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.
There are a number of ways that you can contribute to Event Data. On this page, we show you how to make sure an event is picked up by Event Data, and other ways to get more involved.
How can I create an event?
The easiest way to create an event is to take an action that our agents are tracking. For example, an event will be created if you post a tweet, publish a dataset that is cited by or cites a research article, or add a citation to a Wikipedia article.
Make sure that when you cite a Crossref article you are as specific as possible: including the DOI link, such as https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmb.2007.03.025 or, where this isn’t possible, a link to the article. An event will not be created if you only use details such as the title and authors without including a link. We attempt to track publisher website URLs but they can change and we may not be successful in creating a link based on the website if there is no DOI.
For data citations to be picked up by Event Data, these citations must be included in reference lists deposited with Crossref, and must be in a structured format. A reference that the publisher formats using the “unstructured reference” type will not lead to an event.
If you run a website or service that generates a large number of events, please get in touch via our community forum. Similarly, if you run a source that we already cover, we would welcome a discussion about the most efficient way to transfer data.
There is something missing from Crossref Event Data, what can I do?
If you see events online that you think should have been included in Event Data, first check our status page to see whether there are any current issues. If not, please start a discussion on our community forum.
Can I contribute to the code base?
Yes, you can! Crossref runs Event Data for the benefit of the scholarly community and we welcome collaborations to develop and improve our code. All of the code is open source and a summary of the elements is available in our Knowledge Database.
