Schema on Crossref

Schema 5.5 now available: adding CRediT, new record types for blogs and posters, and more

Patricia Feeney — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Research is rarely limited to a single contributor performing a single role. Behind every research output are people contributing in various ways: software development, data analyses, methodology design, and much more. Often, the same person contributes in several of these ways. Until now, Crossref metadata could only capture part of that picture, but this is changing with Schema 5.5.

Crossref Schema 5.5 includes several improvements across different content types, but its most significant enhancement is the expanded support for contributor roles through the introduction of multiple roles per contributor, option to specify the corresponding author, and compatibility with the CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy): a community-owned taxonomy of 14 contributor roles, which has been adopted and made available in multiple languages.

These enhancements allow members to describe research contributions in much greater detail, creating richer metadata that better reflects how research is actually produced, and supporting greater accountability and more comprehensive research assessment.

If your workflow already distinguishes between different kinds of contributions, Schema 5.5 gives you a way to record that detail more accurately using the CRediT taxonomy values. CRediT can be adopted gradually, where it fits your editorial or production workflow.

Figure 1: Until now, contributors could be assigned a single contributor role using Crossref’s existing contributor role vocabulary. In Schema 5.5, members can indicate that the same contributor was responsible for different roles, such as corresponding author; writing: reviewing and editing; and data curation.

Existing deposits remain fully supported, and members can continue using the current contributor role attribute while planning implementation of the new repeatable role type element. For our members, who have been using CRediT in their workflows already, as ever – we encourage updating your metadata when practicable.

Why this update is kind of a big deal

This update gives more accurate credit to all of the people behind research outputs. Crossref vocabulary includes roles that aren’t recognised in CRediT, and vice versa. Capturing richer contributor metadata recognises contributions that may not be visible in a single author line and improves transparency around how research is produced, thereby enabling downstream systems to interpret that information more reliably. The update also offers better interoperability with CRediT, which is well recognised across the scholarly ecosystem.

Figure 2: Schema 5.5 is an expansion of Crossref contributor metadata. Members can describe contributors using Crossref’s existing contributor role vocabulary, as well as the internationally recognised CRediT taxonomy.

In turn, this strengthens metadata reuse across repositories, discovery services, funders, institutions and other infrastructure providers; and supports evaluation, reporting and discovery workflows. Better contributor metadata strengthens the connections that make up the Research Nexus.

What else is included in Schema 5.5?

Beyond the expanded contributor support, Schema 5.5 includes several additional enhancements across the metadata schema.

1. Updates to report series metadata

Support has been added for metadata elements that were previously missing from report series records, including Crossmark, funding, and licence information.

2. Posted content improvements: now including blogs and posters

Posted content includes preprints, eprints, and other types of content that have been posted to a stewarded host platform. We’re all about persistence, so it’s vital that everything registered with us be maintained. Note that accepted manuscripts are not considered posted content. Schema 5.5 refreshes posted content sub-types by introducing blog and poster.

At the same time, we are “retiring” working paper, dissertation, and report from posted-content sub-types. Over time, these have been developed into separate record types that benefit from richer, dedicated schemas.

Finally, archive locations can now also be included for posted content records.

3. Expanded archive support

A new archive location, CINES, has been added to the list of supported archive providers.

4. Clinical trial metadata across more record types

Clinical trial information is no longer limited to journal articles and conference papers. Schema 5.5 extends support across additional content types, including books, datasets, dissertations, reports, posted content, standards, and pending publications.

Schema adoption

Taken together, the updates in our latest schema support more holistic recognition of contributions to the research and its communication, as well as greater accountability and integrity in related processes.

To support gradual adoption, Schema 5.5 maintains backwards compatibility with existing deposits. Members can continue using the current contributor_role attribute while preparing to implement the new repeatable role element. We have prepared a migration guide to help members transition to Schema 5.5.

As you prepare to adopt Schema 5.5, we encourage members to include contributor roles whenever they are available from editorial workflows and to use recognised vocabularies consistently, including CRediT roles where appropriate.

Building better connections: the story of Crossref's metadata development

Patricia Feeney — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Three years ago, we asked our members what they needed from Crossref’s metadata. We received confirmation that we were going in the right direction, as well as some new ideas to explore. This helped set the course for our metadata development work since then, and continues to guide where we’re headed next.

Every metadata update we make is driven by the same set of priorities: supporting metadata that reflects our organizational truths, focusing on what metadata our members can actually provide, and aligning with best practices, vocabularies, and standards that our wider scholarly community has established. More recently our Metadata Advisory Group has helped us explore both the minutia of working with metadata as well as larger ideas around the value and impact of the metadata we support.

What We’ve Accomplished

Our schema 5.4 update included several new or expanded types of metadata. First, citation metadata can now be labelled with a publication type. This means when a work cites an article, a preprint, a dataset, or software, that distinction is clear, helping make citations without an accompanying DOI metadata record easier to identify. Second, version information is now supported across all record types, giving the scholarly record a more precise handle on exactly which version of a work is being described.

We’ve also made two meaningful improvements to how funding relationships are captured. ROR IDs are now supported as funder identifiers in both our standard metadata schema and our grants-specific schema. Also, Grant DOIs can now be explicitly identified within funding metadata, making it possible to draw clearer lines between research outputs and the grants that supported them.

What’s happening now

A significant update is nearly here. Schema 5.5 will expand contributor metadata to support multiple roles per contributor, and will introduce support for CRediT — the ANSI/NISO taxonomy for contributor roles. This means that an individual’s complete contribution to a research output can finally be described in our metadata, rather than flattened into a single role or omitted entirely. The schema isn’t released yet, but the final version of the XML schema is available in our GitLab repository for those who want to get a head start.

