ curl -LH “Accept: text/bibliography; style=bibtex” http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nrd842 @article{Atkins_Gershell_2002, title={From the analyst’s couch: Selective anticancer drugs}, volume={1}, DOI={10.1038/nrd842}, number={7}, journal={Nature Reviews Drug Discovery}, author={Atkins, Joshua H. and Gershell, Leland J.}, year={2002}, month={Jul}, pages={491-492}} A locale can be specified with the “locale” record type parameter, like this: $ curl -LH “Accept: text/bibliography; style=mla; locale=fr-FR” http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nrd842 Atkins, Joshua H., et Leland J. Gershell. « From the analyst’s couch: Selective anticancer drugs ». Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 1.7 (2002): 491-492.You may want to process metadata through CSL yourself. For this use case, there’s another new record type, “application/citeproc+json” that returns metadata in a citeproc-friendly JSON form:$ curl -LH “Accept: application/citeproc+json” http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nrd842 {“volume”:“1”,“issue”:“7”,“DOI”:“10.1038/nrd842”,“title”:“From the analyst’s couch: Selective anticancer drugs”,“container-title”:“Nature Reviews Drug Discovery”,“issued”:{“date-parts”:[[2002,7]]},“author”:[{“family”:“Atkins”,“given”:“Joshua H.”},{“family”:“Gershell”,“given”:“Leland J.”}],“page”:“491-492”,“type”:“article-journal”}Finally, to retrieve lists of supported styles and locales, see:
style and locale repositories. There’s one big caveat to all this. The CSL processor will do its best with Crossref metadata which can unfortunately be quite patchy at times. There may be pieces of metadata missing, inaccurate metadata or even metadata items stored under the wrong field, all resulting in odd-looking formatted citations. Most of the time, though, it works.