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.
Earlier this week, colleagues from Crossref, ScienceOpen, and OPERAS/OpenEdition joined forces to run a webinar on “Where does publisher metadata go and how is it used?”.
Stephanie Dawson explained how ScienceOpen’s freely-accessible, interactive search and discovery platform works by connecting and exposing metadata from Crossref. Her case study showed that articles with additional metadata had much higher average views than those without - depositing richer metadata helps you get the best value from your DOIs!
Pierre Mounier of OPERAS/OpenEdition showed us how a variety of persistent identifiers (PIDs) including DOIs, ORCID iDs, and Funder Registry IDs have been used on OA book platforms to improve citations, author attribution, and tracking of funding. He described a forthcoming annotations project with Hypothes.is, and explained how Crossref metadata is being used in both usage and alternative metrics.
Five ways to register content with Crossref
My overview of Content Registration outlined the five ways to register content with Crossref:
With OJS’s Crossref plugin - more information here (see OJS downloads Version 3.1.0 and above is the best option for supporting the fullest Crossref metadata)
How important it is to have accurate, clean, and complete metadata
The importance of registering your backfiles
How to see the metadata you have
Anna Tolwinksa, Crossref’s Member Experience Manager, gave us an overview of the new Participation Reports tool. She explained how Participation Reports allows anyone to see the metadata Crossref members have registered with us, and how you can see for yourself where the gaps in your metadata are, and—importantly—how you can improve your coverage.
What we learnt
There are 10 key metadata elements or checks in Participation Reports that aid in Crossref members’ content discoverability, reproducibility and research integrity:
References
Open References[EDIT 6th June 2022 - all references are now open by default].
ORCID iDs
Funder Registry IDs
Funding award numbers
Text mining URLs
License URLs
Similarity Check URLs
Every day, research organizations around the world rely on metadata from Crossref, and use it in a variety of systems. Here are a few examples. Many organizations that enable research depend on Crossref’s metadata; we received over 650 million queries just last month
Crossref members should check Participation Reports to see what percentage of their content includes rich metadata
If the percentages are low, Crossref is happy to work with you to help understand and improve your coverage
Richer metadata helps research to be found, cited, linked to, assessed, and reused
