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 query engine operates by processing many different rules. By default, all metadata provided in a query is used to generate a match, and a result is only returned if exactly one DOI match is found. Enabling a secondary query instructs the query engine to perform specific searches when the initial search fails to find a match.
Author/article title secondary query
Queries by default use all metadata present in the request. Requests with only an author and title are treated as author/article title queries. When other fields are present, the request is submitted as a metadata search.
Setting the secondary-query attribute to author-title causes an author/title search to be performed when the initial metadata search fails to find a match.
<query key="cit-3" enable-multiple-hits="true" secondary-query="author-title">
<issn>0360-3016</issn>
<volume>54</volume>
<issue>2</issue>
<first_page>215</first_page>
<year>2002</year>
<author>Kim</author>
<article_title match="fuzzy">Potential radiation sensitizing effect of SU5416 by down-regulating the COX-2 expression in human lung cancer cells</article_title>
</query>
Year is included in the author/article title secondary query when present. An author/article title query will only be performed if both author and article title are included in the query.
Multiple hits secondary query
By default, the query engine will only return a result if a single DOI is found. Queries returning multiple results (or hits) are unresolved. Setting the secondary-query attribute to “multi-hit” instructs the query engine to return all available results.
<query key="cit-3" secondary-query="multiple-hits">
<issn>0360-3016</issn>
<volume>54</volume>
<issue>2</issue>
<first_page>215</first_page>
<year>2002</year>
<author>Kim</author>
<article_title match="fuzzy">Potential radiation sensitizing effect of SU5416 by down-regulating the COX-2 expression in human lung cancer cells</article_title>
</query>
Setting the secondary-query attribute to “author-title-multiple-hits” instructs the query engine to perform an author/title query and return multiple hits if the initial search fails.
<query key="cit-3" enable-multiple-hits="true" secondary-query="author-title-multiple-hits">
<issn>0360-3016</issn>
<volume>54</volume>
<issue>2</issue>
<first_page>215</first_page>
<year>2002</year>
<author>Kim</author>
<article_title match="fuzzy">Potential radiation sensitizing effect of SU5416 by down-regulating the COX-2 expression in human lung cancer cells</article_title>
</query>
Secondary query results
Query results will specify which method was used to return the result. Successful metadata searches will specify metadata:
