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.
Once you click Deposit, we immediately process the deposit and display the results for accepted and rejected deposits. All deposit records accepted by the system have a live DOI.
All deposit results are archived and available for reference on the Deposit history tab on the top menu bar.
You can also see your deposit history in the admin tool - go to the Administration tab, then the Submissions tab. Metadata Manager deposit filenames begin with MDT. You can even review the XML that Metadata Manager has created your behalf.
Updating existing records and failed deposits
Metadata Manager also makes it easy to update existing records, even if you didn’t use Metadata Manager to make the deposit in the first place. You must add the journal to your workspace before you can update the records associated with it - learn more about setting up a new journal in your workspace.
Accepted and Failed submissions can be updated using the respective tabs in the workspace. Click into the journal, and then click into the article. Add or make changes to the information, and then deposit.
What does the status “warning” in my submission result mean?
When similar metadata is registered for more than one DOI, it’s possible that the additional DOIs are duplicates. Because DOIs are intended to be unique, the potentially duplicated DOI is called a conflict. Learn more about the conflict report.
In Metadata Manager, if you register bibliographic metadata that is very similar to that for an existing DOI, you will see a status “warning” with your submission result. This is accurate.
When you return to your journal workspace in Metadata Manager to review your list of DOIs, the DOI that returned the “warning” will display as “failed”. This is inaccurate, as you can see if you try to resolve the DOI in question. We are working on improving the wording in this part of the process to make it less confusing.