We’ll next begin implementation work for a new Grants schema (0.3.0). This update will remodel investigator names to include a new role (beneficiary) as well as an organizational grant recipient, making it possible to include recipient info for grants given to organizations. Grant records include project metadata, so this update will also include support for RAiD, a persistent identifier for projects. The XML schema for this update is also available in a GitLab repository.

What’s up next

Our next planned major update will build substantially on the contributor work in version 5.5. In the next version (6.0) we will remodel names to expand our current limited structure to support a variety of name types as well as alternate names. We’ll also expand the contributor identifiers we collect to include ISNI and Wikidata identifiers, better supporting contributors for whom an ORCID is not possible. Our organizational contributor will be remodelled as well to include organization-level identifiers like ROR.

We’ll also introduce statements to Crossref metadata. Statements will allow members to include free-text statements including funding acknowledgements, ethics declarations, AI usage disclosures, and other important contextual information that doesn’t fit neatly into structured fields.

Other updates include expanding our support for abstracts encoding beyond JATS to include ONIX, BITS, and a generic markup option, and implementing better in-schema validation to avoid surprises at the time of deposit.

Progress means letting go of the past. We’re planning to deprecate all schemas prior to version 5.3.1 by the end of 2027, to be carried out in phases as outlined in our deprecation blog post. This is a necessary step to keep our infrastructure sustainable and to ensure members are working with schemas that reflect current capabilities and standards.

Looking further ahead

Beyond 6.0, we’re exploring further support for provenance in metadata (to establish who is doing what to a metadata record), a rethinking of how we handle dates so that they better capture the lifecycle of a research object, better support for research objects we don’t yet fully support, and making our metadata inputs more consistent. The Metadata Development roadmap has full details on what’s being explored and prioritized.

Each of these updates contributes to Crossref’s research nexus vision: strengthening connections between funders and research, more accurately capturing and recognizing contributor roles in the scholarly record, and collecting free-text content to fill in the gaps that structured metadata alone can’t address. Better metadata means better research integrity and more trustworthy infrastructure for everyone who depends on it.

Two billion citation links in Crossref help research travel further

Kornelia Korzec — Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve recently reached an important milestone for the research nexus: the works in our metadata corpus are now connected with over 2 billion citation links! This is a great opportunity to share a dedicated dataset and discuss why these are important for science.

The reference metadata is a lifeline of discoverability. Scholars use citations to critique and build on existing research. They acknowledge the contributions of others through references. Our members can then deposit those references as part of metadata with Crossref, and we use those to link the cited and citing objects. This results in complex thematic networks that can be explored by interested researchers. Many tools for research discovery use the linked reference metadata in Crossref to support searches of related content.

The citation links are derived from bibliographic references in the metadata of one work that include DOIs of materials it cites (scholarly works, data, code, etc.). It’s always best if the members can deposit these relationships in full. In a recent post, we shared that nearly half of these links are asserted by our members through metadata deposits, and the other half are created thanks to our automated matching. This form of metadata enrichment happens when members include some information about the references but without the DOI of the cited work, and it’s enough to automatically find and add that DOI. The enrichment supports making data more useful for the community.

The most important impact of citation links is the increased discoverability of connected works. Reference metadata is an important tool for improving visibility and readership of our members’ content. These links are also the foundation of our Cited-by service, which enables implementing members to display citation counts of the work they published on their landing pages.

The chart below shows the cumulative count of citations over time, by the created date of the citing DOI’s record. These include records linked by DOI either through member-submitted metadata or matched by Crossref, as well as records that are unmatched. Unmatched records can include records that we were unable to match with the information we have, but also records that truly have no DOI to link to. You can explore the full citation dataset of all 2 billion citation links between Crossref DOIs available now as a (somewhat hefty) download.

Cumulative count of references deposited to Crossref by created date of citing DOI

The push for open citation data is something that has unfolded over the last few decades, making more and more of these relationships public. Notably, the growth in citation links reflects not just the output of new scholarship, but also a sustained effort to extend coverage of the historical scholarly record. We can see evidence of this playing out over time by looking at our historical data—periodic snapshots of Crossref’s metadata going back to 2019. When comparing successive snapshots and examining the publication dates of citing and cited works, we can classify each newly appearing citation as either a new paper citation, or a retrospective one. A new citation is where the citing work was published since the previous snapshot, representing real growth in the scholarly record. A retrospective citation is where both papers already existed but the link between them had not yet been captured by Crossref, and these represent indexing catchup rather than new publishing activity.

The chart below shows the cumulative count of citations added in each category since 2019. In the early years of our data, retrospective backfill was the dominant source: the blue line climbs steeply from 2019 to 2021 as a large volume of previously uncaptured historical citation relationships entered the corpus. Over time, however, that rate of backfilling has levelled off. New paper citations, meanwhile, have grown steadily throughout the period, and by 2025 they surpassed the cumulative retrospective total. The open citation ecosystem continues recovering historical links, but the citation network’s growth is now increasingly driven by the natural momentum of scholarly publishing itself.

Cumulative citations added to Crossref by type, 2019–2026. Retrospective citations (blue) represent links to and from works that existed before the previous snapshot; new paper citations (green) come from works published since the last snapshot.

Combined with other metadata for more context, reference metadata supports bibliographic and meta-research on different aspects of the scholarly process, and can support judgements about research integrity and conflicts of interest.

