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 journals and articles by direct deposit of XML. You can also register the journals and articles record types using our helper tools: web deposit form, record registration form, or third party Crossref XML plugin for OJS.
DOIs may be assigned to journal titles, volumes, issues, and (of course) journal articles.
Assign DOIs to supplemental materials associated with journal articles using our component record type.
Creating journal deposits
<journal> is the container for all information about a single journal and the articles you are depositing for the journal. Within a single <journal> instance you may register articles for a single issue. If you need to register articles for more than one issue, you must use multiple instances of <journal>. These may be included within the same deposit file.
If you have articles that have not been assigned to an issue (or you do not use issue numbering) you may register them within a single journal instance. In this case, do not include <journal_issue> metadata.
If you publish in volumes only you must include <journal_issue> and the child element <journal_volume> but omit the <issue> number.
Examples
A journal may be created with an ISSN or without. A DOI is not required but is strongly recommended and should remain consistent for all articles registered for the journal.
Example title-only deposit files are available here: with ISSN | without ISSN.
Example of a journal deposit containing several articles and issues
