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.
We provide a Java program that performs file uploads (via HTTPS POST) to Crossref. This program allows you to upload a single file, a list of files, or a whole directory of files.
user is the username and password from your Crossref account credentials. If you are using organization-wide shared role credentials, the username is the role. If you’re using personal user credentials, the username is your email address plus the role in the following format email@address.com/role.
file is the name of the file you are uploading or
directory is the name of the directory containing files to upload
Using user credentials (note: in these examples, we have used the fictional user credential, role, and password combination of: email@address.com/role, mrcrossref, and abc134)
If you don’t already have Crossref test system credentials configured, you’ll need to contact our technical support team in order for us to enable a test account for test.crossref.org.
Note that if the –metadata option is given a directory name instead of a filename then all files within the directory are uploaded. To ensure that you are uploading what you want use the –dry-run option and review the listing of files, eg:
If your upload is successful, you will see this message:
[…] INFO uploading to https://doi.crossref.org:443/ […] INFO uploading submission: file=myfile.xml […] INFO uploaded submission: file=myfile.xml […] INFO done
If the username is wrong, you will see the message:
[…] INFO uploading to https://doi.crossref.org:443/ […] INFO uploading submission: file=myfile.xml […] INFO unauthorized: file=myfile.xml; user=mrcrossref […] INFO done
