Participation Reports on Crossref

Re-introducing Participation Reports to encourage best practices in open metadata

Lena Stoll — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve just released an update to our participation report, which provides a view for our members into how they are each working towards best practices in open metadata. Prompted by some of the signatories and organizers of the Barcelona Declaration, which Crossref supports, and with the help of our friends at CWTS Leiden, we have fast-tracked the work to include an updated set of metadata best practices in participation reports for our members. The reports now give a more complete picture of each member’s activity.

What do we mean by ‘participation’?

Crossref runs open infrastructure to link research objects, entities, and actions, creating a lasting and reusable scholarly record. As a not-for-profit with over 20,000 members in 160 countries, we drive metadata exchange and support nearly 2 billion monthly API queries, facilitating global research communication.

To make this system work, members strive to provide as much metadata as possible through Crossref to ensure it is openly distributed throughout the scholarly ecosystem at scale rather than bilaterally, thereby realizing the collective benefit of membership. Together, our membership provides and uses a rich nexus of information— known as the research nexus—on which the community can build tools to help progress knowledge.

Each member commits to certain terms, such as keeping metadata current, updating links for their DOIs to redirect to, linking references and other objects, and preserving their content in perpetuity. Beyond this, we also encourage members to register as much rich metadata as is relevant and possible.

Creating and providing richer metadata is a key part of participation in Crossref; we’ve long encouraged a more complete scholarly record, such as through Metadata 20/20, and through supporting or leading initiatives for specific metadata, like open citations (I4OC), open abstracts (I4OA), open contributors (ORCID), and open affiliations (ROR).

Which metadata elements are considered best practices?

Alongside basic bibliographic metadata such as title, authors, and publication date(s), we encourage members to register metadata in the following fields:

Example participation report for Crossref member University of Szeged

References

A list of all the references used by a work. This is particularly relevant for journal articles but the references can include any type of object, including datasets, versions, preprints, and more. Additionally, we encourage these to be added into relationships, where relevant.

Abstracts

A description of the work. These are particularly useful for discovery systems that will promote the work, and are often used in downstream analyses such as for detecting integrity issues.

Contributor IDs (ORCID)

All authors should be included in a work’s metadata, ideally alongside their verified ORCID identifier.

Affiliations / Affiliation IDs (ROR)

Members are able to register contributor affiliations as free text, but we are encouraging everyone to add ROR IDs for affiliations as the recommended best practice, as this differentiates and avoids mistyping. These two fields have newly been added to the participation reports interface in the most recent update.

Funder IDs (OFR)

Acknowledging the organisation(s) that funded the work. We encourage the inclusion of Open Funder Registry identifiers to make the funding metadata more usable. This will evolve into an additional use case for ROR over time.

Funding award numbers / Grant IDs (Crossref)

A number or identifier assigned by the funding organisation to identify the specific award of funding or other support such as use of equipment or facilities, prizes, tuition, etc. The Crossref Grant Linking System includes a unique persistent link that can be connected with outputs, activities, people, and organisations.

Crossmark

The Crossmark service gives readers quick and easy access to the current status of a record, including any corrections, retractions, or updates, via a button embedded on PDFs or a web article. Openly adding corrections, retractions, and errata is critical part of publishing, and the button provides readers with an easy in-context alert.

Similarity Check URLs

The Similarity Check service helps editors to identify text-based plagiarism through our collective agreement for the membership to access to Turnitin’s powerful text comparison tool, iThenticate. Specific full-text links are required to participate in this service.

License URLs

URLs pointing to a license that explains the terms and conditions under which readers can access content. These links are crucial to denote intended downstream use.

Text mining URLs

Full-text URLs that help researchers in meta-science easily locate your content for text and data mining.

What is a participation report?

Participation reports are are a visualization of the data representing members’ participation to the scholarly record which is available via our open 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 members’ work 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 organisation’s metadata are, and perhaps compare your performance to others. Participation reports are free and open to everyone - so you can also check the report for any other members you are interested in.

We first introduced participation reports in 2018. At the time, Anna Tolwinska and Kirsty Meddings wrote:

Metadata is at the heart of all our services. With a growing range of members participating in our community—often compiling or depositing metadata on behalf of each other—the need to educate and express obligations and best practice has increased. In addition, we’ve seen more and more researchers and tools making use of our APIs to harvest, analyze and re-purpose the metadata our members register, so we’ve been very aware of the need to be more explicit about what this metadata enables, why, how, and for whom.

All of that still rings true today. But as the research nexus continues to evolve, so should the tools that intend to reflect it. For example, in 2022, we removed the Open references field from participation reports after a board vote to change our policy and update the membership terms meant that all references deposited with Crossref would be open by default. And now we’ve expanded the list of fields again, adding coverage data for contributor affiliation text and ROR identifiers.

