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 conference proceedings by direct deposit of XML. You can also register the conference proceedings record type using one of our helper tools: web deposit form.
The conference proceedings record type captures metadata about a single conference, such as date, acronym, and location. DOIs should be assigned to all papers associated with the conference, and a DOI may be assigned to the conference itself. Ongoing conferences published with an ISSN may be deposited as a series.
<conference> is the container for all information about a single conference as well as the individual conference papers you are depositing for the conference. If you need to register articles for more than one conference, you must use multiple instances of <conference>.
Conference deposits require metadata about the event (captured in <event_metadata>) such as conference name (required) and theme, acronym, sponsor, location, and date (all optional), and proceedings-specific metadata such as a proceedings title, publisher, and date (all required) and subject (optional).
A conference may be deposited as a single conference or as a conference series. A conference series requires an ISSN and series-level title.
Conference papers
Conference paper metadata is captured in <conference_paper>. Contributor(s), title, and DOI are required. Abstracts, page numbers, publication date, citations, funding, license, and relationship metadata are optional but encouraged.
