We are delighted to announce the formation of a new Advisory Group to support us in improving preprint metadata. Preprints have grown in popularity over the last few years, with increasing focus brought by the need to rapidly disseminate knowledge in the midst of a global pandemic. We have supported metadata deposits for preprints under the record type ‘posted content’ since 2016, and members currently register a total of around 17,000 new preprints metadata records each month.
Service Providers work on behalf of our members by creating, registering, querying and/or displaying metadata. We rely on this group to support our schema as it evolves, to roll out new and updated services to members and to work closely with us on a variety of matters of mutual interest. Many of our Service Providers have been with us since the early days of Crossref. Others have joined as scholarly communications has grown and services have evolved. Though fewer than 20 in number, their impact far outweighs the size of the group.
Crossref aims to link research together, making related items more findable, increasing transparency, and showing how ideas spread and develop. There are a number of moving parts in this effort: some related to capturing and storing linking information, others to making it available.
By including relationship metadata in Event Data, we are taking a big step to improve the visibility of a large number of links between metadata. We know this is long-promised and we’re pleased that making this valuable metadata available supports a number of important initiatives. We will also be backfilling, so all previously deposited relationships will eventually become available as events. The first step will be to add relationships between items that have DOIs, such as between a research article and a related review report or dataset.
Some things in life are better left a mystery. There is an argument for opaqueness when the act of full disclosure only limits your level of enjoyment: in my case, I need a complete lack of transparency to enjoy both chicken nuggets and David Lynch films. And that works for me. But metrics are not nuggets. Because in order to consume them, you really need to know how they’re made. Knowing the provenance of data, along with the context with which it was derived, provides everyone with the best chance of creating indicators which are fit for purpose. This is just one of the reasons why we built the Event Data infrastructure with transparency in mind.
Version 5.4.0 metadata schema update now available
2025 March 19
2025 public data file now available
2025 March 12
