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.
When you apply for the Similarity Check service, you must ensure you have full-text URLs for Similarity Check present in the metadata of at least 90% of your registered articles (across all your journal prefixes). These URLs will be used by Turnitin to index your content into the iThenticate database, making you eligible for reduced-rate access to iThenticate through the Similarity Check service.
The URLs must point directly to your full-text PDF, HTML, or plain text content, and you must continue to include these links in all future deposits. If you aren’t registering any journal articles and instead are registering other record types (such as conference papers), please contact us.
The metadata you deposit with Crossref is available to be searched and retrieved by everyone, and this includes Similarity Check full-text URLs. If your content is paywalled, please make sure that your Similarity Check URLs prompt an authentication step before allowing a user to access full-text content. You’ll also need to ensure that your hosting provider has safelisted the Turnitin IP range to ensure that the content is available for them to index.
Where should Similarity Check URLs point?
These URLs will be used to index your content, so they need to resolve directly to the content itself - the full-text PDF, HTML or plain text content. PDFs in a frame can’t be indexed, and neither can content that’s wrapped in javascript. The URL must point directly to the location of the full-text content, and not to the article landing page (even if the content is available via a link on that page). Most members supply the PDF download link.
Once you’ve added your Similarity Check URLs to your metadata, the Turnitin indexing crawler will index your content. If your content is openly available, the crawler will be able to access and index your content without further work on your side. But if your content is protected by authentication, you may need to safelist Turnitin’s IP address and UserAgent so they can do this.
If your content is protected by authentication, please ask your hosting provider to safelist the following IP address and UserAgent:
