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.
Creating relationships helps build a map of scholarly research objects that we call the research nexus. Expressing these relationships in the metadata enables the evolving infrastructure to build on this mapping.
These connections may consist of citations, or refer to publications which do not always exist as a single content item (its parts may be produced, curated, and published by different organizations and separate activities). Making these connections creates linked metadata, which is useful because it establishes associations and context.
We have also introduced other interlinking services that address specific types of relationships:
Components allow for the assignment of DOIs to the component parts of a publication (figures, tables, images) which may lead to their reuse.
Updates notify the community about changes that have a material effect on the original work, including corrections and retractions.
Funding data supports identifying the organization that financially supports the research behind a specific publication.
Peer reviews support the host of outputs made publicly available about published scholarly content, for example: referee reports, decision letters, and author responses.
These and other services create relationships between metadata records; however, they share two characteristics that restrict their ability to define relationships:
Both items involved in a relationship must be identified by Crossref DOIs.
The types of relationships are dictated by the mission of the specific service.
The following modifications and new services developed in response to these two limitations:
Allow non-Crossref DOIs to be deposited in an item’s (article/chapter/paper) list of citations.
Support the creation of general typed relationships between items with a Crossref DOI, and other content items with a variety of identifiers.
