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’ve acquired titles from another publisher, you may have also acquired existing DOIs and metadata that were previously registered. Although these DOIs won’t be on your prefix, these DOIs will now be your responsibility and you’ll be able to update the metadata associated with them.
Don’t try to register new DOIs on your prefix for content that already has a DOI. Instead, you should just update the metadata for these DOIs if you want to change something.
Confirming your acquired DOIs
If you aren’t sure which DOIs have already been registered for a particular title, look at the depositor report for the title. Please note: the depositor report updates at 0100 UTC each day, so a new publisher may need to wait until the next day to see its newly acquired titles.
Go to the depositor report and look for your organization name. You might need to wait a while for the page to load properly - it’s a bit slow. Click on your name and you’ll see the list of titles associated with your organization. Click on the recently acquired title and you’ll see all the DOIs that are currently registered for it.
Updating the existing metadata for acquired titles
When you acquire a title from another publisher and we perform a title transfer for you, the publisher name will update in the metadata automatically.
However, there are likely to be some elements that you need to update yourself. For example, you may need to change the resolution URLs. And you may also need to change the full-text URLs for text and data mining or Similarity Check URLs if the previous publisher has submitted them. Or you may need to change a license URL that the previous publisher has submitted.
To add, change, or remove information from your metadata records, you generally need to resubmit your complete metadata record with the changes included.
However, there are a few exceptions to this, and changes to resolution URLs is an important one - you may need our help here. Learn more about updating your resolution URLs.
Finding the existing XML for acquired DOIs
If you wish to see what is in the metadata that you have inherited, you can retrieve the metadata as an XML file using either the deposit harvester, or one of these REST API queries. If you plan to use a REST API query, we suggest installing a JSON formatter in your browser.
To retrieve all items by ISSN, use this API query: http://api.crossref.org/works?filter=issn:2090-8091&rows=1000 and replace 2090-8091 with the ISSN for your title
To retrieve all items by title, use this API query: http://api.crossref.org/works?query.container-title=Connections and replace Connections with your title
You can adjust the API query to retrieve just one element per DOI, such as full-text links (including for Similarity Check) - replace 2090-8091 with the ISSN for your title: http://api.crossref.org/works?filter=issn:2090-8091&rows=1000&select=DOI,link
To transform the JSON to XML for individual records, append your API call with .xml, like this: (unsupported, so please do not rely on this feature)
If you register your content with us by sending us XML files, you can just edit this XML to remove or replace metadata, and then redeposit the XML.
Note: for most metadata elements, you can just update the XML record and resubmit to delete elements. However, there are some non-bibliographic metadata elements where you have to go through a two-step process - firstly send us a submission to delete this element, and then send us a further submission to add in the replacement data. Learn more about updating your metadata.
