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.
We support several versions of our metadata input and grants schema, as well as XML Schema Definition (XSD) schema for looking up and retrieving DOIs and metadata. A quick reference is available. The metadata input schema is used to deposit metadata for most record types, except Grants, which have their own schema.
We currently support versions 4.3.0 to 5.4.0 of our main metadata schema. If you are beginning to register your metadata with Crossref you should use the most recent version (currently 5.4.0) to ensure you are able to take advantage of all metadata deposit options.
We also have a resource-only deposit schema that may be used to add some pieces of metadata to an existing record.
Metadata input schema versioning
All supported schema are available in our Schema GitLab repository. Versions 4.3.0 - 4.8.1 of our schema are backwards-compatible with the exception of deposits for standards, which may only be deposited with version 4.3.6 and above. A breaking change to affiliations metadata was made with version 5.3.1
We are now incrementing our input schema version numbers with each change for all updates after version 4.4.2. Note that addtional schema versions are available via gitlab (5.0 - 5.2 for example) but are not documented for use as subsequent versions were released at the same time (5.3.1).
Recommended metadata deposit schema
crossref5.4.0xsd: type attribute added to citations, support added for version numbering, status support added for posted content/preprints
Recommended grants deposit schema
grant_id0.2.0.xsd: adds support for ROR identifiers to identify funders; adds new funding types (APC, BPC, infrastructure)
crossref5.3.1.xsd: adds support for ROR, wikidata, and ISNI identifiers in affiliations (breaking change)
crossref4.8.1.xsd: changes include support for ISBN that begin with 979, changes to the regex for the email_address field, relaxed regex for given_name to allow numbers, and schema refactoring.
crossref4.4.2.xsd: adds support for pending publication, distributed usage logging (DUL), multiple dissertation authors, abstracts for all record types, support for JATS 1.2 abstracts, and adds acceptance_date element to journal article, book, book chapter, and conference papers
