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.
Continuing our blog series highlighting the uses of Crossref metadata, we talked to Sara Girard and Howard Ratner at CHORUS about the work they’re doing, and how they’re using our REST API as part of their workflow.
Introducing CHORUS
CHORUS (www.chorusaccess.org) is an innovative non-profit organization that supports funders, publishers, authors and institutions to deliver public access to articles reporting on funded research. Our vision is to create a future where the output flowing from funded research is easily and permanently discoverable, accessible and verifiable by anyone in the world.
CHORUS currently monitors over 400,000 articles for more than 20 US federal and two international funding agencies, and has partnerships with Department of Defense, Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Office of the Director National of Intelligence: Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, Smithsonian Institution, US Department of Agriculture, US Geological Survey, Japan Science and Technology Agency, and the Australian Research Council. CHORUS is supported by over 50 publisher and affiliate members who represent the majority of funded published research.
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What problem is your service trying to solve?
CHORUS is the first service of CHOR Inc., founded in 2013 in response to the directive of the US Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) for all US federal research agencies to develop and implement plans to widen public access to publications and data associated with federally funded research.
CHORUS aims to minimize public access compliance burdens and ensure the long-term preservation and accessibility of articles reporting on funded research. We provide the necessary metadata infrastructure and governance to enable a smooth, low-friction interface between funders, authors, institutions and publishers in a distributed network environment. CHORUS’ services track public accessibility of articles regardless of whether they are published Gold OA or made open by the publisher.
Can you tell us how you are using the Crossref REST API at CHORUS?
The Crossref REST API is a key source for the metadata database that powers the CHORUS Dashboard, Search and Reporting services for Funders, Institutions and Publishers.
What metadata values do you pull from the API?
We pull the basic bibliographic information such as publisher, journal title, article title, authors and publication date. Perhaps even more important to our area of focus are the funder, grant and license information.
How often do you extract/query data?
CHORUS uses the Crossref REST API every day.
Can you describe your workflow using Crossref metadata?
Every night we query the Crossref API to send us metadata for all article or conference proceeding records for our member publishers that have funder metadata matching the funders monitored by CHORUS.
CHORUS monitors these DOIs for public accessibility on publisher websites; inclusion in agency search tools; deposit in a growing list of funder repositories (e.g.,US DOE PAGES,NSF PAR, and USGS Publications Warehouse and NIH PubMed Central); and for associated ORCID researcher records. CHORUS also uses the reuse license metadata to identify when an article is expected to be made publicly accessible.
Finally, we check for ingestion in CLOCKSS and/or Portico to ensure long-term preservation and accessibility of research findings reported in journal and proceedings articles. Our preservation partners keep the full text in their dark archives, only making it available when the content may no longer be made publicly accessible by the publisher.
The collected and enhanced metadata is presented in our dashboard, search and reporting services all including links back to the publisher sites via the Crossref DOI.
What are the future plans for CHORUS?
Following the success of our Funder and Publisher Dashboards, CHORUS is expanding the services we provide to international funders, non-governmental funders, and institutions. Our first funder partnership outside of the United States is with the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST). CHORUS announced its new Institution Dashboard service this Autumn after successfully concluding pilots with the University of Florida and University of Denver. CHORUS will also be adding links to relevant datasets and other metadata utilizing forthcoming identifiers and metadata standards.
What else would you like to see the REST API offer
It would be great to see more identification of funders from Crossref members. While we have seen great leaps since 2013, we all have a long way to go. We are also eager to see Crossref incorporate the Organization Identifiers that they have begun with ORCID, DataCite and others.
Thanks, CHORUS! If you would like to contribute a case study on the uses of Crossref Metadata APIs please contact the Community team.
