Looking back over 2024, we wanted to reflect on where we are in meeting our goals, and report on the progress and plans that affect you - our community of 21,000 organisational members as well as the vast number of research initiatives and scientific bodies that rely on Crossref metadata.
In this post, we will give an update on our roadmap, including what is completed, underway, and up next, and a bit about what’s paused and why.
The Crossref2024 annual meeting gathered our community for a packed agenda of updates, demos, and lively discussions on advancing our shared goals. The day was filled with insights and energy, from practical demos of Crossrefâs latest API features to community reflections on the Research Nexus initiative and the Board elections.
Our Board elections are always the focal point of the Annual Meeting. We want to start reflecting on the day by congratulating our newly elected board members: Katharina Rieck from Austrian Science Fund (FWF), Lisa Schiff from California Digital Library, Aaron Wood from American Psychological Association, and Amanda Ward from Taylor and Francis, who will officially join (and re-join) in January 2025.
Background The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) provides a set of guidelines for operating open infrastructure in service to the scholarly community. It sets out 16 points to ensure that the infrastructure on which the scholarly and research communities rely is openly governed, sustainable, and replicable. Each POSI adopter regularly reviews progress, conducts periodic audits, and self-reports how theyâre working towards each of the principles.
In 2020, Crossrefâs board voted to adopt the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure, and we completed our first self-audit.
In June 2022, we wrote a blog post âRethinking staff travel, meetings, and eventsâ outlining our new approach to staff travel, meetings, and events with the goal of not going back to ânormalâ after the pandemic. We took into account three key areas:
The environment and climate change Inclusion Work/life balance We are aware that many of our members are also interested in minimizing their impacts on the environment, and we are overdue for an update on meeting our own commitments, so here goes our summary for the year 2023!
ROR IDs and Affiliations of authors can now be tracked in Participation Reports! Check your own Participation Report to see how many of your publications have author affiliations and ROR IDs in Crossref metadata. If you deposit metadata via XML, see our guide on Affiliations and ROR for instructions on how to include affiliations and ROR IDs in your metadata.
Crossref encourages our members to include ROR IDs in metadata in order to help make research organization information clear and consistent as it is shared between systems. ROR IDs are essential to realize a rich and complete Research Nexus because they enable connections between research outputs and the organizations that support researchers.
“The ability to link author affiliations to publications and other scholarly outputs is vital for numerous stakeholders across the research landscape. ROR is completely open; specifically focused on identifying research organizations; and collaboratively developed by, with, and for key stakeholders in scholarly communications.” – Maria Gould, Director of the ROR initiative
ROR IDs are specifically designed to be implemented in any system that captures institutional affiliations and to enable a richer networked research infrastructure. ROR IDs are interoperable with other organization identifiers, including GRID (which provided the seed data that ROR launched with), the Open Funder Registry, ISNI, and Wikidata. ROR data is available under a CC0 Public Domain waiver and can be accessed at no cost via a public API and a data dump.
ROR is operated as a joint initiative by Crossref, DataCite, and the California Digital Library, and was launched with seed data from GRID in collaboration with Digital Science. These organizations have invested resources into building an open registry of research organization identifiers that can be embedded in scholarly infrastructure to effectively link research to organizations. ROR is not a membership organization (or an organization at all!) and charges no fees for use of the registry or the API. Read more about ROR’s sustainability model.
Why ROR IDs are an important element of Crossref metadata
For a long time, Crossref only collected affiliation metadata as free-text strings, which made for ambiguity and incomplete data. An author affiliated with the University of California at Berkeley might give the name of the university in any of several common ways:
University of California, Berkeley
University of California at Berkeley
University of California Berkeley
UC Berkeley
Berkeley
And likely more âŚ
While it isnât too difficult for a human to guess that âUC Berkeley,â âUniversity of California, Berkeley,â and âUniversity of California at Berkeleyâ are all referring to the same university, a machine interpreting this information wouldnât necessarily make the same inference. If you are trying to easily find all of the publications associated with UC Berkeley, you would need to run and reconcile multiple searches at best, or, at worst, miss some data completely.
This is where an organization identifier comes in: a single, unambiguous, standardized identifier that will always stay the same. For UC Berkeley, that would be https://ror.org/01an7q238.
In 2019, Crossref members indicated that the ability to associate research outputs with organizations in a clean and consistent fashion was one of their most desired improvements to Crossref metadata. In January of 2022, therefore, Crossref added support for ROR IDs in its metadata schema and APIs. Since then, more and more Crossref members have been including ROR IDs in DOI metadata.
Publishers and service providers can implement ROR in their systems so that submitting authors and co-authors can easily choose their affiliation from a ROR-powered list instead of typing in free text. Authors themselves do not have to provide a ROR ID or even know that a ROR ID is being collected. This affiliation information can then be sent to Crossref alongside other publication information.
Demo of collecting ROR IDs in a typeahead field
If the submission system you use does not yet support ROR, or if you don’t use a submission system, you’ll still be able to provide ROR IDs in your Crossref metadata. ROR IDs can be added to JATS XML, and Crossref helper tools will start to support the deposit of ROR IDs. There’s also an OpenRefine reconciler that can map your internal identifiers to ROR identifiers.
ROR IDs for affiliations stand to transform the usability of Crossref metadata. While itâs crucial to have IDs for affiliations, itâs equally important that the affiliation data can be easily used. The ROR dataset is CC0, so ROR IDs and associated affiliation data can be freely and openly used and reused without any restrictions.
The ROR IDs registered by members in their Crossref metadata are available via Crossrefâs open APIs so that they can be detected, analyzed, and reused by anyone interested in linking research outputs to research organizations. Examples include
Institutions who want to monitor and measure their research output by the articles their researchers have published
Funders who want to be able to discover and track the research and researchers they have supported
Academic librarians who want to find all of the publications associated with their campus
Journals who want to know where authors are affiliated so they can determine eligibility for institutionally sponsored publishing agreements
The inclusion of ROR IDs in Crossref metadata will eventually help all these entities make all these connections much more easily.
Get ready to ROR đŚ!
ROR is already working with publishers, funders and service providers who are integrating ROR in their systems, mapping their affiliation data to ROR IDs, and/or including ROR IDs in publication metadata. Libraries and institutional repositories are also beginning to build ROR into their systems and to send ROR IDs to Crossref in their metadata. See the growing list of active and in-progress ROR integrations for more stakeholders who are supporting ROR.
If you deposit metadata with Crossref via XML, see our guide on Affiliations and ROR for instructions on how to include author affiliations and ROR IDs.
For further information on how ROR IDs are supported in the Crossref metadata, you can take a look at this .xsd file (under the âinstitutionâ element) or in this journal article example XML. ROR also has some great help documentation for publishers and anyone else working with the ROR Registry.