Putting it in practice

To find out how you measure up when it comes to participation, type the name of your member organisation into the search box. You may be surprised by what you find—we often speak to members who thought they were registering a certain type of metadata for all their records, only to learn from their participation report that something is getting lost along the way.

You can only address gaps in your metadata if you know that they exist.

More information, as well as a breakdown of the now 11 key metadata elements listed in every participation report and tips on improving your scores, is available in our documentation.

And if you have any questions or feedback, come talk to us on the community forum or request a metadata Health Check by emailing the community team.

Crossref at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2018

Amanda Bartell — Tue, 11 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

How good is your metadata? Find out at the Frankfurt Book Fair…

At the Frankfurt Book Fair this year (Hall 4.2, Stand M82), the Crossref team will be on hand to give you a personal tour of our new Participation Reports tool. Or join us at The Education Stage to hear about how this new tool can help you view, evaluate and improve your metadata participation.

How good is your metadata? Join us Thursday 11th October at 15.30 at the Education Stage in Hall 4.2 to find out

Lots of reasons to visit our stand

We’ll be located in the same place as last year, Hall 4.2, Stand M82, and there are lots of reasons to visit us:

Get your metadata participation evaluated - Anna Tolwinska and Amanda Bartell will walk you through your own Participation Report and provide guidance on how to improve your results. Discover how complete your metadata is, where the gaps are, and how other publishers compare.

Discuss a technical issue that’s hindering your metadata participation (or any other technical issue) with Isaac Farley and Paul Davis from our Technical Support team.

Jennifer Kemp will also be around to answer all your metadata use and reuse questions. She’s looking forward to chatting with all kinds of service providers and toolmakers.

On the strategy side, Ginny Hendricks will be there on Wednesday 10th if you’d like to discuss any policy stuff, new ideas, or find out what Crossref is planning next.

Ask us anything

Not just Participation Reports—you can ask us about anything. Perhaps about our newer record types such as preprints, pending publications (i.e. DOIs on acceptance), or data citations. Or, ask us how you can:

Advance scholarly pursuits for the benefit of society, through Metadata 2020
Check papers for originality, with our service for editorial rigour, through Similarity Check
Discover where and how research is being discovered, through Event Data
Reveal who is citing your published papers and how platforms can display this information, with our Cited-by service
Provide evidence of trust in published outputs, revealing updates, corrections and retractions, through our Crossmark service

Let us know if you’d like to book in a meeting with one of us, or do just stop by the stand to say “Guten Tag”.

We look forward to seeing you there - bis dann!

3,2,1… it’s ‘lift-off’ for Participation Reports

Anna Tolwinska — Wed, 01 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Metadata is at the heart of all our services. With a growing range of members participating in our community—often compiling or depositing metadata on behalf of each other—the need to educate and express obligations and best practice has increased. In addition, we’ve seen more and more researchers and tools making use of our APIs to harvest, analyze and re-purpose the metadata our members register, so we’ve been very aware of the need to be more explicit about what this metadata enables, why, how, and for whom.

This week we take an important step towards this goal with a much-anticipated announcement: Participation reports are in beta release—so come along and take a look!

What does this mean?

Participation Reports gives—for the first time—a clear visualization of the metadata that Crossref has. Search for any member to find out what percentage of their content includes 10 key elements of information, above and beyond the basic bibliographic metadata that all members are obliged to provide. This includes metadata such as ORCID iDs for contributors, funding acknowledgements, reference lists, and abstracts—richer metadata that makes content more discoverable, and much more useful to the scholarly community as a whole, including among members themselves.

You can filter by content such as journal articles, book chapters, datasets, and preprints, and compare current content (past two calendar years and year-to-date) to back file content (older than that). And within the journal articles view, you can drill down to view the metadata completeness for each individual journal. We hear that editorial boards are keen to see that aspect!

We’re delighted that participation reports are now available in beta. That means that while we are confident that the data shown is accurate, there could be the odd glitch as we monitor use.

Thank you to everyone who has helped us to test the reports and provided so much valuable feedback. We plan to expand and improve participation reports to include additional metadata elements, metadata quality checks, and adherence to Crossref best practice such as DOI display. We’re still listening so do get in touch if you have questions or suggestions, or would like a more detailed walk through. There is also a feedback button right in-situ in the tool.

SSP roadtrip for the Crossref team

Amanda Bartell — Wed, 30 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

What do you think of when you think of Chicago? Deep dish pizza? Art Deco architecture?

