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 record registration form can be used to deposit metadata for your records. You do not need any knowledge of XML to use it. You can download your records to your local machine and re-upload them to the form later to make edits to the metadata. You can also save partial records to be used as templates in the future.
The form currently supports journal articles and grants, but we are planning to add support for additional record types in future.
How to use the record registration form
Start at the record registration form and enter your Crossref account credentials. You can choose to create a new record or upload a record you’ve already created using this form. If this is the first time you’ve used this form, you’ll choose New Record.
Create a new record
Select the type of record you wish to create, then add the metadata associated with your record. Some fields are required to be filled out in order to submit your record, while others are optional. If you are submitting a journal article, you can find links to our documentation in the form for more information on what each field means.
At any point while filling out the form, you can use the download button to save your record to your local computer for future edits. The record will download as a .json file, which is named automatically: for grant records, it will be named the funder name and award number; for journal article records, it will be named after the journal’s e-ISSN (or p-ISSN if no e-ISSN is available) and article title. This file can be loaded back into the form at a later date to make changes to your record.
Submit your record
Click Submit at the bottom of the form once you have filled out the required fields, as well as any optional metadata you want to deposit. The submission will be made immediately and a success message will appear on the screen. You can also download the record from this page, or choose to start another submission. If you have submitted a journal article record, you can choose to repeat the process for another article in the same journal and/or journal issue, which will pre-fill the appropriate metadata for you so you don’t have to re-enter it.
If there is a problem with your submission, you will see an error message appear instead. Go to the documentation for tips on how to troubleshoot common errors from our deposit system.
Load a saved record
If you’ve used the record registration form before to create a record, you can upload your saved copy to make edits and re-deposit the metadata. Start at the record registration form and choose Load Record. Select the appropriate .json file from your computer and click Open. Note: the record you load must be a .json file previously downloaded from the record registration form.
Once the form is loaded, you can make edits to your record and submit your record to update the metadata. You can also download a new version to your local machine to repeat the process later.
Create a template
You can partially complete a form and download it for use as a template in the future. For example, if you register multiple grants, your depositor information (name, email address) and funder information (funder name, funder ID) are likely to be the same across all submissions. So you might complete just those parts of the form, download the record, and upload it each time you need to submit a new grant record.