Stereotypically, when talking about references, we consider links to published works (whether preprints, journal articles, or books). However all types of records in Crossref can be cited. Thanks to the changes in our latest schema, members can now signal the types of content that is being referenced. And with our new Data citations endpoint, the community can explore specifically links from Crossref-registered records to research data, including citation links to works within Crossref, as well as DataCite’s corpus.

Close to half of all records registered with Crossref still have none or not enough reference information to make such connections. We invite members to regular Metadata health-check webinars to support them in improving completeness of their records for increased transparency and visibility.

The best way of acknowledging research funding in the metadata: Crossref Grant ID

Patricia Feeney — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We are very pleased to kick off the New Year with another important schema update and the news that a Grant DOI field is now supported for all record types. This means that Crossref members can explicitly include the Crossref Grant IDs as part of their DOI metadata records for publications and any other output type, accurately linking research outputs to the funding that made it possible, all through metadata. We hope that our members will leverage this to respond to recent calls for stronger funding transparency and best practices for reporting funding sources in research outputs.

Funding information is very important for the research community. As explored by some key European funder representatives, providing mechanisms to clearly link funding with its outputs is essential for the community to have a full picture of the research endeavour.

When funders systematically register grants with persistent identifiers and make this information openly available, they create a foundation that publishers and infrastructure providers such as repositories can reliably build upon when depositing output metadata.”

– Hans de Jonge, Katharina Rieck and Zoé Ancion

Up until now, if a Crossref member wanted to include a Crossref Grant ID to unambiguously identify the output funding source, they would need to use other available fields, such as for an award number. While it was an important step towards increasing transparency and is heavily used for reporting and impact assessment, being an unstructured field, it was prone to errors, and of course, funders’ internal award identifiers are not unique, persistent, or necessarily open. This limited our ability to create unambiguous relationships with the Crossref Grant DOIs registered by our now ~50 funder members. As the new field becomes increasingly populated by our members, this rich metadata will pave the way for capturing and representing the funding relationships in a more accurate and complete way and fulfilling one of our commitments at the recent funding metadata workshop with the Barcelona Declaration.

The Crossref Grant ID field in the schema is a clear signal of the growing demand for these persistent Grant IDs (Crossref DOIs), and the relationships these help us create. Those connections can in turn enable streamlined reporting for the grantees, as well as compliance tracking and programme evaluation for funders.

As part of our work to enable the research nexus, Crossref has been proactively identifying funding information and prototyping metadata enrichment processes through matching projects, ensuring that as many relationships as possible are established and made discoverable. With this schema update, we aim to lower barriers and encourage more members to register output-funding relationships at source. This will facilitate the links that make the research nexus a connected, interoperable, and an important source of information that ensures a transparent and trustworthy research process.

We encourage all Crossref members to start incorporating Grant DOIs when available into your metadata submissions. By taking advantage of this new field, you’ll help build a more complete and transparent record of research funding, making it easier for the community to understand and trace the impact of funded research.

When collecting funding information for your publication, please consider asking the authors for the Grant DOI (Crossref Grant ID) as well as the funder’s details (such as their name and identifier). Here’s how the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Scientific and Technical Information’s (OSTI-DOE) grant https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.46936/aps-182101/60010611 can be included in the metadata for related works, from datasets, to preprints, conference proceedings, journal articles, and more:

<assertion name="fundgroup">
 <assertion name="ror">https://ror.org/04qxsr837</assertion>
 <assertion name="grant_doi">10.46936/aps-182101/60010611</assertion>
 </assertion>

Similarly, a grant https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.3030/732489 from European Union H2020-EU.2.1.1. - INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP, would be represented in related work’s metadata as follows:

<assertion name="fundgroup">
 <assertion name="funder_name”>H2020 LEIT Information and Communication Technologies
 <assertion name="funder_identifier”>10.13039/100010669</assertion>
 </assertion>
 <assertion name="grant_doi">10.3030/732489</assertion>
</assertion>

For more technical documentation and implementation guidance, please visit our funding data documentation. If you have questions or need support integrating Grant IDs into your workflow, our support team is here to help!

It's Time: Planning for Metadata Schema Deprecation

Patricia Feeney — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It has been 18 (!) years since Crossref last deprecated a metadata schema. In that time, we’ve released numerous schema versions, some major updates, and some interim releases that never saw wide adoption. Now, with 27 different schemas to support, we believe it’s time to streamline and move forward.

Starting next year, we plan to begin the process of deprecating lightly-used schemas, with the understanding that this will be a multi-year effort involving careful planning and plenty of communication.

Which schema will be deprecated?

There are two types of schema used to register content metadata records: a full metadata input schema, which follows the pattern crossrefX.X.X.xsd, and resource schema, which follows the pattern doi_resourcesX.X.X.xsd. The resource schema are used to append metadata, such as references or funding data, to an existing metadata record.

I’ve categorized our schemas by usage levels to help prioritize the deprecation process:

Light usage (planned for initial deprecation):

crossref4.3.1.xsd
crossref4.3.2.xsd
crossref4.8.1.xsd
doi_resources4.3.2.xsd
doi_resources4.3.4.xsd
doi_resources4.3.5.xsd
doi_resources4.4.2.xsd

Moderate usage:

crossref4.3.3.xsd
crossref4.3.4.xsd
crossref4.3.5.xsd

High usage:

crossref4.3.0.xsd
crossref4.3.6.xsd
crossref4.3.7.xsd
crossref4.4.0.xsd
crossref4.4.1.xsd
crossref4.4.2.xsd
doi_resources4.3.0.xsd
doi_resources4.3.6.xsd

We currently support 5 versions of our grants-specific schema and will be working with our funder members to move to new versions of that schema over time - this will follow a different timeline and process as there are fewer schemas to navigate.

