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.
Submission logs contain information about the DOIs and metadata you have submitted to our system. They let you know if your content is registered successfully, and if not, what issues need to be addressed.
Your logs are by default emailed to the address provided in your registration XML or entered in our web form. You may also use the admin tool to search for past deposits or retrieve them by polling.
This is an example of a deposit containing errors. In the example, note that the <success_count> and <record_count> do not match. A status of “Failure” indicates the record was rejected and the DOI was not registered or updated. The <record_diagnostic> for each registration failure contains an error message. Each error within a deposit should be corrected and the deposit resubmitted. Learn more about error and warning messages.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<doi_batch_diagnostic status="completed" sp="cr5.crossref.org">
<submission_id>394260418</submission_id>
<batch_id>314668373.xml</batch_id>
<record_diagnostic status="Failure">
<doi>10.5555/11111</doi>
<msg>Record not processed because submitted version: 20070904093839 is less or equal to previously submitted version (DOI match)</msg>
</record_diagnostic>
<record_diagnostic status="Failure" msg_id="4">
<doi>10.5555/44444</doi>
<msg>Record not processed because submitted version: 20070904093839 is less or equal to previously submitted version (DOI match)</msg>
</record_diagnostic>
<record_diagnostic status="Success">
<doi>10.5555/55555</doi>
<msg>Successfully added</msg>
</record_diagnostic>
<batch_data>
<record_count>3</record_count>
<success_count>1</success_count>
<warning_count>0</warning_count>
<failure_count>2</failure_count>
</batch_data>
</doi_batch_diagnostic>
Example of a log with XML validation error
This is an example of a submission log for a deposit with an error that prevented all DOIs from being processed. This happens when there are XML formatting issues, or if the uploaded item is not XML. Note that <record_count> and <failure_count> both equal 1. This will be true no matter how many DOIs were actually included in the submission. Learn more about error and warning messages.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<doi_batch_diagnostic status="completed" sp="ds3.crossref.org">
<submission_id>394260418</submission_id>
<batch_id>314668373.xml</batch_id>
<record_diagnostic status="Failure" msg_id="29">
<doi />
<msg>Deposited XML is not well-formed or does not validate: Error on line 1: Content is not allowed in prolog.</msg>
</record_diagnostic>
<batch_data>
<record_count>1</record_count>
<success_count>0</success_count>
<warning_count>0</warning_count>
<failure_count>1</failure_count>
</batch_data>
</doi_batch_diagnostic>
Example of a log with warnings
This is an example of a submission log with warnings. Warnings almost always indicate that DOIs have been successfully deposited and were flagged as a conflict with a previously deposited DOI.
This is an example of a submission log from a deposit containing references. Each reference in the deposit will be included in the log, identified by the citation key included in the deposit.
