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.
We first met the team from PaperHiveat SSP in June, pointed them in the direction of the Crossref Metadata APIand let things progress from there. That’s the nice thing about having an API - because it’s a common and easy way for developers to access and use metadata, it makes it possible to use with lots of diverse systems and services.
So how are things going? Alexander Naydenov, PaperHive’s Co-founder gives us an update on how they’re working with the Crossref metadata:
PaperHive
PaperHive is a web-platform for collaborative reading and a cross-publisher layer of interaction on top of research documents. It lets researchers communicate in published documents in a productive and time-saving way. PaperHive thus puts academic literature, which is integrated with the platform, in the limelight and increases content usage and reader engagement.
Transforming reading into a process of collaboration gives researchers a reason to return to the content and discover new enrichments they can benefit from. Functionality like hiving, deep linking, and the PaperHive browser extension embeds communication in the researcher’s workflow. PaperHive is free to use!
How is the Crossref API used within PaperHive?
PaperHive extends the concept of a living document and offers an innovative way of displaying content without hosting it. Instead, academic documents are dynamically pulled from the publisher’s servers thus ensuring compliance with content licensing. It enables readers to stay in touch with the articles of interest beyond just saving them in an offline folder.
Crossref is the common ground on which third party companies and initiatives can build valuable services for publishers and researchers. It facilitates the integration of content into PaperHive by providing the metadata of articles and books from numerous publishers independent of the technology behind their content platforms. Moreover, if the publishers provide ORCID identifiers of authors in the Crossref metadata, researchers can immediately interact with the readers of their works.
What are the future plans for PaperHive?
In addition to integrating further publishers’ content and extending PaperHive’s feature set for readers, we also plan to extend our partnerships with other technology providers.
As far as our cooperation with Crossref is concerned, we are looking forward to the implementation of theCrossref Event Data API.
What else would you like to see in Crossref metadata?
-The quality of the existing metadata should be improved significantly. We noticed that important fields such as author or title are missing in the metadata of many documents. PaperHive ignores articles and books with incomplete metadata because it impairs the user experience. Publishers, authors and readers can only benefit from the wider and more active usage of content, so we hope that more publishers will improve the data their provide Crossref with.
-Since researchers are working with full texts on PaperHive, it would be great if links to the full text are provided in the metadata of all articles and books. The metadata should also contain information about the format of the full text (e.g., PDF, EPUB, HTML).
Thanks Alex!
Just getting started with the API or what to know more? Get in touch via feedback@crossref.org and pass on your questions and comments.
