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.
Our custom support for preprints ensures that links to these outputs persist over time, that they are connected to the full history of the shared research results, and that the citation record is clear and up-to-date.
Publishing preprints is about more than simply getting a DOI
Crossref can help you to clearly label content as a preprint using a preprint-specific schema. It’s not advisable to register preprints as data, components, articles, or anything else, because a preprint is not any of those things. Our service allows you to ensure the relationships between preprints and any eventual article are asserted in the metadata, and accurately readable by both humans and machines.
We have designed a schema together with a working group that included preprint advisors from bioRxiv and arXiv, along with members including PLOS, Elsevier, AIP, IOP, ACM. The schema lays out what metadata is specifically important for preprint content. We also developed a notification feature to alert preprint creators of any matches with journal articles, so they can link to future versions from the preprint.
Since November 2016, members have been registering hundreds of thousands of preprints with us, and thousands of those in turn already have matches with journal articles too (requires a JSON viewer). These relationships in the Crossref metadata, available through our APIs, are relied upon by many parties - from researchers to funders - to discover, track and evaluate the preprint journey.
Benefits of our custom support for preprints
Persistent identifiers for preprints to ensure successful links to the scholarly record over the course of time
The preprint-specific metadata we ask for reflects researcher workflows from preprint to formal publication
Support for preprint versioning by providing relationships between metadata for different iterations of the same document.
Notification of links between preprints and formal publications that may follow (such as journal articles, monographs)
Reference linking for preprints, connecting up the scholarly record to associated literature
Preprints include funding data so people can report research contributions based on funder and grant identification
Discoverability: we make the metadata available for machine and human access, across multiple interfaces (including our REST API, OAI-PMH, and Metadata Search.
What to be aware of when registering preprints
Members registering preprints need to make sure they:
Respond to our match notifications that an accepted manuscript (AM) or version of record (VOR) has been registered, and link to that within seven days. You should designate a specific contact with us who will receive these alerts (it can be your existing technical contact)
Clearly label the manuscript as a preprint, above the fold on the preprint landing page, and ensure that any link to the AAM or VOR is also prominently displayed above the fold.
Other considerations:
References will be flagged as belonging to a preprint in our Cited-by service
The preprint is treated as one item only without components for its constituent parts
Each version should be assigned a new DOI, and associate the versions via a relationship with type isVersionOf - learn more about relationships
Preprints are not currently able to participate in Crossmark.
Registering preprints: joining as a member
Preprint owners who would like to use our preprint service should apply to join as a member. We have a dedicated fee structure for registering each preprint, and volume discounts offered for both backfile and current content. Learn more about our fees.
Registering preprints: existing members
Are you an existing Crossref member who wants to assign preprint DOIs? Let’s talk about getting started or migrating any existing mis-labelled content over to the dedicated preprint deposit schema. You can also give us a specific contact who will receive match notifications that an author’s accepted manuscript or version of record (AAM or VOR) has been registered. Get in touch with our membership team and they’ll be able to walk you through the process.