If you don’t know which version you’re currently using, now would be a good time to check. Many of our members are still using 4.3.0, the earliest supported version.

Why deprecate now?

Supporting 27 schema is unsustainable: Each schema version we maintain adds complexity to our systems and makes it harder to implement improvements that benefit everyone.
Existing schema need modernization. Some fundamental elements, like names and titles, need to be modeled differently to fully capture variations in language and usage patterns across different cultures and contexts. We also have too many bespoke record types. Consolidating these will create a simpler, more coherent structure. We may retain certain specialized structures for journal articles and books, but overall, simplification will benefit everyone.

Most importantly:

Our current requirements are too minimal. For most record types, we only require a title and publication year. While this low barrier has made registration accessible, it hasn’t served metadata quality well. We know you can do better, and we’d like to ask for more to improve the richness and utility of Crossref metadata.

What happens next?

This won’t be an abrupt change. We would like to deprecate the schema flagged ‘light usage’ by the end of 2026 and will be reaching out to impacted members early next year. For other schema, we’re planning a multi-year effort with clear communication at every stage. We’ll provide ample notice before any schema is deprecated, along with migration guidance and support.

With the exception of recent changes to affiliation metadata, we’ve primarily been building on existing schema structures. This means upgrading should be straightforward for most users. As mentioned, we’ll judiciously making some breaking changes to names, titles, and requirements, and would like to consolidate schema as we move forward.

Our goal is to create a more robust, modern metadata framework that better serves the scholarly community while reducing the maintenance burden that comes with supporting decades of schema versions. Stay tuned for more details on timelines and migration paths. In the meantime, if you’re unsure which schema version you’re using, we encourage you to check your current implementation.

Metadata Advisory Group call for applications

Patricia Feeney — Fri, 02 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve been accelerating our metadata development efforts and recently released version 5.4 of our metadata schema, and are planning to release version 5.5 (including support for multiple contributor roles and the CRediT taxonomy) this summer. We will also extend our grants schema based on the Funders Advisory Group work, and make progress on other changes as set out on our new metadata development roadmap.

As we work towards the vision of the rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organisations, people, things, and actions, dubbed the Research Nexus, our schemas need to change to accommodate the evolving landscape of research processes and communications.

In the past we convened the Metadata Interest Group that helped shape the current set of updates we’re now working through, including changes to names, expansion of support for abstracts, dates, and multilingual metadata. As we’ll soon move into new territory (support for subjects, keywords, and other metadata essential to developing a robust research nexus), we want to further enlist the support of our community to help shape the metadata we collect and the metadata best practices we promote.

We are inviting Crossref members, metadata users, and others with an interest in shaping metadata development at Crossref to apply to join our new Metadata Advisory Group.

The purpose of the group is to contribute your advice and insight to help shape our metadata development as we broaden the metadata we collect and outputs we support to better align with the Research Nexus. Group participants will help shape metadata development at Crossref, and will discuss potential new metadata to adopt, best practices, and the overall needs of metadata providers and users.

We’re looking for participants with experience with XML, JSON, and other metadata formats. We’ll cover a range of topics but we would particularly like to engage with those of you with an interest in emerging content types.

The Metadata Advisory Group will meet quarterly and we’ll accommodate multiple time zones as needed as we want participation to reflect the regional diversity of our membership.

If you’re interested, please submit an application!

Version 5.4.0 metadata schema update now available

Patricia Feeney — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This year, metadata development is one of our key priorities and we’re making a start with the release of version 5.4.0 of our input schema with some long-awaited changes. This is the first in what will be a series of metadata schema updates.

What is in this update?

Publication typing for citations

This is fairly simple; we’ve added a ‘type’ attribute to the citations members supply. This means you can identify a journal article citation as a journal article, but more importantly, you can identify a dataset, software, blog post, or other citation that may not have an identifier assigned to it. This makes it easier for the many thousands of metadata users to connect these citations to identifiers. We know many publishers, particularly journal publishers, do collect this information already and will consider making this change to deposit citation types with their records.

Support for version numbering

Members can now supply a version number across all relevant record types, including journal articles, book chapters, conference papers, posted content/preprints, datasets, reports, standards, and dissertations. The versioning update also includes an optional description field.

Members who version content are encouraged to register a new DOI with each version and supply the isVersionOf’ relationship to connect versions to each other, facilitating the Research Nexus and allowing members to avoid additional content registration fees, which don’t apply for versions.

Preprint status

This is specific to the ‘posted content’ record type and comes as a result of the recommendations of the Preprints Advisory Group. The new status field allows repositories to flag a preprint as ‘withdrawn’ or ‘removed,’ a situation specific to posted content.

There are some other minor updates as well, including:

An expansion of the language codes supported by a language attribute.
Additions to the archive locations we collect. Our membership terms ask members to archive their content where possible, ensuring their DOIs are able to resolve to the content persistently, and we ask that the archive(s) they use are identified in the metadata records registered with us.
We’ve increased the number of ISBNs supported per item from 6 to 100.

If you would like to begin using this schema, a brief transition guide is here. A full set of schema files are in our GitLab repository, and more information is available in our website documentation for schema 5.4.0.

What’s next?

