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.
The deposit harvester allows you to retrieve metadata records for content that you’ve registered. The metadata retrieved is in our UNIXSD output format, which delivers the exact metadata submitted in a deposit, including any citations registered. Members (or their designated third parties) may only retrieve their own metadata.
Ownership and retrieval restrictions - who can retrieve records?
The deposit harvester will only retrieve records for the authorized owner of the metadata records. Metadata ownership is established by the DOI prefix(es) associated with a user’s account (learn more about transferring responsibility for DOIs. Many members have one prefix and one account, but some members may have multiple prefixes. For example, Member A has been assigned account abcd, which is associated with prefixes 10.xxxx, 10.yyyy, and 10.zzzz. Member A can retrieve metadata owned by prefixes 10.xxxx, 10.yyyy, and 10.zzzz using their abcd account.
Ownership of DOIs and titles often moves from member to member, so a title-owning prefix will not always match the prefix of the DOIs attached to the title. Retrieval permission is granted to the current owner, not the original depositor. For example, Member B registers identifier 10.5555/jfo.33425. Ownership of the journal and all identifiers is transferred to Member A with prefix 10.50505. The DOI is now “owned” by prefix 10.50505, and only Member A may harvest the metadata record for that identifier.
Sets
The deposit harvester supports a hierarchy of sets. The hierarchy is in three parts: <work-type>:<prefix>:<publication-id>. For example, the set J:10.12345:6789 will return metadata for a journal (J), with prefix 10.12345, and publication id 6789. The set B will return all book metadata. The set S:10.12345 will return all the series metadata associated with the 10.12345 prefix.
The work-type designators are:
J for journals
B for books and book-like works (reports, conference proceedings, standards, dissertations)
S for non-journal series and series-like works.
If no set is specified, the set “J” is used.
Example requests
ListSets
Retrieve list of titles owned by the prefixes assigned to your account:
work-type: J for journals, B for book or conference proceeding titles, S for series
prefix: the owning prefix of the title being retrieved
title ID: the title identification number assigned by us. Title IDs are included in the ListSets response described above.
username and password: account details for the prefix/title being retrieved
Results
Results conform to Crossref’s UNIXREF format and may contain the following root elements:
journal
book
conference
dissertation
report-paper
standard
sa_component
database
Using resumption tokens with the deposit harvester
Some OAI-PMH requests are too big to be retrieved in a single transaction. If a given response contains a resumption token, the user must make an additional request to retrieve the rest of the data. You must provide the account name and password with both the initial request and subsequent resumption requests. A resumption without authentication details will fail. Learn more about resumption tokens.
