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 unified XML (UNIXREF) format returns all metadata submitted by the member responsible for a DOI. The UNIXREF data does not include namespaces or namespace prefixes, which are used extensively for non-bibliographic metadata.
The UNIXREF format will return deposited citations from other members. Citations will also be returned to members querying for their own deposited data.
UNIXREF schema
The majority of UNIXREF results use the unixref1.1.xsd schema (schema | documentation). Some results involving book or conference proceeding data deposited prior to a deposit schema change use unixref1.0.xsd (schema | documentation).
Example UNIXREF result
<doi_records>
<doi_record owner="10.1353" timestamp="2007-02-13 15:56:13">
<crossref>
<journal>
<journal_metadata language="en">
<full_title>American Quarterly</full_title>
<abbrev_title>American Quarterly</abbrev_title>
<issn media_type=l"electronic">1080-6490</issn>
</journal_metadata>
<journal_issue>
<publication_date media_type="print">
<year>1998</year>
</publication_date>
<journal_volume>
<volume>50</volume>
</journal_volume>
<issue>1</issue>
</journal_issue>
<journal_article publication_type="full_text">
<titles>
<title>"Disturbing the Peace: What Happens to American Studies If You Put African American Studies at the Center?": Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, October 29, 1997</title>
</titles>
<contributors>
<person_name sequence="first" contributor_role="author">
<given_name>Mary Helen.</given_name>
<surname>Washington</surname>
</person_name>
</contributors>
<publication_date media_type="print">
<year>1998</year>
</publication_date>
<pages>
<first_page>1</first_page>
<last_page>23</last_page>
</pages>
<doi_data>
<doi>10.1353/aq.1998.0005</doi>
<timestamp>20070206205234</timestamp>
<resource>
http://muse.jhu.edu/content/crossref/journals/american_quarterly/v050/50.1washington.html</resource>
</doi_data>
</journal_article>
</journal>
</crossref>
</doi_record>
</doi_records>