We’ve already begun working on our next update, which will be an expansion of contributor roles. We’ll allow multiple contributor roles instead of the single role we currently support, we’ll add ‘corresponding author’ and ‘other’ to the Crossref role vocabulary. We will be also adding full support for CRediT.

We’re also hoping to fit in a remodeling of our group contributor (currently labeled ‘organisation’ in our input schema) in the next update, and I would appreciate feedback on this planned update.

More changes are planned, including an update to our grants schema, and expanded support for abstracts. We’ll be circulating details about those updates soon.

Join us for the Mid-year Community Call on 7th May to hear more!

Some rip-RORing news for affiliation metadata

Ginny Hendricks — Mon, 26 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve just added to our input schema the ability to include affiliation information using ROR identifiers. Members who register content using XML can now include ROR IDs, and we’ll add the capability to our manual content registration form, participation reports, and metadata retrieval APIs in the near future. And we are inviting members to a Crossref/ROR webinar on 29th September at 3pm UTC.

The background

We’ve been working on the Research Organization Registry (ROR) as a community initiative for the last few years. Along with the California Digital Library and DataCite, our staff has been involved in setting the strategy, planning governance and sustainability, developing technical infrastructure, hiring/loaning staff, and engaging with people in person and online. In our view, it’s the best current model of a collaborative initiative between like-minded open scholarly infrastructure (OSI) organisations.

Last year, Project Manager Maria Gould described the case for publishers adopting ROR and ROR was ranked the number one priority at our last in-person annual meeting. Now it’s time that Crossref’s services themselves took up the baton to meet the growing demand.

The inclusion of ROR in the Crossref metadata will help everyone in the scholarly ecosystem make critical connections more easily. For example, research institutions need to monitor and measure their output by the articles and other resources their researchers have produced. Journals need to know with which institutions authors are affiliated to determine eligibility for institutionally sponsored publishing agreements. Funders need to be able to discover and track the research and researchers they have supported. Academic librarians need to easily find all of the publications associated with their campus.

Earlier this month, GRID and ROR announced that after working together to seed the community-run Research Organization Registry, GRID would be retiring from public service and handing the proverbial torch over to ROR as the scholarly community’s reliable universal open identifier for affiliations. That means that our members who have been using GRID now need to consider their move to ROR and think about how they can add ROR IDs into the metadata that they manage and share through Crossref.

The plan

We’ve been able to include ROR IDs for our grant metadata schema as affiliation information for two years, since July 2019. And the Australia Research Data Commons (ARDC) was the first member to add ROR IDs to the Crossref system in 2020. In early July, we completed the work to accept ROR IDs for affiliation assertions for all other types of records with an affiliation or institution element, such as journal articles, book chapters, preprints, datasets, dissertations, and many more.

Next, we will commence the plans to support ROR in our other tools and services, such as Participation Reports. We’ll work on alignment with the Open Funder Registry and share our plans to collect the information via the new user interface we’re developing for registering and managing metadata. Open Journal Systems (OJS) already has a ROR Plugin, developed by the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB). This supports the collection of ROR IDs and future releases of this plugin and the OJS DOI plugin will allow including ROR IDs in the metadata sent to Crossref, to support thousands of our members to share ROR IDs via their Crossref metadata. We also aim to add ROR to our metadata retrieval options, including the REST API, which recently saw the start of an unblocking with our move to a more robust technical foundation.

The call for participation

Many Crossref publishers, funders, and service providers are already planning to integrate ROR with their systems, map their affiliation data to ROR, and include ROR in Crossref metadata. In addition to publishers and funders, libraries, repositories, and other stakeholders are developing support for ROR. For example, the Plan S Journal Checker tool uses ROR IDs to let people check whether a particular journal is compliant with an author’s funder and institutional open access policies. In addition, the ROR website shows a growing list of active and in-progress ROR integrations.

Crossref members registering research grants via Altum’s ProposalCentral system can already add ROR IDs. Now those registering articles, books, preprints, datasets, dissertations, and other research objects, can start including much clearer and all-important affiliation metadata as part of their content registration going forward. As with all newly-introduced metadata elements, we recommend adding ROR IDs from now and ongoing, but planning a distinct project to backfill older records. We know that more than 80% of records have been updated and enriched at least once with additional and cleaner metadata, so as members do this routinely, they can include ROR IDs alongside updating URLs, license or funding information, and other metadata.

For information on how ROR will be supported in the Crossref metadata, take a look at our latest schema release (version 5.3.0) or in this journal article example XML.

Join the discussion in our forum below and register for the Crossref/ROR webinar on September 29th at 3pm UTC to learn all you need to know about incorporating ROR into your Crossref metadata.

You’ve had your say, now what? Next steps for schema changes

Patricia Feeney — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It seems like ages ago, particularly given recent events, but we had our first public request for feedback on proposed schema updates in December and January. The feedback we received indicated two big things: we’re on the right track, and you want us to go further. This update has some significant but important changes to contributors, but is otherwise a fairly moderate update. The feedback was mostly supportive, with a fair number of helpful suggestions about details.

Feedback and changes

Many of you are excited about CRediT, and a number of members have indicated that they are ready and waiting to send us CRediT roles. To support this, as in my initial proposal, we’re adding a new role element and role_type attribute that supports existing Crossref-defined roles and CRediT roles, as well as a required vocab attribute to specify which vocabulary is being supplied.

