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 Crossref’s 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 they’re working towards each of the principles.
In 2020, Crossref’s 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 “Rethinking staff travel, meetings, and events” outlining our new approach to staff travel, meetings, and events with the goal of not going back to ‘normal’ 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!
Participation Reports are a visualization of the metadata that’s available via our free REST API. There’s a separate Participation Report for each member, and each report shows what percentage of that member’s metadata records include 11 key metadata elements. These key elements add context and richness, and help to open up content to easier discovery and wider and more varied use. As a member, you can use Participation Reports to see for yourself where the gaps in your organization’s metadata are, and perhaps compare your performance to others. Participation Reports are free and open to everyone.
How a Participation Report works
There’s a separate Participation Report for each member. Visit Participation Reports and start typing the name of a member under Find a member. A list of member names will appear for you to select from. Behind the scenes, our REST API will pull together a report and output it in a clear, visual way. Please note - it should usually take a maximum of 24 hours for you to see changes to your Participation Reports if you’ve added new records or updated the metadata in your existing records.
You can use the dropdowns near the top of the page to see reports for different publication time periods and work types. Current content includes any records with a publication date in the current calendar year or up to two years previously. For example, in 2024, current content is anything with a publication date in 2024, 2023, or 2022. Anything published in 2021 or earlier is considered back file.
The work types currently covered by Participation Reports are:
Journal articles
Conference papers
Books
Book chapters
Posted content (including preprints)
Reports
Datasets
Standards
Dissertations
The 11 key metadata elements for which Participation Reports calculate each member’s coverage are:
Percentage of records that include reference lists in their metadata.
Why is this important?
Your references are a big part of the story of your content, highlighting its provenance and where it sits in the scholarly map. References give researchers and other users of Crossref metadata a vital data point through which to find your content, which in turn increases the chances of your content being read and used.
Make sure you include abstracts when you register your content - it’s available for everything other than dissertations and reports. For existing records, you can add abstracts by running a full metadata redeposit (update).
ORCID iDs
Percentage of records containing ORCID iDs. These persistent identifiers enable users to precisely identify a researcher’s work - even when that researcher shares a name with someone else, or if they change their name.
Why is this important?
Researcher names are inherently ambiguous. People share names. People change names. People record names differently in different circumstances.
Governments, funding agencies, and institutions are increasingly seeking to account for their research investments. They need to know precisely what research outputs are being produced by the researchers that they fund or employ. ORCID iDs allow this reporting to be done automatically and accurately.
For some funders, ORCID iDs are critical for their research investment auditing, and they are starting to mandate that researchers use ORCID iDs.
Researchers who do not have ORCID iDs included in their Crossref metadata risk not being counted in these audits and reports.
Make sure you ask your authors for their ORCID iD through your submission system and include them when you register your content. There’s a specific element in the XML for ORCID iDs if you register via XML. If you use the web deposit form or if you’re still using the deprecated Metadata Manager, there’s a specific field to complete.
Make sure you collect affiliation details from authors via your submission system and include them in your future Crossref deposits.
For existing records, you can add affiliation metadata by running a full metadata redeposit (update).
ROR IDs
The percentage of registered records that include at least one ROR ID, e.g. in the contributor metadata.
Why is this important?
Affiliation metadata ensures that contributor institutions can be identified and research outputs can be traced by institution.
A ROR ID is a single, unambiguous, standardized organization identifier that will always stay the same. This means that contributor affiliations can be clearly disambiguated and greatly improves the usability of your metadata.
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 many Crossref helper tools support the deposit of ROR IDs. There’s also an OpenRefine reconciler that can map your internal identifiers to ROR identifiers.
If you find that an organization you are looking for is not yet in ROR, please submit a curation request.
For existing records, you can add affiliation metadata by running a full metadata redeposit (update).
Funder Registry IDs
The percentage of registered records that contain the name and Funder Registry ID of at least one of the organizations that funded the research.
Why is this important?
Funding acknowledgements give vital context for users and consumers of your content. Extracting these acknowledgements from your content and adding them to your metadata allows funding organizations to better track the published results of their grants, and allows publishers to analyze the sources of funding for their authors and ensure compliance with funder mandates. And, by using the unique funder IDs from our central Funder Registry, you can help ensure the information is consistent across publishers.
Make sure you collect funder names from authors via your submission system, or extract them from acknowledgement sections. Match the names with the corresponding Funder IDs from our Funder Registry and make sure you include them in your future Crossref deposits.
If your funder isn’t yet in the Funder Registry, please let us know.
The percentage of registered records that contain at least one funding award number - a number assigned by the funding organization to identify the specific piece of funding (the award or grant).
Why is this important?
Funding organizations are able to better track the published results of their grants
Research institutions are able to track the published outputs of their employees
Publishers are able to analyze the sources of funding for their authors and ensure compliance with funder mandates
Everyone benefits from greater transparency on who funded the research, and what the results of the funding were.
Make sure you collect grant IDs from authors via your submission system, or extract them from acknowledgement sections. Make sure you include them in your future Crossref deposits and add them to your existing records using our supplemental metadata upload method.
Crossmark enabled
Percentage of records using the Crossmark service, which gives readers quick and easy access to the current status of an item of content - whether it’s been updated, corrected, or retracted.
Why is this important?
Crossmark gives quick and easy access to the current status of an item of content. With one click, you can see if the content has been updated, corrected, or retracted and can access extra metadata provided by the publisher. It allows you to reassure readers that you’re keeping content up-to-date, and showcases any additional metadata you want readers to view while reading the content.
The percentage of registered records containing full-text URLs in the metadata to help researchers easily locate your content for text and data mining.
Why is this important?
Researchers are increasingly interested in carrying out text and data mining of scholarly content - the automatic analysis and extraction of information from large numbers of documents. If you can make it easier for researchers to mine your content, you will massively increase your discoverability.
There are technical and logistical barriers to text and data mining for scholarly researchers and publishers alike. It is impractical for researchers to negotiate many different websites to locate the full-text that they need. And it doesn’t make sense for each publisher to have a different set of instructions about how to best find the full-text in the required format. All parties benefit from the support of standard APIs and data representations in order to enable text and data mining across both open access and subscription-based publishers.
Our API can be used by researchers to locate the full text of content across publisher sites. Members register these URLs - often including multiple links for different formats such as PDF or XML - and researchers can request them programmatically.
The member remains responsible for actually delivering the full-text of the content requested. This means that open access publishers can simply deliver the requested content, while subscription publishers use their existing access control systems to manage access to full-text content.
The percentage of registered records that contain URLs that point to a license that explains the terms and conditions under which readers can access content.
Why is this important?
Adding the full-text URL into your metadata is of limited value if the researchers can’t determine what they are permitted to do with the full text. This is where the license URLs come in. Members include a link to their use and reuse conditions: whether their own proprietary license, or an open license such as Creative Commons.
The percentage of registered records that include full-text links for the Similarity Check service.
Why is this important?
The Similarity Check service helps you to prevent scholarly and professional plagiarism by providing editorial teams with access to Turnitin’s powerful text comparison tool.
Similarity Check members contribute their own published content to iThenticate’s database of full-text literature via Similarity Check URLs, and this is an obligation of using the service. If members aren’t registering these, they can’t take part in the Similarity Check service.
For future records, make sure you include these URLs as part of your standard metadata deposit. They need to be deposited within the crawler-based collection property, with item crawler iParadigms.
You can add these URLs into your already-deposited DOIs using a resource-only deposit, or by using the Supplemental-Metadata Upload option available with our web deposit form.
Page owner: Lena Stoll | Last updated 2024-October-15
