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 main way to access events created by Event Data is via the API, which returns data in JSON format. For example, the following finds the first 500 events:
It is not required, but we recommend that you include your email address. We will not share this information, but can use it to contact you if a problem arises, for example:
Full documentation for the API is available. Briefly, the results can be filtered by various parameters based on time, source, and object.
The results can also include facets of the data: summary counts of a certain characteristic. For example, to see the 10 news websites that have produced the most events, use the query:
If you want to make regular and extensive use of the API, we highly recommend reading the full documentation.
Developers are welcome to build applications based on Event Data, however Crossref doesn’t offer a dashboard or plugin to provide Event Data results. Some Jupyter notebooks are available that demonstrate possible uses of Event Data, including accessing all events about a single DOI.
A list of the current agents is available on our Gitlab pages.
Who uses Event Data?
There are a large number of uses for Event Data and it is intended as a free and transparent data source for third parties. Some examples of how the data can be used are the following:
Building links between scholarly outputs, such as Scholix