<role role_type="author" vocab="crossref">author</role> <role role_type="writing-original_draft" vocab="credit"/>

CRediT as it exists now is an informal standard coordinated by CASRAI, but a formal standard is in the works via NISO. CRediT is currently a list of well considered and defined roles that are not particularly machine-readable. I’ve created a list for implementation that eliminates spaces and ampersands. CRediT also lacks reliable PIDs or persistent URLs for the role definitions, so that has been omitted from our implementation. We’ll adopt any changes resulting from the NISO standard, but have decided to go forward with it as-is, as many of our members are eager to implement.

Beyond CRediT, we’ll also be expanding and refining our contributor support in a number of ways:

We’ll be expanding our affiliation metadata beyond a simple string to include organisation identifiers like ROR, and allow markup of organisation names and locations.
We’re expanding the contributor identifiers as well - in addition to ORCID iDs, members can send us Wikidata, ISNI, and other identifiers.
We’re adding support for multiple names to support contributors whose names can be expressed in multiple alphabets, or who have aliases or nicknames.
We’re changing surname to family_name and will be relaxing the requirement that all person names have a “surname” - a given name may be supplied on its own to support contributors who do not have family names.
The current element for corporate/group authors, organisation, will be replaced by collab as the term “organisation” was widely confusing (we have a lot of affiliation info registered as group authors!), and the collab section will also allow organisation identifiers.

Many of these updates align with how JATS supports contributors - I hope these changes will allow our members to supply robust contributor metadata without the burden of complicated conversions.

I’m also including the proposed changes to support data citation and typing of citations. Additionally, we’ll be adding support for members who want to:

supply Grant IDs in their metadata records
register identifiers for conferences.

A draft 5.0 xsd file is available in a branch of our GitLab schema repository with the details of the planned updates, and more robust documentation and examples are forthcoming.

Implementation plans

My house was built in 1890 and there are always surprises whenever we need to fix or renovate anything. Our system is just as old in technology years - it’s been chugging along since the aughts. This means while we don’t think it’s powered by knob-and-tube wiring, we can’t be sure until we open up the walls. We want to implement our plans (in fact we want to do more!) but if we run into any big blockers or crucial issues, we may roll out the changes over several iterations. These updates are fairly conservative and I remain optimistic we’ll be able to implement them as-is. Our update will help us build a foundation for future updates, allowing us to continuously evolve our schema as we move forward.

Some of you are understandably worried about our implementation schedule and backwards incompatibility. We’re aware that changes are expensive and inconvenient, and making them on our schedule doesn’t always work for your schedule. That’s why we’ve sustained 12+ versions of our schema over the past 12 years. We won’t be mandating a change any time soon, and definitely won’t do so without sufficient warning and community involvement. In the future we’ll need to make a sustained effort to retire older schema, but now isn’t the time for that.

We intend to commence work in Q2 but won’t have a firm timeline for a few more weeks. I will be providing regular updates as we progress, and will be asking for volunteers to test the updates when we’re ready. I’ll also be sharing more documentation and information about how the changes will be represented in our metadata outputs.

Have more to say?

Our feedback period has finished and we do plan to implement the changes as described, but if you have opinions, please share them.

Proposed schema changes - have your say

Patricia Feeney — Wed, 04 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The first version of our metadata input schema (a DTD, to be specific) was created in 1999 to capture basic bibliographic information and facilitate matching DOIs to citations. Over the past 20 years the bibliographic metadata we collect has deepened, and we’ve expanded our schema to include funding information, license, updates, relations, and other metadata. Our schema isn’t as venerable as a MARC record or as comprehensive as JATS, but it’s served us well. It’s not currently positioned to fully support everything we want to do long term - we’d like to support assertions, map cleanly to JATS and schema.org magically at the same time, and maybe even move beyond XML - but for now it’s something we can work with to empower member metadata to help find, cite, and connect scholarly content.

We’ve maintained backwards compatibility for most things since 2007 but this update will require some moderate changes to how contributors are modeled. The balance between supporting established tagging and addressing the evolution of what we collect and how it is expressed can be tricky. We want to collect good metadata without significantly disrupting the workflow of our membership, who are the source of the metadata. Even so, this is a fairly pragmatic update that will position us well for the future. I look forward to supporting new types of content and metadata in the future, but for now take a look at what I’m proposing.

Leave feedback, ask questions, and make suggestions in the feedback document or via email to feedback@crossref.org.

Next update

I’m proposing some updates and additions to the metadata we collect, and would like your feedback. To fully and elegantly support affiliation identifiers and multiple author roles, we need to break backwards compatibility. Specifically, we want to:

Add support for CRediT

The CASRAI CRediT taxonomy is increasingly used to represent roles common to contributors to research outputs. Our members are applying CRediT to contributors, so we want to capture them as well. Supporting CRediT allows Crossref and our membership to identify and credit contributors beyond authors and editors.

As most of you know, a contributor often does more than one thing - they write, they edit, they curate. We currently only allow one contributor role as an attribute, but, to realistically support CRediT and accurately capture evidence about the work, we need to allow multiple contributor roles. This will break backwards compatibility. We can potentially support the old way and the new way, but I’m trying to avoid awkward compromises wherever possible.

Supporting CRediT doesn’t mean you need to adopt CRediT. We’ll continue to support existing author roles, but they’ll be marked up differently. Details are in our request for feedback document.

Expand support for author and organisation identifiers

We collect ORCID iDs in our metadata but do not currently support other types of contributor identifiers. We also don’t support affiliation or organisation identifiers beyond those assigned within our funder and clinical trial registries. We’ve had increasing demands from both metadata suppliers and users to expand support for affiliation identifiers because…identifiers are useful. We also want to expand author identifier support as ORCID IDs may only be registered by researchers who are able to curate their own ORCID record. Adding support for ISNI and Wikidata IDs is a common request, but we anticipate there’s a need for other identifiers as well.

Our plan is to accept identifiers registered with identifiers.org as well as other identifiers upon request. We prefer to remain consistent with the identifiers.org registry as much as possible.

We’re particularly keen to support open community-led identifiers like ORCID and ROR and will continue to do so, but also want to support the metadata our members want to distribute. organisation identifiers will be particularly useful as they’ll help us populate records with ROR IDs in the future, leading to better quality affiliation metadata.

Expand support for a range of contributor names

We currently require a surname for all contributors, and don’t provide comprehensive support for contributors whose names are represented by multiple alphabets, or who have nicknames or aliases, or who don’t have a surname. To begin with, we’ll replace surname with the more widely used ‘family name’ and remove the fixed surname requirement, allowing only a given name to be provided where appropriate. We’ll also allow a variety of names to be provided for each contributor.

Expand affiliation support

We currently collect affiliation as a single string - we’re going to break that up to support affiliation names, and add in support for organisational identifiers like ROR.

Expand support for data citation

For those of you who send us references, we’re adding a few fields to better support data citation. We’re also going to allow you to (optionally) supply a specific publication type for references.

Other updates

We’re making some other small updates as well. If you have a small request, we may be able to accommodate it in our next update. Larger changes or additions will probably have to wait for future updates, but we’d love to start collecting suggestions now.

We need your feedback!

I’ll be giving a webinar on December 19 at 02:00 and 15:00 UTC to go over these changes in detail - please visit our webinars page to register.

Again, please leave feedback, ask questions, and make suggestions in the feedback document, or if you prefer send feedback via email to feedback@crossref.org. We’ll be taking feedback through January 15, 2020.

Request for feedback: Conference ID implementation

Patricia Feeney — Fri, 13 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve all been subject to floods of conference invitations, it can be difficult to sort the relevant from the not-relevant or (even worse) sketchy conferences competing for our attention. In 2017, DataCite and Crossref started a working group to investigate creating identifiers for conferences and projects. Identifiers describe and disambiguate, and applying identifiers to conference events will help build clear durable connections between scholarly events and scholarly literature.

Chaired by Aliaksandr Birukou, the Executive Editor for Computer Science at Springer Nature, the group has met regularly over the past two years, collaborating to create use cases and define metadata to identify and describe conference series and events. We first asked for input on metadata specifications in April 2018. Technical implementation kicked off in February with a workshop at CERN to discuss the mechanics of making PIDs for conferences a reality.

We’ve reached another milestone and want your feedback

Crossref has supported a number of conference publication-related PIDs for years - members can currently register PIDs for conference series publications, conference proceedings, and of course individual conference papers - and that won’t change, but we will also be supporting DOI registration for conferences. A crucial step towards this is of course integrating the new identifier into our metadata input schema.

The details

We currently collect some limited metadata describing the conference itself such as theme, location, and dates as part of the conference series or proceeding metadata, but do not apply a DOI to that information. The new Conference ID records will include expanded metadata as defined by the working group. You’ll be able to register a distinct metadata record for a single conference. You’ll also be able to register a record for a conference series, and connect Conference IDs to conference proceeding metadata records and DOIs.

Changes to the conference-specific metadata are backwards compatible. Members will be able to register event metadata per usual, or can instead use the new event metadata to register an identifier for their conference event and/or series. This means a member can:

Register conference, conference series, proceedings series, proceedings, and papers in one submission
Register proceedings or proceedings series and papers without a Conference ID included
Register Conference IDs only
Update an existing conference record with a Conference PID

I’ve written up our proposal in this google doc and we want your feedback before we proceed with implementation. Please comment directly in the Google doc, open a Gitlab issue, or feedback@crossref.org. We’ll keep the document open for comments until September 30.

Building better metadata with schema releases

Patricia Feeney — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This month we have officially released a new version of our input metadata schema. As well as walking through the latest additions, I’ll also describe here how we’re starting to develop a new streamlined and open approach to schema development, using GitLab and some of the ideas under discussion going forward.

What’s included in version 4.4.2

The latest schema as of August 2019 is version 4.4.2 and this release now includes:

Support for “pending publication”
Support for JATS 1.2 abstracts
Abstract support to dissertations, reports, and allow multiple abstracts wherever available
Support for multiple dissertation authors
A new acceptance_date element added to journal article, book, book chapter, and conference paper record types

“Pending publication” is the term we’ve coined for the phase where a manuscript has been accepted for publication but where the publisher needs to communicate a DOI much earlier than most article metadata is available. Some members asked for the ability to register and assign DOIs prior to online publication, even without a title, so this allows members to register a DOI with minimal metadata, temporarily, before online publication. There is of course no obligation to use this feature.

It’s worth calling out the addition of acceptance_date too. This is a key attribute that is heavily requested by downstream metadata users like universities. Acceptance dates allow people to report on outputs much more accurately, so we do encourage all members to start including acceptance dates in their metadata. It’s highly appreciated!

Schema files public on GitLab

I’ve added our latest schema to a new GitLab repository, There you’ll find the schema files, some documentation, and the opportunity to suggest enhancements. The schema has been released as bundle 0.1.1 and also includes our new Grant metadata schema for members that fund research.

