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.
You might have missed it, but you haven’t missed out. If you want to watch – or savor re-watching – the presentations from last week’s 2015 Crossref Annual Meeting, we’ve embedded each video below in chronological order. Sit back, relax, and take it all in (again) just as though you were in an air-conditioned ballroom at the Taj.
Martin Paul Eve senior lecturer at Birkbeck University, London, delivers a trenchant criticism of the process small publishers must go through when getting and depositing their first Crossref DOI in his presentation, Crossref Deposit: A Scholar-Publisher Experience:
Anne Coghill, Manager of Peer Review Operations for the American Chemical Society, detailed their process for deciding where in the manuscript workflow to insert CrossCheck plagiarism screening in her presentation, American Chemical Society Publications and CrossCheck: http://www.slideshare.net/Crossref/ann-coghill-crossref15 (slides only)
Ben Hogan, Regional Manager in Wiley’s Peer Review Management team, shares Wiley’s pain points as well as its positive experiences in using CrossCheck to detect plagiarism in his presentation, _CrossCheck Usage and Case Studies: _
Jure Triglav, Lead Developer for the PubSweet Publishing Framework at the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation, demonstrates how to mine data from the corpus of open science using Crossref’s metadata via its API and open source tools from the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation in his presentation, Making Science Writing Smarter:
Scott Chamberlain, open science researcher, shows the several advantages of using programmatic tools such as R, Python, and Ruby to mine text and data, including Crossref metadata, in his presentation, _Text and Data Mining: _
Helen Duriez, ePublishing Manager at the Royal Society, describes the Royal Society’s experience with providing Crossmark data as a means of communicating document version information in her presentation, Crossmark – a journey through time (and space?) 2015
John Chodacki, chair of Crossref’s DET committee, describes the future state of the DOI Event Tracker as an open hub for collecting and sharing data around web events that involve DOIs in his presentation, DOI Event Tracker 2015:
Marc Abrahams, editor and co-founder of the Annals of Improbable Research, makes you LAUGH, then THINK with his keynote speech, Improbable Research, the Ig Nobel Prizes, and You:
Juan Pablo Alperin describes the ways that Crossref and the Public Knowledge Project can work together to support common goals, in his presentation, _PKP and Crossref: Two P’s in a Cross
Ed Pentz, Crossref Executive Director, summarizes the organization’s expansion over the past year with his presentation, Crossref Growth and Change:
Ginny Hendricks, Director of Member & Community Outreach, details the findings of Crossref’s recent stakeholder research and the organization’s future plans to enhance member experience with her presentation, Member & Community Outreach:
Jennifer Lin, Director of Product Management, visualizes Crossref’s role as a map maker for the scholarly web in her presentation, Crossref: Building an Open Map for the Scholarly Enterprise:
Chuck Koscher, Director of Technology, gives us performance stats for the Crossref system, including aggregate uptimes and how long it takes to deposit metadata, in his presentation, Crossref System Performance:
Geoffrey Bilder, Director of Strategic Initiatives, sheds light on the status of current and future research projects that are part of Crossref’s new product development process in his presentation, Strategic Initiatives Update:
Scott Chamberlain, open science researcher, proposes the use of programmatic tools, such as the R programming language working with the Crossref search API, to undertake scientific research in his presentation, Thinking Programmatically:
Martin Paul Eve, senior lecturer at Birkbeck University, London, bears us back to the origins of the scholarly mission, considers the implications of the notion that researchers work within a symbolic economy, and looks at the practical challenges brought about by open access modes of publication for works in the Humanities in his wide-ranging presentation, Open Access & the Humanities: Digital Approaches:
