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 guide gives markup examples for members registering affiliations by direct deposit of XML. As of schema version 5.3.0 we’ve introduced a new tag that supports both affiliated institution names and select identifiers, including ROR. This change is made across contributor metadata in all record types.
Affiliation metadata consists of a repeatable element that contains the following:
Element
Description
Limits
institution
container for institution metadata
repeatable
institution_name
The full name of an institution
repeatable, either institution_name or institution_id required
institution_id and attribute(s): @type (values are ror, wikidata, isni)
Identifier for an institution or organization
ID
institution_acronym
The acronym of an institution
optional
institution_place
The primary city location of an institution
1 allowed, xsd:string
institution_department
The department within an institution
1 allowed, xsd:string
Requirements:
For each affiliation, you must at minimum include an institution identifier (institution_id) or an institution name (institution_name). A ROR ID is recommended as we plan to integrate ROR data into our APIs in the future.
You should include an identifier wherever possible, to improve discovery, disambiguate, and make affiliations machine actionable.
You may include optional metadata including an acronym (institution_acronym), a place (institution_place), and a department (institution_department). Most of this metadata is made redundant by identifiers, so include only if an identifier is not available or if the identifier is not sufficiently granular (as with departments).
Institution identifiers
We currently support 3 institution identifiers: ROR, Wikidata, and ISNI. We do some basic validation for each identifier provided in your XML:
ROR: must begin with https://ror.org/ (full regex used for validation is https://ror\\.org/0[^ilo]{6}\\d{2})
Wikidata: must begin with https://www.wikidata.org/entity/ (full regex used for validation is https://www\\.wikidata\\.org/entity/([qQ]|[pP]|[lL])\\d+)
ISNI: should begin with https://isni.org/isni but https://www.isni.org/isni is also allowed (full regex used for validation is https://www\\.isni\\.org/isni/\\d{15}(x|[0-9])
Affiliation examples
There are multiple ways to mark up an affiliation depending on what metadata is available -
a ROR ID may be provided on its own as it’s all we need to identify an organization:
This example includes department information to supplement the ROR ID:
<affiliations><institution><institution_idtype="ror">https://ror.org/01bj3aw27</institution_id><institution_department>Office of Environmental Management</institution_department></institution></affiliations>
This affiliation does not have an identifier, so additional metadata is useful:
<institution><institution_name>Tinker Fan Club</institution_name><institution_acronym>TinFC</institution_acronym><institution_place>Boston, MA</institution_place><institution_department>Office of Environmental Management</institution_department></institution>
As mentioned above a ROR identifier is preferred, but ISNI and Wikidata identifiers are also supported and will be passed on to our metadata users via our REST and XML APIs.
Crossref and JATS
Crossref affiliation metadata easily maps to JATS and the JATS4R affiliation recommendations. For example, a basic affiliation with name only is tagged in JATS as:
