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.
As soon your content is registered with Crossref, users will be able to retrieve identifiers and create links with them. Crossref DOIs must resolve to a unique landing (or response) page that you maintain.
A landing page is a web page that provides further information to someone who has clicked on a DOI link to help them confirm that they are in the right place. It’s important that each DOI resolves to a unique landing page that is just for that specific item.
Landing pages for published research outputs
The landing page for research outputs should be unique for that item and should contain:
Full bibliographic information: so that the user can verify they have been delivered to the correct item
The DOI displayed as a URL: so that if a reader wishes to cite this item, they can just copy and paste the DOI link (learn more about our DOI display guidelines)
A way to access the full-text of the content: It’s acceptable for the full-text to be behind a login or paywall - this is fine as long as the landing page is accessible to everyone. A DOI can resolve to the HTML full-text of the content, and if this page includes the criteria above, a separate landing page is not necessary. It’s not good practice to link directly to a PDF however, as it will start downloading when the DOI is clicked.
Here are some examples of landing pages for published research outputs:
Many publishers also include abstracts on their landing pages, especially for journal articles.
And a little more for preprints
As well as the criteria above, a preprint landing page (such as https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/bkx3n) should also prominently identify the content as a preprint and include a link to any AAM or VOR. This information should be above the fold.
Landing pages for grants
The landing pages for grants should be unique for that specific grant and contain:
Information about the grant so the user can verify they’ve been delivered to the correct item
