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.
You can use and redistribute any metadata you retrieve with the Crossref REST API or that is included in Crossref snapshots and public data files. Have fun.
Details
What we colloquially call “Crossref metadata” is actually a mix of elements, some of which come from our members, some of which come from third parties, and some of which come from Crossref itself. These elements, in turn, each have different copyright implications.
On top of this, Crossref has terms and conditions for its members and terms and conditions for specific services. These grant Crossref the right to do things with some classes of metadata and not do things with other classes of metadata - regardless of copyright.
Since 2000 Crossref has stated that it considers basic bibliographic metadata to be “facts.” And under US law (Crossref is registered in the US) these facts are not subject to copyright at all. Note also that, given that this data is not subject to copyright at all, there is no way Crossref can “waive the copyright” under CC0. In short, this metadata has no restrictions on reuse.
More recently, some of our members have been submitting abstracts to Crossref. These are copyrighted. In the case of subscription publishers, the copyright usually belongs to the publisher. In the case of open access publishers, the copyright most often belongs to the authors. In both cases, Crossref cannot waive copyright under CC0 because the copyright is not ours to waive. However, we are allowed to redistribute the abstracts with our metadata because that is part of the terms and conditions we have with our members.
We also collect Event Data, which contains mentions of research works from across the internet. We can make the majority of this data openly available under CC0, however for a few of the sources there are additional restrictions. These might affect you if you’re planning to republish results of event data queries or store them for a long time. You can find more details on the Event Data terms of use page.
We also have some data that we’ve always released under CC0. This includes the Open Funder Registry and Event Data. This data is currently available through separate APIs, but will eventually be made available via the REST API as well.
And this leaves us with data that is created by Crossref itself as a byproduct of our services. This data includes things like participation reports, conflict reports, member IDs, and Cited-by counts, and any aggregations of our otherwise uncopyrighted data that might, by aggregating it, be subject to sui generis database rights. We also make this latter class of data available CC0.
To summarize:
Data
Licence
Bibliographic metadata, including references
Facts, not subject to copyright
Crossref-generated data, and any aggregations of our otherwise uncopyrighted data that might, by aggregating it, be subject to sui generis database rights.
CC0
Open Funder Registry, Event Data
CC0
Abstracts
Copyright held by publisher or author, but redistributable as per Crossref membership terms.
