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 offer a wide array of services to ensure that scholarly research metadata is registered, linked, and distributed. When members register their content with us, we collect both bibliographic and non-bibliographic metadata. We process it so that connections can be made between publications, people, organizations, and other associated outputs. We preserve the metadata we receive for the scholarly record. We also make it available across a range of interfaces and formats so that the community can use it and build tools with it.
Some of our services are only available to members - most of these services are included your membership but some involve an extra fee (marked *). We also offer a range of services free of charge to the scholarly community, with the option of premium service versions at an extra charge (marked ~).
Metadata Plus gives you enhanced access to all our supported APIs, guarantees service levels and support, and additional features such as snapshots and priority service/rate limits.
When someone links their data online, or mentions research on a social media site, we capture that Event and make it available for anyone to use in their own way. We provide the unprocessed data—you decide how to use it.
Register
Rich metadata leads to greater discoverability
The more complete the metadata registered, the more accurate the view of the scholarly record and the more discoverable the content is to the scholarly community.
Through our content registration service, members register and maintain metadata for their content. We are interested in the full range of metadata for each publication, including information on:
contributors (such as authors, editors, reviewers)
funding (such as funding body, grant number)
publication history (such as versions, updates, revisions, corrections, retractions, dates)
peer review (such as status, type, reviews)
access indicators (such as publication license, text & data mining URLs, machine mining URLs)
related resources & associated research artifacts (such as preprints, figures & tables, datasets, software, protocols, research resource IDs).
Unique identifiers for authors, organizations, and associated scholarly outputs enhance precision and quality, members can deposit accurate funder acknowledgment metadata when they apply the unique funder identifier in Crossref’s Funder Registry service, a regularly updated, industry-standard taxonomy of grant-giving organizations.
Link
Linking improves the scholarly enterprise
The complete set of scholarly links spans time, geography, and disciplinary boundaries.
We connect all the metadata elements we can accurately identify, from all phases of publication, across content records in our vast corpus. We link literature to people, literature to resources and associated research artifacts, and soon, literature to the activity surrounding the publication. Amongst the vast web of links, we connect research output content to external tools such as Turnitin’s iThenticate in the Similarity Check service, assisting members in plagiarism detection. With the references deposited by members, Crossref offers a Cited-by service so that participating members can discover all the publications that have cited their content. The upcoming Event Data service will offer links between literature and various platforms where it is shared, discussed, mentioned, referenced, reviewed, and considered.
Retrieve
Metadata is meant to be used
Crossref delivers metadata to systems throughout scholarly communications making content easy to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse.
Our metadata retrieval service supports a diverse range of systems by offering a wide range of formats and interfaces. We do this because the range of organizations who use it – from publishers to libraries, to funders to startups–and how they use it, are diverse. Using metadata facilitates content discoverability–if it’s rich metadata, all the better. Crossmark is a powerful example: Metadata is displayed on publication landing pages through the a widget that gives readers quick and easy access to the current status of an item of content. With one click, readers can see if content has been updated, corrected or retracted and access additional metadata provided by the member.
