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.
Posted content includes preprints, eprints, working papers, reports, dissertations, and many other types of content that has been posted but not formally published. Note that accepted manuscripts are not considered posted content.
To qualify as posted content, an item must be posted to a host platform where it will receive some level of stewardship. We’re all about persistence, so it’s vital that everything registered with us be maintained. A preprint should remain online once it has been posted, including once it has appeared in a journal or if an updated version becomes available. If different versions become available, the preprint owner should update the preprint metadata using relations tags. In exceptional cases where a preprint is removed, such as in the case of plagiarism or other misconduct, we recommend that the DOI resolves to a page containing at least the title, authors, and a short explanation of the removal. Preprint owners should refer to good practice for journal article retraction in this case. Note that we cannot remove preprint metadata from our records.
Publishing preprints is about more than simply getting a DOI
Crossref can help you to clearly label content as a preprint using a preprint-specific schema. It’s not advisable to register preprints as data, components, articles, or anything else, because a preprint is not any of those things. Our service allows you to ensure the relationships between preprints and any eventual article are asserted in the metadata, and accurately readable by both humans and machines.
Benefits of our custom support for preprints
Persistent identifiers for preprints to ensure successful links to the scholarly record over the course of time
The preprint-specific metadata we ask for reflects researcher workflows from preprint to formal publication
Support for preprint versioning by providing relationships between metadata for different iterations of the same document.
Notification of links between preprints and formal publications that may follow (such as journal articles, monographs)
Reference linking for preprints, connecting up the scholarly record to associated literature
Preprints include funding data so people can report research contributions based on funder and grant identification
Discoverability: we make the metadata available for machine and human access, across multiple interfaces (including our REST API, OAI-PMH, and Metadata Search.
Designate a specific contact with us who will receive match notifications when an accepted manuscript (AM) or version of record (VOR) of the posted content has been registered.
Link your posted content record to that other record within seven days of receiving an alert.
Clearly label the manuscript as a preprint above the fold on its landing page, and ensure that any link to the AAM or VOR is also prominently displayed above the fold.
In additional to annual membership dues, all records attract a one-time registration fee. There are volume discounts available for posted content. Read about the fees.
Associating preprints with later published outputs
Once a research object has been published from the posted content and a DOI has been assigned to it, the preprint publisher will update their metadata to associate the posted content with the DOI of the accepted manuscript (AM) or version of record (VOR).
We will notify the member who deposited metadata for the posted content when we find a match between the title and first author of two publications, so that the potential relationship can be reviewed. The posted content publisher must then update the preprint metadata record by declaring the AM/VOR relationship. The notification is delivered by email to the technical contact on file. Please contact us if you need the email notifications to be sent to a different address.
Displaying and labeling on posted content publications
You must make it clear that posted content is unpublished and you must ensure that any link to the AM/VOR is prominently displayed, specifically:
The landing page (or equivalent) of the preprint must be labeled as not formally published (for example, preprint, unpublished manuscript). This label must appear above the fold (the part of a web page that is visible in a browser window when the page first loads)
The landing page (or equivalent) of the preprint must link to the AM/VOR when it is made available. The link must be appropriately labeled (for example, Now published in [Journal Name], Version of record available in [Journal Name]) and appear above the fold.
History
We’ve been supporting registration of preprints and other posted content since 2016. The Preprints Advisory Group provides ongoing guidance and advice for developing the preprints metadata we collect.
Our preprints record type was originally developed with advisors from bioRxiv and arXiv, PLOS, Elsevier, AIP, IOP, and ACM.
