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.
The Metadata Manager tool is in beta and contains many bugs. It has been deprecated since 2021. We recommend using the web deposit form as an alternative, or the OJS plugin if your content is hosted on the OJS platform from PKP.
Metadata Manager (beta) offers a way to deposit and update metadata for journal articles for both single and multiple deposits.
You’ll now see your Metadata Manager workspace. This is where all deposits occur, both new deposits and updates to content you’ve already registered with Crossref. To return to this view at any time, click Home at the top of the screen.
Your workspace holds your list of publications, and it will be blank when you first log in. As you add the publications you want to manage to Metadata Manager, they’ll start collecting on this screen.
You can add new publications and edit existing publications you have previously submitted to our system from your workspace. You can also click into each publication and add or edit articles against them.
The home button - Return to the overview of all your publications by clicking Home.
Deposit history - See your previous deposits made via Metadata Manager (excludes deposits via other deposit methods such as HTTPS POST, or the web deposit form).
To deposit - Shows items for which you’ve entered information, but have not yet deposited with us. The number next to To deposit shows how many records are awaiting deposit.
Your username - Shows the credential you’ve used to log in. Click the down arrow to access account functions, log out, and view a tutorial of Metadata Manager.
Search publication - This search bar allows you to find and add publications to your workspace. You can search by title name or title-level DOI.
New publication - This section allows you to create a new journal and add it to your workspace.
