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 peer reviews by direct deposit of XML. It is not currently possible to register the peer reviews record type using one of our helper tools.
Getting started with registering peer reviews
Registration of peer reviews is supported as of schema version 4.4.1. Peer reviews include referee reports, decision letters, and author responses. You may also register post-publication reviews using our peer review record type.
Peer review metadata includes a number of review-specific elements. Many are optional to accommodate differences in review practices, but please include all elements relevant to your reviews when submitting your metadata records.
Our schema includes support for the following fields:
contributor, to capture reviewer name and role, choose from:
Captures reviewer name and role. If anonymous, must capture as <anonymous/>. Peer review roles are: reviewer, review-assistant, stats-reviewer, reviewer-external, reader, translator, author, editor
optional
title
Title of review. If you don’t have a review-specific title convention, we recommend that you include Review (or member’s own term for review) in your peer review registration, as well as a revision and review number. For example, a review pattern of Review: title of article (Revision number/Review number) will be: Review: Analysis of the effects of bad metadata on discoverability (R2/RC3)
required
review_date
Date of review, including month, day, year
year is required
institution
Organization (member or other) submitting the peer review, strongly advised if submitter differs from publisher of item being reviewed
optional, may include up to 5
competing_interest_statement
Competing interest statement provided by review author during review process
optional
running_number
Internal number/identifier used to identify specific review
Relate review to item being reviewed through relationships - must supply the DOI of item being reviewed as an inter-work relation with review type isReviewOf
required
Some metadata is captured as attributes with specific enumerated values:
Attributes
Description
Limits
stage
Options are pre-publication and post-publication
optional
type
Types of report include: referee-report, editor-report, author-comment, community-comment, aggregate, recommendation
Revision round number, first submission is defined as revision round 0
optional
language
Language of review
optional
The types are refer to the following categories of peer reviews:
referee-report: also commonly known as a reviewer report - comments provided by someone who has been verified as an expert in the field of the work, usually invited by an editor. Note that we treat the terms reviewer and referee as interchangeable.
editor-report: comments by an editor representing the journal or platform where the work is submitted. It might contain feedback on other peer reviews or a decision on whether to accept the work for publication.
author-comment: a response by one or more authors to peer review reports on their work.
community-comment: comments made on a work from the community at large. These are usually part of a public call for reviews, rather than personally invited.
aggregate: a summary of a review process, for example collating the responses of several referees and/or editors.
recommendation: Reporting an editorial decision on a peer review with one of the values: major-revision, minor-revision, reject, reject-with-resubmit, accept.
Example of connecting a review to the reviewed item through relations
<programxmlns="http://www.crossref.org/relations.xsd"><related_item><description>Referee report of Treatment of plaque psoriasis with an ointment
formulation of the Janus kinase inhibitor, tofacitinib: a Phase 2b randomized
clinical trial</description><inter_work_relationrelationship-type="isReviewOf"identifier-type="doi">10.1186/s12895-016-0051-4</inter_work_relation></related_item></program>
Example of a complete review
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><doi_batchxmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.crossref.org/schema/4.4.2 http://www.crossref.org/schema/crossref4.4.2.xsd"xmlns="http://www.crossref.org/schema/4.4.2"version="4.4.2"><head><doi_batch_id>20170807</doi_batch_id><timestamp>2017080715731</timestamp><depositor><depositor_name>Crossref</depositor_name><email_address>support@crossref.org</email_address></depositor><registrant>Crossref</registrant></head><body><peer_reviewstage="pre-publication"revision-round="1"recommendation="accept"><contributors><person_namecontributor_role="reviewer"sequence="first"><given_name>Wilson</given_name><surname>Liao</surname></person_name></contributors><titles><title>Review: Treatment of plaque psoriasis with an ointment formulation of the Januskinase inhibitor, tofacitinib: a Phase 2b randomized clinical trial. V1</title></titles><review_date><month>08</month><day>19</day><year>2016</year></review_date><competing_interest_statement> There were no competing interests</competing_interest_statement><running_number>RC1 </running_number><programxmlns="http://www.crossref.org/relations.xsd"><related_item><description>Referee report of Treatment of plaque psoriasis with an ointment formulation of the Janus kinase inhibitor, tofacitinib: a Phase 2b randomized clinical trial</description><inter_work_relationrelationship-type="isReviewOf"identifier-type="doi">10.1186/s12895-016-0051-4 </inter_work_relation></related_item></program><doi_data><doi>10.5555/abc123</doi><resource>https://www.example.org/openpeerreview/art%3A10.1186%2Fs12895-016-0051-4/12895_2016_51_ReviewerReport_V2_R1.pdf</resource></doi_data></peer_review></body></doi_batch>
