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.
The 80 millionth scholarly item is [drumroll…] Management Approaches in Beihagi History from the journal Oman Chapter of Arabian Journal of Business and Management Review, published by Al Manhal in the United Arab Emirates.
There have been loads of changes since Wiley registered “Designer selves: Construction of technologically mediated identity within graphical, multiuser virtual environments” with the DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(1999)50:10<855::AID-ASI3>3.0.CO;2-6), which happens to have been Crossref’s first official DOI (after many prototype deposits).
In the beginning, most of our new members came from the United States and Europe. Now, lots of our members and affiliates come from other parts of the world.
Ed Pentz was Crossref’s first (and only) employee in February 2000. Now it takes 30 of us to manage the 80 million records and over 5,300 participating organizations and to work on projects like Crossref Event Data, ‘early content registration’ , and all the new stuff you’ll be hearing about later this year.
Maybe in the context of social media services (e.g. Facebook users) 80,000,000 does not seem like such a big number. But 80,000,000 is an important milestone. Just think —
