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A few months ago we announced our plan to deprecate our support for the Open Funder Registry in favour of using the ROR Registry to support both affiliation and funder use cases. The feedback we’ve had from the community has been positive and supports our members, service providers and metadata users who are already starting to move in this direction. We wanted to provide an update on work that’s underway to make this transition happen, and how you can get involved in working together with us on this.

Every year, Crossref releases a full public data file of all of our metadata. This is partly a commitment to POSI and partly just what we do. We want the community to re-use our metadata and to find interesting ends to which they can be put! However, we have also recognized, for some time, that 170GB of compressed .tar.gz files, spread over 27,000 items, is not the easiest of formats with which to work.

Today, we are announcing a long-term plan to deprecate the Open Funder Registry. For some time, we have understood that there is significant overlap between the Funder Registry and the Research Organization Registry (ROR), and funders and publishers have been asking us whether they should use Funder IDs or ROR IDs to identify funders. It has therefore become clear that merging the two registries will make workflows more efficient and less confusing for all concerned.

We were delighted to engage with over 200 community members in our latest Community update calls. We aimed to present a diverse selection of highlights on our progress and discuss your questions about participating in the Research Nexus. For those who didn’t get a chance to join us, I’ll briefly summarise the content of the sessions here and I invite you to join the conversations on the Community Forum. You can take a look at the slides here and the recordings of the calls are available here.

We have some exciting news for fans of big batches of metadata: this year’s public data file is now available. Like in years past, we’ve wrapped up all of our metadata records into a single download for those who want to get started using all Crossref metadata records. We’ve once again made this year’s public data file available via Academic Torrents, and in response to some feedback we’ve received from public data file users, we’ve taken a few additional steps to make accessing this 185 gb file a little easier.

Recording data citations supports data reuse and aids research integrity and reproducibility. Crossref makes it easy for our members to submit data citations to support the scholarly record. TL;DR Citations are essential/core metadata that all members should submit for all articles, conference proceedings, preprints, and books. Submitting data citations to Crossref has long been possible. And it’s easy, you just need to: Include data citations in the references section as you would for any other citation Include a DOI or other persistent identifier for the data if it is available - just as you would for any other citation Submit the references to Crossref through the content registration process as you would for any other record And your data citations will flow through all the normal processes that Crossref applies to citations.

At Crossref, we care a lot about the completeness and quality of metadata. Gathering robust metadata from across the global network of scholarly communication is essential for effective co-creation of the research nexus and making the inner workings of academia traceable and transparent. We invest time in community initiatives such as Metadata 20/20 and Better Together webinars. We encourage members to take time to look up their participation reports, and our team can support you if you’re looking to understand and improve any aspects of metadata coverage of your content.

What’s in the metadata matters because it is So.Heavily.Used. You might be tired of hearing me say it but that doesn’t make it any less true. Our open APIs now see over 1 billion queries per month. The metadata is ingested, displayed and redistributed by a vast, global array of systems and services that in whole or in part are often designed to point users to relevant content. It’s also heavily used by researchers, who author the content that is described in the metadata they analyze.

Why the focus on funding information? We are often asked who uses Crossref metadata and for what. One common use case is researchers in bibliometrics and scientometrics (among other fields) doing meta analyses on the entire corpus of records. As we pass the 10 year mark for the Funder Registry and 5 years of funders joining Crossref as members to register their grants, it’s worth a look at some recent research that focuses specifically on funding information.

This blog post is from Lettie Conrad and Michelle Urberg, cross-posted from the The Scholarly Kitchen. As sponsors of this project, we at Crossref are excited to see this work shared out. The scholarly publishing community talks a LOT about metadata and the need for high-quality, interoperable, and machine-readable descriptors of the content we disseminate. However, as we’ve reflected on previously in the Kitchen, despite well-established information standards (e.g., persistent identifiers), our industry lacks a shared framework to measure the value and impact of the metadata we produce.