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.
More of our members are keen to expose evidence of the integrity of the editorial process, such as peer review. Registering peer reviews means:
The metadata can provide relevant information about the reviews such as whether they were part of peer review or post-publication.
There is evidence of the contribution from reviewers.
These reviews are connected to the original work and other related objects.
Links to these documents persist over time for future generations.
This metadata may also support enrichment of scholarly discussion, reviewer accountability, publishing transparency, and analysis or research on peer reviews.
All peer reviews must include relationship metadata linking the review with the item being reviewed.
The item being reviewed must have a Crossref DOI.
You can’t add components to peer review records.
Crossmark is not currently supported for peer review records.
You can only register peer reviews by direct deposit of XML, our helper tools do not currently support this record type.
Fees
In addition to annual membership dues, all records attract a one-time registration fee. For peer reviews, the fees are different if they are reviews of your own records, or for another member’s records. Read about the fees.
History
Our members asked for the flexibility to register content for the reviews and discussions of scholarly content which they publish, so we’ve extended our infrastructure to support members who post them. We support a whole host of outputs made publicly available from the peer review history, as they vary greatly based on journal. This may include referee reports, decision letter, and author response. The overall set may include outputs from the initial submission only or those from all subsequent rounds of revisions. We also allow members to register content made up of discussions surrounding a journal article after it was published (e.g. post-publication reviews).
The following organizations consulted with us on the design and/or development of the peer review service:
