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.
Crossref performs some fuzzy matching, but for best results, queries for metadata which includes special characters should also include special characters.
For example, DOI https://doi.org/10.1260/095830506778119452 was deposited with the metadata shown below. Notice that the first author surname (ámon) has a numerical character entity, in this case the character á.
<journal_article publication_type="full_text">
<titles>
<title>Twenty years after chernobyl in Hungary: the Hungarian perspective of energy policy and the role of nuclear power</title>
</titles>
<contributors>
<person_name sequence="first" contributor_role="author">
<given_name>Ada</given_name>
<surname> ámon </surname>
</person_name>
</contributors>
<publication_date ="print">
<month>7</month>
<day>1</day>
<year>2006</year>
</publication_date>
<publication_date ="online">
<month>7</month>
<day>29</day>
<year>2009</year>
</publication_date>
<pages>
<first_page>383</first_page>
<last_page>399</last_page>
</pages>
<publisher_item>
<identifier id_type="pii">C8612851662R7W4H</identifier>
</publisher_item>
<doi_data>
<doi>10.1260/095830506778119452</doi>
</doi_data>
If we formulate a query that does not include page number, we must include the author using the entity and not some other form of character, for example:
