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 OpenURL service is used primarily by library link resolvers but can also be used to look up metadata records. Please note that OpenURL retrieval includes only bibliographic metadata.
Access to the OpenURL service is free, but it does require you to identify yourself using your email address. You do not need to register your email address with us in advance, but you do need to include your email address in your query. Find out more.
If you are a librarian and you need to use OpenURL with your library link resolver, an email address should be supplied in queries that the link resolver sends to Crossref. This will be configured in your link resolver.
Providing an email address in your queries means that we can identify and contact a user in the rare event that their queries are overloading our system or otherwise causing issues. Any contact information that you provide in your requests will only stay in our logs for 90 days. We do not give this contact information to anyone else.
OpenURL access using an email address
You need to include your email address in the pid parameter of the OpenURL request. (Please note, in this context, pid stands for personal ID and does not mean a persistent identifier such as a DOI, ROR or ORCID iD).
For interfaces that require a key, your email address is your key.
Use the format below but include your own email address instead of name@someplace.com:
The OpenURL Query Interface can accept these parameters:
Citation metadata parameters
issn
title (journal title)
aulast (family name, preferably of first author)
volume
issue
spage (first page)
date (publication year YYYY)
stitle (short title, which may be supplied as an alternative to title)
Other parameters
pid (your email address). Note: pid (personal id) is different from PID (persistent identifier)
redirect (set to false to return the DOI in XML format instead of redirecting to the target URL. The default is true)
multihit (set to true to return DOIs for more than one content item if our system does not find an exact match. The default is false)
format (set to unixref to return metadata in UNIXREF format)
OpenURL results
By default, an OpenURL match will direct the user to the landing page registered for the matched metadata record.
In most instances, only a single identifier will be returned. If more than one identifier is returned, the user will be directed to a list of all available DOIs. For example, the query:
OpenURL may be used to retrieve metadata records by setting the redirect parameter to “false”. By default an OpenURL response uses the XSD XML format. The UNIXREF format may be requested by setting the format parameter to “unixref”.
Example metadata queries
This query will return an XSD-formatted XML metadata record:
Like metadata queries, DOI query results are returned in XML format.
NISO 0.1 or 1.0 URLs
We also support NISO 0.1 and 1.0 URLs as well as some common deviations. In general it supports the San Antonio Profile #1, including in-line, by-value, and by-reference. In the presence of a url_ver= Z39.88-2004 parameter this service will operate on a info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:ctx context format with referent formats info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:journal or info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:book.
https://doi.crossref.org/openurl?pid=email@address.com&url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:journal&rft.atitle=Isolation of a common receptor for coxsackie B&rft.jtitle=Science&rft.aulast=Bergelson&rft.auinit=J&rft.date=1997&rft.volume=275&rft.spage=1320&rft.epage=1323
