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 of contributor metadata for members registering content by direct deposit of XML. A contributor is a person or organization that is considered the author of a work. A contributor may be a person or a group author (organization in our XML). Contributor metadata also includes affiliations, which have their own guide.
ORCID iDs
An author’s ORCID iD should be included whenever possible. Providing an ORCID iD in a metadata record allows the author’s ORCID record to be automatically updated via our auto-update process. OJS users who have upgraded to version 3.1.2 or later can request authenticated iDs from both contributing authors and co-authors - learn more about the OJS-ORCID plugin.
Contributor roles
We currently support and require a single contributor role per contributor. Supported values are:
author
editor
chair
reviewer
review-assistant
stats-reviewer
reviewer-external
reader
translator
We intend to allow multiple roles per contributor and as expand our list of supported contributor roles in a future update.
Contributor order
The <person_name> and <organization> elements both include required contributor role and sequence attributes. An author may be first or additional. Specific sequence numbering is not allowed, but many systems using our metadata assume that the order of authors as present in the metadata is the appropriate order for metadata display. * If a contributor has just one name, put it under the <surname> field
Note that the data supplied in the <given_name> and <surname> fields is used for display and query matching and must be as accurate as possible.
<contributors><person_namesequence="first"contributor_role="author"><given_name>Minerva</given_name><surname>Nipperson</surname><suffix>III</suffix><affiliations><institution><institution_idtype="ror">https://ror.org/01bj3aw27</institution_id><institution_department>Office of Environmental Management</institution_department></institution></affiliations><ORCIDauthenticated="true">https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4011-3590</ORCID></person_name><person_namesequence="additional"contributor_role="author"><given_name>Christopher </given_name><surname>Personality</surname><affiliations><institution><institution_idtype="ror">https://ror.org/01bj3aw27</institution_id><institution_department>Office of Environmental Management</institution_department></institution></affiliations></person_name><person_namesequence="additional"contributor_role="author"><given_name>Katharine </given_name><surname>Mech</surname></person_name></contributors>
