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.
Funders are joining Crossref to register their grants so that they can more easily and accurately track the outputs connected to the research they support.
Once you’re a member, registering grants with us means giving us information about each awarded grant, including a DOI which uniquely and persistently identifies each record. You can use the grant registration form or direct XML deposit methods to deposit and update grant metadata. This section focuses on grants, but research funders can also register other record types such as reports, data, and working papers.
Something to consider before you begin
Decide which grants to register first, as you get into the swing of things. For example, pilot a particular country, or area of support. It’s better to start with newly-awarded grants, and then move on to older or long-running awards - these are cheaper to register, and are more likely to have produced research papers, so they’re great for demonstrating the full potential of connected research metadata.
Constructing your identifiers (DOIs)
A DOI is made up of a DOI resolver, a prefix, and a suffix. When you join Crossref as a member, we give you a DOI prefix. You combine this with a suffix of your choice to create a DOI. Although some funders choose to use their internal grant identifier as the DOI suffix, we advise you to make your suffix opaque, meaning that it does not encode or describe any information about the work. Your DOI becomes active once it is successfully registered with us. Read more about constructing your DOIs.
Should a grant move to a new landing page, the URL in the grant’s metadata is updated to point to the new location. There’s no charge to update metadata for existing deposits.
Registering grant metadata
Grants can be registered for all sorts of support provided to a research group or individual, such as awards, use of facilities, sponsorship, training, or salary awards.
Here’s the section of our schema for grant metadata. If you’re working with a third-party system, such as Proposal Central or EuroPMC, they may be able to help with this piece of work.
Registering grant metadata using the grant registration form
You can use the grant registration form to register grants, with no prior knowledge of XML. You fill out the form and the XML is created for you in the background. You enter your account credentials and the metadata is submitted directly.
Formatting grant metadata for direct deposit
If you’d prefer to work directly with XML, you may be able to map your own data and identifiers to our schema. See our example deposit file - this is a full example, and many of the fields it contains are optional, but we encourage you to provide as much information as you can. Rich metadata helps maximum reuse of the grant records you register with Crossref. This .xsd file helps explain what goes into each field, and the parameters (length, format) of what is accepted in each field. Here’s a less techy version.
When you’ve created your XML files, use our checker to test them - this will show any potential errors with your files. For help with resolving problems, send your XML file and the error message to Support.
Uploading your files to Crossref
Once you’re happy with your files, upload them to us using the admin tool, or submit them through HTTPS POST.
Once your submission is successful, your grant DOIs are ‘live’ and ready to be used. It’s good practice to add the grant DOI to the landing page for the grant, as in this example for https://doi.org/10.37717/220020589:
Spread the word about your grant identifiers
Let your grant submission systems, awardees, and other parties know you are supporting Crossref grant identifiers, and that they should start collecting these identifiers too. Crossref grant metadata (including grant DOIs) is made openly available through our APIs, so it can be used by third parties (including publishers, grant tracking systems) to link grants to related research outputs.
