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.
This checklist will help you ask the right questions of your content hosting providers when selecting a new platform. It helps ensure that you can continue to participate with us in the way you want to after a migration - without any surprises.
You can cut and paste the bits you need into your RFP, or use File > Print in your browser to save or print a copy to use in your meeting. But before you remove any sections, do check that you definitely won’t want them in the future. Even if you aren’t planning to use all the options now, it’s good to know what your chosen platform will be able to do for you in the future, and whether there will be any extra costs involved.
Record types
Is the potential provider able to register these record types with Crossref (using the relevant schema)?
Record type
Able to register?
Extra charge?
Charge (if applicable)
Books, chapters and reference works
Components (as part of other content)
Conference proceedings and conference papers
Datasets
Journal articles
Peer review reports
Pending publications (DOIs on acceptance)
Preprints
Reports and working papers
Standards
Theses and dissertations
Grants that you award
Metadata elements
Is the potential provider able to gather and register these metadata elements with Crossref?
Metadata type
Able to register?
Extra charge?
Charge (if applicable)
Abstracts
Award/grant numbers
Full-text URLs for Similarity Check
Full-text URLs for text mining
Funder IDs
License URLs (eg for Version of Record (VOR), Accepted Manuscript (AM), Text and Data Mining (TDM) or STM’s Article Sharing Framework)
ORCID iDs
References
Relationships (such as data, translation, preprint)
URL, publication title, authors, and dates
ROR identifiers
Other Crossref services
Is the potential provider able to support these services?
Other Crossref services
Able to register?
Extra charge?
Charge (if applicable)
Cited-by display
Crossmark display
Reference linking (displaying Crossref DOIs in article reference lists)
Backfile content
Is the potential provider able to support the deposit of metadata for backfile content?
Backfile content
Extra charge?
Charge (if applicable)
Will backfile content be supported?
Will backfile content be migrated at the same time as current?
Will backfile content registration happen at the same time?
DOI obligations and best practice
Is the potential provider able to support the DOI best practice and obligations?
