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.
When you become a member of Crossref, you’re joining a community of organizations who have committed to link their content to each other persistently, and to share their metadata with each other and with the scholarly community.
You’re committing to:
Stewarding your DOIs and their associated metadata for the long term;
Making sure that the DOI always resolves to a live landing page;
Keeping the scholarly community aware of any changes to your content (such as withdrawals or retractions);
Adding to, updating, and perhaps even deleting some metadata to keep your metadata useful to the whole community and to make your content even more discoverable.
This means that the work doesn’t stop after you first register your records - you should ensure that you continue to maintain this metadata record for the long term. There’s no charge to update the metadata after a record has first been registered, and you should aim to keep your records clean, complete and up-to-date.
If you have omitted or provided any incorrect metadata, just update your metadata to make corrections, remove incorrect metadata, or provide missing data.
Although you can remove metadata elements from a record, it’s not possible to fully delete the records or DOIs, as they are designed to be persistent. Read more about changing or deleting DOIs, and contact us with the details of your situation so we can help.
Keep your records complete
Add information for additional fields, and don’t forget to do this for your backfiles too.
Go beyond basic bibliographic metadata, and deposit as much rich metadata as possible. Richer metadata includes information such as:
Check your participation report to see what metadata is missing from your records.
Keep your records up-to-date
Metadata may change over time, and ownership of records may change, so make sure your metadata is updated with these changes.
Update your resolution URLs if the location of your landing pages or full-text content changes - for example: if your website domain changes; if a journal moves from one hosting platform to another; or if a journal ceases to publish and the content must be accessed through an archive.
Keep the community up-to-date with updates, retractions, or withdrawals by registering updates.