Well for one week only this year you can add scholarly publishing to the list as the #SSP2018 Conference comes to town. Some Crossref people are excited to be heading out for the conference, and we’re looking forward to meeting as many of our members as possible.

Come along to stand 212A and talk to Anna Tolwinska about Participation Reports. Although this new tool is still in beta, she’s giving SSP attendees a sneak peek and the chance to get an early look at whether they (and over 10 000 other members) are registering the ten key elements that add context and richness to the basic required metadata. You’ll get real insight into what metadata you’re registering, even if this work is done by a third party or other department.

Thinking about registering preprints or including data citations? Want to find out more about our forthcoming Event Data service? Our product director Jennifer Lin will be able to give you the ins and outs of all our latest services so do keep an eye out for her at the conference.

Speaking of third parties, I’ll will be popping along to the “Thinking the Unthinkable, or How to Prepare for a Platform Migration” pre meeting seminar on Wednesday with copies of our new Platform Migration Checklist and lots of hints and tips to help form a new platform migration guide which will help members have a smooth transition when thinking of moving providers.

Shayn Smulyan will be attending the ORCID breakfast meeting on Thursday morning, so come and say hello if you have any questions about how ORCID and Crossref work together. Shayn is one of our support specialists, so he’ll be able to help you with any other technical queries you may have.

Our tech director Chuck Koscher will be keen to hone in on members’ advanced questions about Content Registration, citation matching, and any and all schema deets. So seek him out if you have deep technical questions.

Want to find out more about Metadata 2020, the new campaign to improve metadata for research? Rosa Morais Clark will be able to give you the lowdown, and even better - she has stickers!

And don’t feel left out if you aren’t a member but work closely with Crossref. Jennifer Kemp will be on hand to answer all your metadata use and reuse questions, she’ll be looking forward to chatting with all kinds of service providers, platforms, and tools.

We’re looking forward to seeing you there!

How good is your metadata?

Kirsty Meddings — Thu, 26 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Exciting news! We are getting very close to the beta release of a new tool to publicly show metadata coverage. As members register their content with us they also add additional information which gives context for other members and for services that help e.g. discovery or analytics.

Richer metadata makes content useful. Participation reports will give—for the first time—a clear picture for anyone to see the metadata Crossref has. This is data that’s long been available via our Public REST API, now visualized.

Who are participation reports for? Everyone!

It’s an opportunity to evaluate and educate. See for yourself where the gaps are, and what our members could improve upon. Understand best practice through seeing what others are doing, and learn how to level-up.

Monitor what metadata is being registered, even if this work is done by a third party or another department. And see what other organisations in scholarly communications see when they use Crossref metadata in their research, tools, and services.

The beta release—expected after acceptance testing some time late May—will let anyone look up any of our 15,000+ members and see whether they are registering ten key elements that add context and richness to the basic required bibliographic metadata.

What do we mean by ‘richer metadata’?

The ten checks for Beta, will be:

References
~~Open references~~ [EDIT 6th June 2022 - all references are now open by default].
ORCID iDs
Funder IDs
Funding award numbers
Crossmark metadata
License information
Full text links
Similarity Check URLs
Abstracts

Each of these additional metadata elements helps increase discovery and wider and more varied use—and usefulness—of research outputs.

Why are we doing this and what do we mean by ‘participation’?

Over the years when we’ve talked with our members about their metadata, we learned that many just can’t be certain exactly how they’re performing. It could be that they’ve outsourced Content Registration to another service provider or larger publisher, or it could be they just weren’t previously aware they could collect and share authors’ ORCID iDs, Funder IDs, and so on. So our primary aim is to give our members the information they need in order to make a case for improving their metadata records. Each check will come with information about why it is important and guidance on how to improve. Additionally, with the growing use of Crossref as a central source of metadata for the research community, it’s in everyone’s interest to be as transparent as possible about what metadata we have - and encourage greater understanding of what’s possible.

Member ‘participation’ is an important concept. Crossref distinguishes itself from other DOI registration agencies by providing this richer infrastructure which allows for things like funding information, license information, links between data and preprints, and so on—all contributing to the research nexus for everyone’s benefit.

Membership of Crossref is not just about getting a persistent identifier for your content, it’s about placing your content in context by providing as much metadata as possible and looking after it long-term.

Here’s a sneak preview of what the report will look like:

So whether you’re a member who wants to run a “health check” on your own metadata, or a consumer of metadata interested in what’s available and from whom, watch this space for Participation Reports!

Would you like a heads-up on your report, pre-beta?

Beta will be released some time in May or June this year, following acceptance testing with members and others. Then we’re looking for about 20 members to have a half-hour phone call with a walk-through ‘health check’. Please contact Anna if you’d like to schedule one.