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.
If you’re making your deposits via the admin tool or HTTPS POST, you can use our test system.
Special characters in your XML
All XML submitted to our system must be UTF-8 encoded. There are two ways to include a special unicode character in a Crossref deposit XML file:
Encode the special character using a numerical representation. This is the preferred approach. Constructing an entity reference in the XML that is the numerical value of the character. For example, <surname>Šumbera</surname> includes the special character S with a háček (Š).
Use a UTF-8 editor or tool when creating the XML and insert characters directly into the file, which results in a one or more byte sequence per character in the file.
For example, an S with a háček (Š) has a decimal value of 352 which is 160hex. This value converts to the UTF-8 sequence C5,A0 in hex. You can create a small XML file in which you insert this two-byte sequence (shown here between the <UTF_encoded> tags).
The character displays properly in a browser but if you save the XML source and try to view it in certain editors, it will not display correctly.
Character entities
XML based on schema does not support named character entities (sometimes referred to as html-encoded characters). For example, é or – are not allowed. To include these characters you must use their numerical representation, é or – respectively. These are called numerical entities, shown by the # (hash or pound sign). The x following # indicates the value is in hex (rather than decimal if the x were omitted). All entities must end with the ; character.
Some style/face markup is supported by our schema but we recommend using it only when it is essential to the meaning of the text. Learn more about face markup.
