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.
This query is fairly strict - it is requesting a single match for the given metadata. The ISSN is provided but does not need to be used for matching (match="optional"). The journal title needs to match exactly (match="exact"), no fuzzy matching will be applied. Fuzzy matching is applied to the author (match="fuzzy") but only the first author will be matched.
<query key="1178517" enable-multiple-hits="false">
<issn match="optional">15360075<issn>
<journal_title match="exact">American Journal of Bioethics</journal_title>
<author match="fuzzy" search-all-authors="false">Agich</author>
<volume match="fuzzy">1</volume>
<issue>1</issue>
<first_page>50</first_page>
<year>2001</year>
<article_title>The Salience of Narrative for Bioethics</article_title>
</query>
A less strict journal article query
The query below will return multiple matches (enable-multiple-hits="true") and fuzzy match the author against all deposited authors, and will do an author/article title query if the full metadata query does not produce a match.
<query key="1178517" enable-multiple-hits="true" secondary-query="author-title">
<journal_title match="fuzzy">American Journal of Bioethics</journal_title>
<author match="fuzzy" search-all-authors="true">Agich</author>
<volume match="fuzzy">1</volume>
<issue>1</issue>
<first_page>50</first_page>
<year>2001</year>
<article_title>The Salience of Narrative for Bioethics</article_title>
</query>
An unstructured citation
This citation has not been marked up into separate elements. We’ll try to break it up, but the results may not be as accurate.
<query key="q1" enable-multiple-hits="true">
<unstructured_citation>Hungate, B. A., & Hampton, H. M. (2012). Ecosystem services: Valuing ecosystems for climate. Nature Climate Change, 2(3), 151-152.
</unstructured_citation>
</query>
Book chapter query
A query which will return the DOI for a single chapter in the specific title
Searching for individual chapters within a book may also be done by using just the author name and chapter title (author name is optional, but should be included for better results):
<query key="MyKey1" enable-multiple-hits="false">
<author>Casteilla</author>
<article_title>Choosing an Adipose Tissue Depot for Sampling </article_title>
</query>
Book title query
Book title queries should include the book title (as volume_title) and author (or editor) when available.
Some title-level book DOIs lack author information. If you do not have author information to include in your query or you are querying for an authorless book, for best results your query should instruct the system to ignore author by setting the author match attribute to null.
Crossref query results can be retrieved in several formats. By default the XSD_XML format will only contain basic bibliographic metadata. Setting expanded-results to TRUE will also return the article title.
This example shows use of expanded-results=true along with enable-multiple-hits=true:
<crossref_result version="2.0" xsi:schemaLocation="https://www.crossref.org/qrschema/2.0 https://www.crossref.org/qrschema/crossref_query_output2.0.xsd">
<query_result>
<head>
<email_address>hisham@atypon.com</email_address>
<doi_batch_id>Sample multi resolve</doi_batch_id>
</head>
<body>
<query key="mutliResolve1" status="multiresolved" fl_count="0">
<doi type="journal_article">10.1016/S0360-3016(02)03429-6</doi>
<issn type="print">03603016</issn>
<journal_title> International Journal of Radiation Oncology*Biology*Physics</journal_title>
<author>KIM</author>
<volume>54</volume>
<issue>2</issue>
<first_page>215</first_page>
<year>2002</year>
<publication_type>full_text</publication_type>
<article_title> Potential radiation sensitizing effect of SU5416 by down-regulating the COX-2 expression in human lung cancer cells </article_title>
</query>
<query key="mutliResolve1" status="multiresolved" fl_count="0">
<doi type="journal_article">10.1016/S0360-3016(02)03428-4</doi>
<issn type="print">03603016</issn>
<journal_title> International Journal of Radiation Oncology*Biology*Physics </journal_title>
<author>WILLIAMS</author>
<volume>54</volume>
<issue>2</issue>
<first_page>215</first_page>
<year>2002</year>
<publication_type>full_text</publication_type>
<article_title> Effect of the administration of lovastatin on the development of pulmonary fibrosis following whole lung irradiation in a mouse model </article_title>
</query>
</body>
</query_result>
</crossref_result>
The system will return no DOIs if an ambiguity exists. Setting enable-multiple-hits to true instructs the system to return the list of DOIs.
Searching all authors
Normally the author name supplied in a query must be that of the article’s first author. First author is an optional designation made by the member when depositing a DOI’s metadata. Articles registered without a first author designation handicap queries that depend on author (for example, those which do not supply a page number). In an XML query there is a property called search-all-authors which forces the process to examine all authors associated with the article.
This example shows a query that would not return any results if this feature were not used:
