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.
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.
Support for version numbering
Members can now supply a version number across all relevant record types, including journal articles, book chapters, conference papers, posted content/preprints, datasets, reports, standards, and dissertations. The versioning update also includes an optional description field.
Members who version content are encouraged to register a new DOI with each version and supply the isVersionOf’ relationship to connect versions to each other, facilitating the Research Nexus and allowing members to avoid additional content registration fees, which don’t apply for versions.
Preprint status
This is specific to the ‘posted content’ record type and comes as a result of therecommendations of the Preprints Advisory Group. The new status field allows repositories to flag a preprint as ‘withdrawn’ or ‘removed,’ a situation specific to posted content.
There are some other minor updates as well, including:
An expansion of the language codes supported by a language attribute.
Additions to the archive locations we collect. Our membership terms ask members to commit to archiving content, ensuring their DOIs are persistent, and ask that the archive(s) they use are identified in the metadata records registered with us.
We’ve increased the number of ISBNs supported per item from 6 to 100.
We’ve already begun working on our next update, which will be an expansion of contributor roles. We’ll allow multiple contributor roles instead of the single role we currently support, we’ll add ‘corresponding author’ and ‘other’ to the Crossref role vocabulary. We will be also adding full support for CRediT.
We’re also hoping to fit in a remodeling of our group contributor (currently labeled ‘organization’ in our input schema) in the next update, and I would appreciate feedback on this planned update.
More changes are planned, including an update to our grants schema, and expanded support for abstracts. We’ll be circulating details about those updates soon.
