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.
It’s a good idea to verify the format and structure of your XML file before trying to register your content. You can validate your XML locally using an XML editor such as Oxygen or XMLSpy, or command line tools such as xmllint. We provide an XML parser that supports single file uploads for validation only.
Our test version of the admin tool allows members and service providers a sandbox to test their XML submissions, before depositing in the production (live) system. The test environment works in the same way as our production admin tool, but uses a test database and does not register DOIs with Handle. You can use the test system for deposits via the admin tool and HTTPS POST, but not for deposits via the web deposit form.
You can also use our metadata quality check parser to check your XML before submission. The parser quickly identifies errors in the XML you uploaded.
Any deposits you make in the test system have no effect on your resolution reports and conflict reports, which relate only to content you register in the production system. Learn more about reports.
Differences between test and production systems
VoR/preprint match notifications: in the production system, a notification feature alerts preprint creators of any matches with journal articles, so they can link to future versions from the preprint. In the test system, you won’t be notified of matches.
Accessing the test system
We don’t automatically set up new accounts with access to the test system, but we are happy to give you this access at any time, whether during your membership application, or at any time after joining. Just contact us to request access.
