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 API makes use of content negotiation (the possibility to serve different versions of a document) to provide a common mechanism for TDM users to locate the full-text of articles on a member’s site. The member is responsible for delivering the content to the user, applying any access control, and applying usage statistics data to content accessed in this way.
Normally, when you follow a DOI link, the browser sends a signal to the web server asking for the content to be returned in HTML for display in the browser. Therefore, when you access a DOI using a browser, you are shown the member’s landing page.
With content negotiation, you can write programs that specify that, instead of returning a human-readable HTML representation of the landing page, the server should return a machine-readable representation of the data connected with the DOI.
To support TDM, members need include full-text URL(s) in their metadata for each content item with a DOI. Anybody using our API to query will be able to retrieve these URLs and follow them directly to the full-text. Members who want to be able to support multiple formats of the full-text of the article will be able to do so - for example, they could support the retrieval of either PDF, XML, or HTML, or just one of these formats.
There are two methods that members can use to register links to full-text content: for members who do (method 1) and do not (method 2) support content negotiation on their platforms.
Method 1: Member provides a URL which points to content negotiation resource
This method is for members who support content negotiation on their platforms.
This section of XML illustrates how to specify a single URL end-point where the member platform supports content negotiation:
