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.
Alongside Crossref, there are other agencies of the DOI Foundation. Many focus on specific regions of the world (mEDRA, JaLC, CNKI, KISTI, et al) or on the needs of institutional repositories rather than publishers (eg DataCite).
It’s important to carefully research which agency you want to join so you start with the right agency for you and continue to work with them for the long term. If you do start to work with one agency and need to move to another agency later, this is possible and prefixes can be transferred between Registration Agencies. But there’s extra work for you to make this happen, so it’s much better to start with the right agency. Do contact us for advice.
If you do wish to move between agencies and transfer your prefix:
Contact the Registration Agency that you are moving to - the one that will be receiving the prefix. So to transfer a prefix from DataCite to Crossref for example, contact us. To transfer a prefix from Crossref to DataCite, contact DataCite.
The two agencies will work together to confirm if the prefix can be transferred. This is usually possible, but if the prefix is shared or belongs to a generalist repository then it won’t be able to be transferred and we’ll need to take a different approach.
If the prefix can be transferred, then the two Registration Agencies will liaise to make this happen.
Once the prefix has been transferred, you will need to re-register all your existing DOIs with the new Registration Agency. This ensures that all metadata relating to your titles is with the same registration agency, you can manage all your DOIs in one central place, all your citation tracking will be centralized, and you can be sure that the thousands of organizations and individuals using Crossref metadata via our API have full information about your titles, helping to improve your discoverability. Re-registration is not optional - it’s an obligation of the transfer. At Crossref, we will work with you to ensure that you are not charged for any content that you are re-registering with us after transferring a prefix from another agency.
