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.
Our reports are tools to help you evaluate and improve your metadata. The dashboard gives an overview of our ever-growing corpus of metadata. How good is your metadata? Find out using Participation Reports and other reports to evaluate your metadata records, check for any issues, and learn how to resolve them.
We send reports by email from reports@crossref.org to specific contacts on your account. Do add this address to your email contacts list or safe senders list to ensure that you receive them. These reports are intended to help you keep your metadata records up-to-date, and include:
Conflict report - this report shows where two (or more) DOIs have been submitted with the same metadata, indicating that you may have duplicate DOIs. You’ll start receiving conflict reports if you have at least one conflict. These reports are sent out on a monthly basis, or more frequently if your number of conflicts peaks by over 500, and it is sent to the main Technical contact on your account.
DOI error report - a DOI error report is sent immediately when a user informs us that they’ve seen a DOI somewhere which doesn’t resolve to a website, and it is sent to the main Technical contact on your account.
Resolution report - this monthly report shows the number of successful and failed DOI resolutions for the previous month, and it is sent to the Primary contact on your account (please note - this contact used to be known as the Business contact).
Schematron report - the main Technical contact on your account may also receive periodic Schematron reports if there’s a metadata quality issue with your records.
If you aren’t receiving reports, please check the emails aren’t being caught by your spam filter. It might also be because we our contact information for your organization is not current, or you aren’t the designated reports person in our database. Please contact us and we’ll sort it out for you.
If you are not the appropriate person to receive reports, we can send reports to a different email address. If you don’t find our reports useful, please contact us and we’ll see what we can do.
If you need information about something that’s not covered by your reports, please explore all the information you can access through our REST API, or contact us for help.
