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.
Depositing metadata, linking, and DOI use for books
You should:
Register the content by depositing metadata at the time of online publication and assign DOIs at the title and chapter/entry level. Learn more about the benefits of registering book chapters.
Deposit references from books and collect references from other members to your books via our Cited-by service.
Instruct authors to cite specific chapters and entries using page numbers, chapter/entry titles and DOIs.
Update your editorial guidelines - ask copyeditors to look for page numbers and chapter titles in book citations. Use our tools to check references as part of the production process so that references can be corrected and missing information added. Learn more about creating reference links.
Updates and versions
There are two types of updates:
Major content changes that may affect the interpretation of a work may mean a new edition with new ISBNs. Major version changes imply that the publisher will formally notify readers that content has changed (through errata, corrigenda, or new editions (which would also get a new ISBN)
Minor content changes are unlikely to affect a reader’s interpretation of the work, and the publisher will not generally draw attention to the changes with a new version.
Just as publishers decide when a new print edition or version is warranted, it is publishers’ responsibility to distinguish between major and minor versions in online content.
Since a Crossref DOI is a citation identifier, a new DOI should only be issued if the new version will be cited differently. The same logic applies to differing formats, for example, the file types or containers used to present content: a distinct DOI should not be registered for different formats unless the format will be cited in a different way. This means, for example, that you should not assign one DOI to an EPUB version of a book and another DOI to the PDF version of a book if the format doesn’t affect how the book is cited. You may register a single DOI for all versions of a translated book. Distinct DOIs may also be registered for translated versions of content.
The recommended best practice is:
Assign new DOIs to new major versions or editions of books, chapters and entries. This practice will preserve the scholarly citation record. Older versions should remain available online with links to the latest version. In use, a reader follows a link to the version cited and then has the option to follow a link to the current version.
Do not assign new DOIs to minor new versions of books, chapters and entries.
Where book content is hosted on multiple platforms (such as NetLibrary, ebrary) and publishers can enable enable linking from a single DOI to those platforms, they should use multiple resolution, which allows multiple URLs to be associated with one DOI. Learn more about multiple resolution.
If multiple resolution doesn’t work for your circumstances, or content on your platform does not already have DOIs, please contact us to find a solution.
Citation matching for book title queries
To enable citation matching at the title level, the minimum query must include the following elements:
book title
book author
book copyright year
To increase the accuracy of matching, members should also include as many of the following elements as possible in the query:
editor (where appropriate)
ISBN
ISSN / DOI
publisher
Citation matching for book chapters or reference entry queries
The metadata provided for a book title is used to identify book chapters during querying. This means that a book chapter query should include title metadata as well. The minimum query for a book chapter must include the following elements:
book title
title and subtitle should be separated with a colon (:)
book year
chapter author
first page
To increase the accuracy of matching, publishers should also include as many of the following elements as possible in the query:
editor (where appropriate)
publisher
chapter title
Combining chapter title and chapter author returns the best matches.
DOIs in citations
Following a review in 2017 of common citation style guides and publishers’ instructions to authors, this is what we recommend for the use of DOIs in citations, of any style or format:
Include DOIs whenever they are available (use Metadata Search to find DOIs for registered content)
In your in author guidelines, describe the use of DOIs in general, and for different record types (such as journals, conference proceedings)
Books that have DOIs at the title and chapter levels should be cited accordingly
Print materials (of any record type) may display DOIs but should not have their own print-only DOIs
Providing information to us on update cycles (when possible), and contact information for keeping in touch with questions or future developments (such as new record types).
