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.
Our journals model supports registration of records for journal titles and articles, as well for individual volumes and issues of a journal. We recommend registering DOI records for journal titles and articles, and optionally for volumes and issues.
Journal titles
Do:
be consistent - journal title records are created from the metadata submitted when you first register your journal and articles. You determine the exact title and ISSN included in the deposit, and we record that title and ISSN in a title record in our database. The title, ISSN, and title-level persistent identifier supplied in your content registration files must be consistent across submissions.
include all registered ISSN for your journal - the ISSN is crucial for identifying a serial. If you are supplying us with data for older titles that predate ISSN assignment, you should request ISSNs from your ISSN agency as they can be assigned retroactively. This isn’t only for our convenience - libraries, database providers, and other organizations using your data will welcome (and often require) an ISSN for anything defined as a journal.
supply distinct ISSN and / or title DOI for each distinct version of a title. If a title changes significantly the publisher should obtain new ISSNs (both print and online). This rule is established by the ISSN International Centre, not us, but we support and enforce it. Minor title changes (such as changing ‘and’ to ‘&’) don’t require a new ISSN.
supply all commonly used title abbreviations within the repeatable abbrev element
supply a journal language using the language attribute
Do not:
register issues and articles published under a past title under the current title - this makes it hard to match DOIs to citations and accurately identify items published over time. ome publishers consolidate all versions of a title under the most recent title. This isn’t recommended practice as it causes a lot of linking and citing confusion – you’ve essentially created two (or more) versions of a title. This is particularly confusing when volume and issue numbers overlap between title iterations.
Journal titles should reflect the journal title at the time of publication, and should not be updated if the journal title changes later on.
vary your journal title without obtaining a new ISSN
Journal issue and volume metadata
You can register DOIs for volumes and issues of journals if you want to make them citeable and linked persistently. If you do not opt to register DOIs for volumes and issues you should still provide clean and complete metadata as it is needed for the article records within each issue.
Do:
supply accurate issue and volume numbers
for special issues, include additional metadata to make the issue identifiable and citable - this includes:
editors in the contributors section
issue title (as title)
any special issue numbering, including text (as special_numbering)
Do not:
include non-essential text in the volume or issue elements
Journal articles
You should register all research articles published by your journal, as well as other cite-able content (book reviews, case studies, editorials).
Do:
pay close attention to title best practice - journal article metadata is used for display and discoverability, so it is vital that article titles are accurate.
include all contributors and (again) pay close attention to the metadata you are sending us.
include affiliation info for each contributor
include abstracts (recommended for all types of content, but particularly useful for journal articles)
include a language (using the language attribute on the journal_article element)
Do not:
register records for items you do not intend to maintain long-term, such as advertisements
supply titles in all caps - titles in article metadata are used for display and citation formatting, and if it supplied in all caps, it will appear in all caps wherever our metadata is used.
