One of the challenges that we face in Labs and Research at Crossref is that, as we prototype various tools, we need the community to be able to test them. Often, this involves asking for deposit to a different endpoint or changing the way that a platform works to incorporate a prototype.
The problem is that our community is hugely varied in its technical capacity and level of ability when it comes to modifying their platform.
When each line of code is written it is surrounded by a sea of context: who in the community this is for, what problem we’re trying to solve, what technical assumptions we’re making, what we already tried but didn’t work, how much coffee we’ve had today. All of these have an effect on the software we write.
By the time the next person looks at that code, some of that context will have evaporated.
It turns out that one of the things that is really difficult at Crossref is checking whether a set of Crossref credentials has permission to act on a specific DOI prefix. This is the result of many legacy systems storing various mappings in various different software components, from our Content System through to our CRM. To this end, I wrote a basic application, credcheck, that will allow you to test a Crossref credential against an API.
Subject classifications have been available via the REST API for many years but have not been complete or reliable from the start and will soon be deprecated. dfdfd
The subject metadata element was born out of a Labs experiment intended to enrich the metadata returned via Crossref Metadata Search with All Subject Journal Classification codes from Scopus. This feature was developed when the REST API was still fairly new, and we now recognize that the initial implementation worked its way into the service prematurely.
Tl;dr: Metadata for the (currently 26,000) grants that have been registered by our funder members is now available via the REST API. This is quite a milestone in our program to include funding in Crossref infrastructure and a step forward in our mission to connect all.the.things. This post gives you all the queries you might need to satisfy your curiosity and start to see what’s possible with deeper analysis. So have the look and see what useful things you can discover.
Since late 2019, research funders have been registering metadata and identifiers for their grants with us. We currently have a healthy 26k grants registered with us, via 13 funding organisations. I’d specifically highlight Wellcome for volume (registering via Europe PMC), and the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) who was the first funder that included ROR IDs in their grant metadata, really getting the value of connecting all related entities and contributors.
The reasons for registering grants with Crossref? Let’s recap:
Support of open data and information about grants
Streamlined discovery of funded content
Improved analytics and data quality
More complete picture of outputs and impact
Better value from investments in reporting services
Improved timeliness, completeness and accuracy of reporting: save time for researchers
More complete information to support analysis and evaluation without relying on manual data entry
How it’s going
For grant information to be used, it’s key that it is is openly available and disseminated as widely as possible. That work starts with funders registering their grants, and continues with us. Now that we’ve completed the REST API’s Elasticsearch migration, we’re happy to announce that all our grant information is now available via our REST API.
"publisher":"Wellcome","award":"107769","DOI":"10.35802/107769","type":"grant","created":{"date-parts":[[2019,9,25]],"date-time":"2019-09-25T07:17:20Z","timestamp":1569395840000},"source":"Crossref","prefix":"10.35802","member":"13928","project":[{"project-title":[{"title":"Initiative to Develop African Research Leaders (IDeAL)"}],"project-description":[{"description":"Research is key in tackling the heath challenges that Africa faces. In KWTRP we have been committed to building sustainable capacity alongside an active and diverse research programme covering social science, health services research, epidemiology, laboratory science including molecular biology and bioinformatics. Our strategy has been successful in delivering high quality PhD training, leveraging individual funding and programme funding in order to place students in productive groups and provide high quality supervision and mentorship. Here we plan to consolidate and build on these outputs to address long-term sustainability. We will emphasise the full career path needed to generate research leaders. KWTRP aims to address capacity building for research through an initiative that employs a progressive and long term outlook in the development of local research leadership. The overall aim of the \"Initiative to Develop African Research Leaders\" (IDeAL) is to build a critical mass of African researchers who are technically proficient as scientists and well-equipped to independently lead science at international level, able to engage with funders, policy makers and governments, and to act as supervisors and mentors for the next generation of researchers.","language":"en"},
If you dig in, you can see information about the project, investigators (including their ORCID iDs), the funder, award type, amount, description of the grant, and a link to the public page showing information about the grant. More information on the required and optional fields is available in our grants markup guide.
Here are some examples of the kind of things you can now ask:
This is a milestone but it’s not the end of the story. We have more to add relationships, encourage the use of this metadata amongst publishers and their platforms, and to add grant records to our tools such as Participation Reports and Metadata Search. But in the meantime, feel free to get in touch if you have queries about registering grants with us or about using the related metadata in your tools and services.
This information will grow over time as more funders join Crossref and add their grant metadata and as more analyses is possible. We’re looking forward to the next steps!