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.
Do you want to affect change for the scholarly community?
Our Nominating Committee is inviting expressions of interest to serve on the Board as it begins its consideration of a slate for the November 2017 election.
Key responsibilities of the Board are setting the strategic direction for the organization, providing financial oversight, and approving new policies and services. Some of the decisions the board has made in recent years include:
Establishing The OI Project to create a persistent Organization Identifier;
The approval to develop Event Data which will track online activity from multiple sources.
Any member can express interest in serving on the Board
We are seeking people who know about scholarly communications and would like to be part of our future. If you have a vision for the international Crossref community, we are interested in hearing from you. Crossref members that are eligible to vote, and would like to be considered, can express their interest together with statements of interest from you and from your organization. The form should be completed and sent to us before 01 June 2017.
The role of the Nominating Committee
The Nominating Committee meets to discuss change, process, criteria, and potential candidates, ensuring a fair representation of membership. The Committee is made up of three board members not up for election, and two non-board members.
Current Nominating Committee members:
John Shaw, Sage (Chair)
Mark Patterson, eLife
Paul Peters, Hindawi
Chris Fell, Cambridge University Press
Rebecca Lawrence, F1000 Research
About the election and our Board
We have a principle of one member, one vote; our board comprises a cross-section of members and it doesn’t matter how big or small you are, every member gets a single vote. Board terms are three years, and one third of the Board is eligible for election every year. There are six seats up for election in 2017. The board meets in a variety of international locations in March, July, and November each year. View a list of the current Crossref Board members and a history of the decisions they’ve made (motions). The election opens online in late September 2017 and voting is done by proxy online or in person at the annual business meeting during Crossref LIVE in November 2017. Election materials and instructions for voting will be available to all Crossref members online in late September 2017. The board needs to be truly representative of Crossref’s global and diverse membership of organizations who publish.
