Blog

In our previous blog post in this series, we explained why no metadata matching strategy can return perfect results. Thankfully, however, this does not mean that it’s impossible to know anything about the quality of matching. Indeed, we can (and should!) measure how close (or far) we are from achieving perfection with our matching. Read on to learn how this can be done! How about we start with a quiz? Imagine a database of scholarly metadata that needs to be enriched with identifiers, such as ORCIDs or ROR IDs.

In our previous instalments of the blog series about matching (see part 1 and part 2), we explained what metadata matching is, why it is important and described its basic terminology. In this entry, we will discuss a few common beliefs about metadata matching that are often encountered when interacting with users, developers, integrators, and other stakeholders. Spoiler alert: we are calling them myths because these beliefs are not true! Read on to learn why.

In our previous blog post about metadata matching, we discussed what it is and why we need it (tl;dr: to discover more relationships within the scholarly record). Here, we will describe some basic matching-related terminology and the components of a matching process. We will also pose some typical product questions to consider when developing or integrating matching solutions. Basic terminology Metadata matching is a high-level concept, with many different problems falling into this category.

At Crossref and ROR, we develop and run processes that match metadata at scale, creating relationships between millions of entities in the scholarly record. Over the last few years, we’ve spent a lot of time diving into details about metadata matching strategies, evaluation, and integration. It is quite possibly our favourite thing to talk and write about! But sometimes it is good to step back and look at the problem from a wider perspective.

In the scholarly communications environment, the evolution of a journal article can be traced by the relationships it has with its preprints. Those preprint–journal article relationships are an important component of the research nexus. Some of those relationships are provided by Crossref members (including publishers, universities, research groups, funders, etc.) when they deposit metadata with Crossref, but we know that a significant number of them are missing. To fill this gap, we developed a new automated strategy for discovering relationships between preprints and journal articles and applied it to all the preprints in the Crossref database. We made the resulting dataset, containing both publisher-asserted and automatically discovered relationships, publicly available for anyone to analyse.

TL;DR One of the things that makes me glad to work at Crossref is the principles to which we hold ourselves, and the most public and measurable of those must be the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure, or POSI, for short. These ambitions lay out how we want to operate - to be open in our governance, in our membership and also in our source code and data. And it’s that openness of source code that’s the reason for my post today - on 26th September 2022, our first collaboration with the JSON Forms open-source project was released into the wild.

Our entire community – members, metadata users, service providers, community organizations and researchers – create and/or use DOIs in some way so making them more accessible is a worthy and overdue effort. For the first time in five years and only the second time ever, we are recommending some changes to our DOI display guidelines (the changes aren’t really for display but more on that below). We don’t take such changes lightly, because we know it means updating established workflows.

We talk so much about more and better metadata that a reasonable question might be: what is Crossref doing to help? Members and their service partners do the heavy lifting to provide Crossref with metadata and we don’t change what is supplied to us. One reason we don’t is because members can and often do change their records (important note: updated records do not incur fees!). However, we do a fair amount of behind the scenes work to check and report on the metadata as well as to add context and relationships.

The ecosystem of scholarly metadata is filled with relationships between items of various types: a person authored a paper, a paper cites a book, a funder funded research. Those relationships are absolutely essential: an item without them is missing the most basic context about its structure, origin, and impact. No wonder that finding and exposing such relationships is considered very important by virtually all parties involved. Probably the most famous instance of this problem is finding citation links between research outputs. Lately, another instance has been drawing more and more attention: linking research outputs with grants used as their funding source. How can this be done and how many such links can we observe?

Crossref has supported depositing metadata for preprints since 2016 and peer reviews since 2018. Now we are putting the two together, in fact we will permit peer reviews to be registered for any record type.