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.
All metadata records and identifiers registered with Crossref are submitted as XML formatted using our metadata input schema. Unlike other objects registered with Crossref, grants have their own grant-specific input schema. Version 0.1.1 of our Grants schema is available in our GitLab schema repository, as is a complete XML example.
Please note: as of version 0.1.1 a version attribute is required in the <doi_batch> schema declaration, for example:
Members currently using version 0.0.1 do not need to provide a version number.
Grant and project metadata
Grant metadata by default includes a single or multiple projects. Multiple projects may be applied to a single grant but the DOI registered is applied at the grant level. Multiple grants may be included in a single XML file.
The metadata within each project includes basics like titles, descriptions, and investigator information (including affiliations), funding information such as funder names and identifiers from the Funder Registry, as well as information about funding types and amounts.
When registering a grant:
you must include required project information (a project title, a funder name and identifier, and a funding type) as well as your internal grant or award number
you should include a project description, language information, investigator details including ORCID IDs, ROR IDs within affiliations, and investigator country code; award amounts/currency, and project start and end dates and/or an award date (note that project or grant start/end dates are used to calculate current vs. backfile content registration fees).
you may include multiple titles and descriptions as well as language information; a funding scheme, and planned project start and end dates.
Project metadata
Project: Project metadata includes titles and descriptions (abstracts). Both can be supplied multiple times to capture information in different languages.
Element / attribute
Description
Limits
project
Container for project information. Multiple projects may be assigned to a single Grant ID.
required; multiple allowed
project-title
Title of a project funded by the grant being registered
required; multiple allowed
description
Used to capture an abstract or description of a project.
optional; multiple allowed
@xml:lang
Use @xml:lang to identify language for each project-title or description. This allows you to provide multiple titles in different languages.
optional
Investigators: Investigators are not required, but all applicable investigators should be included. Optional start and end dates may be used to capture investigators whose involvement is limited to a specific timeframe.
Element / attribute
Description
Limits
investigators
container for investigator information
optional
person
container for individual investigator details
at least 1 required, multiple allowed (unbounded)
@role
available roles are lead_investigator, co-lead_investigator, investigator
required
@start-date
Date an investigator began work with the project
optional
@end-date
Date an investigator ended work with the project
optional
givenName
given or first name
optional
familyName
family or surname
optional
alternateName
alias or nickname used by the Investigator
optional
affiliation
container for affiliation information
optional, multiple allowed
institution
institution an investigator is affiliated with when associated with the project being defined. Multiple affiliations should be supplied where applicable
1 allowed, use multiple affiliation groups for investigators with multiple affiliations
@country
ISO 3166-1 alpha 2-letter country code, captures location (country) of affiliation
optional
ROR
A ROR ID may be supplied to disambiguate affiliation information, expressed as a URL
scheme for grant or award as provided by the funder
optional
Award dates: Dates can be applied at the project level (via award-date). An award-start-date may also be applied to the grant / award as a whole.
Element / attribute
Description
Limits
award-dates
container for date information
optional
@start-date
actual start date of award
optional
@end-date
actual end date of the award
optional
@planned-start-date
planned start date of award
optional
@planned-end-date
planned end date of award
optional
Funding types: Types of funding are limited to the following values:
award: a prize, award, or other type of general funding
contract: agreement involving payment
crowdfunding: funding raised via multiple sources, typically small amounts raised online
endowment: gift of money that will provide an income
equipment: use of or gift of equipment
facilities: use of location, equipment, or other resources
fellowship: grant given for research or study
grant: a monetary award
loan: money or other resource given in anticipation of repayment
other: award of undefined type
prize: an award given for achievement
salary-award: an award given as salary, includes intramural research funding
secondment: detachment of a person or resource for temporary assignment elsewhere
seed-funding: an investor invests capital in exchange for equity
training-grant: grant given for training
Grant metadata
We collect grant-specific metadata that is separate from the project information. This includes the funder-specific award identifier (grant number), the (optional) start date of the grant, related items, and the DOI and URL being registered.
Element / attribute
Description
Limits
award-number
funder-supplied award ID /grant number
required
award-start-date
start date of grant funding
optional
relation (as rel:program)
relationship metadata connecting grant to other items (other grants, funded research outputs)