The schema has been available in some form for months but at this point we consider it ‘officially’ released to kick off our new but necessary practice of formal schema releases. Any forthcoming updates will be added to the next version.

Schema management process

We’ve been adding sets of metadata and new record types over the years, but also need to have a defined process for small but vital pieces of metadata that you need to provide and retrieve from our metadata records. If you’re wondering what our procedure for updating our schema is, you are not alone! We have not had a formal process, instead relying on ad-hoc requests from our membership and working groups. Our release management and schema numbering has also not been consistent.

Going forward, I will ensure that all forthcoming versions of our metadata schema are be posted as a draft on GitLab for review and comment, and the final version will be officially released via GitLab as well.

It’s important to note that when we talk about “the schema”, we generally mean the input schema specifically i.e. what members of Crossref can register about the content they produce. As always, the output for retrieving that metadata is subject to separate development plans for our Metadata APIs. I’m working with our technical team so we can develop and introduce an ’end-to-end’ approach that doesn’t in future treat the input and the output as such separate considerations.

What’s next

Many of the updates in this latest release have been in the works for some time. Changes to our metadata both large and small are considered carefully, but I’d like to do this in a transparent and cooperative way with our community.

I recently set up the “Metadata Practitioners Interest Group” and we’ve just had our second call. A big topic was how to best manage the ideas and requests from the community. The ability for public comments on GitLab is a first step.

This most recent update contains a mix of long term projects and updates to keep our metadata current and useful. Other changes that are under discussion will require more development on our end. But stay tuned for more information about forthcoming changes, as well information about how you can contribute.

A Lustrum over the weekend

Jennifer Lin — Mon, 26 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The ancient Romans performed a purification rite (“lustration”) after taking a census every five years. The term “lustrum” designated not only the animal sacrifice (“suovetaurilia”) but was also applied to the period of time itself. At Crossref, we’re not exactly in the business of sacrificial rituals. But over the weekend I thought it would be fun to dive into the metadata and look at very high level changes during this period of time.

Crossref provides the latest cumulative stats online. We share news about the work we do along the way in the Crossref blog, including periodic summaries such as the Executive Director’s 2017 end-of-year highlights and the annual review. But what follows is a brief and very informal survey of the population of inhabitants in the Crossref metadata-land for the current lustrum.

Works published

The first thing a census typically asks is population size. We know there are new records arriving each month with 95.7mil to date. And they do so at variable rates. But when the data is visualized, a rough yearly pattern emerges into view. (Data were collected on Mar 25, 2018; results are partial for this month.)

Each year brings with it a significant spike, an influx of new entrants, perhaps reflecting an increase in submissions at the end of the previous year. After January, volume drops down dramatically and gradually rises once more over the course of the year. We see smaller spikes at the March, June, and September mark. (Since this was a brief exercise, I did not dive into any formal research conducted on the nature of publishing cycles.)

Metadata Coverage

The next question is a look at how the population is broken up into different demographics. For this, I analyzed four key sub-populations of ORCID, funding information, license, abstract metadata. The following graph shows the percentage of new parties (i.e., works registered at Crossref containing these metadata) across four specific segments.

I ran Karthik Ram’s script which employed rOpenSci’s r client for the Crossref REST API. Data are based on publication date rather than deposit date and represent all updates to the metadata record for the baseline view.

The census graph shows extensive empty space on the top half, indicating there is ample room for continual growth in these communities. The ORCID population is expanding the fastest, followed by license and funding. Abstracts are a minority group and quite visibly needs a population boost here in Crossref-land.

This view does not capture the percentages across record types nor does it take into account the differential rate of growth between record types (e.g., journal article, book, report, conference proceeding, dissertation, dataset, component, posted content, peer review) as the Crossref corpus has grown. While ORCID, funding, and license information are available for all full record types (viz., excludes components), this matters for abstracts. Abstracts are part of the metadata schema of all relevant record types. This excludes those which do not apply: dataset, component, and peer reviews. All things considered though, the relative impact on the total percentage of metadata deposited (or not deposited) is miniscule given the small sums for these works.

Calling the real demographers & cartographers

This mini-pseudo-lustrum was the result of a few hours of play. The graphs have raised more questions than answers. We welcome more serious and earnest efforts to dive into the metadata and conduct a more detailed, reliable investigation on the size, distribution and composition of the population through our REST API. Next month, we will roll out reports on metadata coverage based on individual members.

This “play” census came out of a session with Karthik Ram, one of the founders of rOpenSci, as we talked about struggle to build better tools for researchers. (rOpenSci is an exciting and influential non-profit that builds open source software for research with a community of users and developers and educates scientists about transparent research practices.) With each round of cocktails, it became clear that a critical subset of the issues boiled down to the problem of limited information about research publications. Why, that is what Crossref does! Indeed. Publishers register their content with Crossref and provide the metadata about the works they publish.

Over the past few years, we have been working with our members to broaden the coverage of the metadata as well as improve their metadata quality. This issue is not exclusive to Crossref - Metadata 2020 rallies stakeholders across the research enterprise to push for change together.

To represent the full breadth and depth of the scholarly communications enterprise, Crossref aims to capture the richness of what our members publish through the content they register. So publishers, powerfully represent your services and make sure your metadata is complete and correct for discovery systems, indexing platforms, research evaluation systems, analytics tools, and the great number of Crossref metadata consumers far and wide.

The research nexus - better research through better metadata

Jennifer Lin — Tue, 14 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Researchers are adopting new tools that create consistency and shareability in their experimental methods. Increasingly, these are viewed as key components in driving reproducibility and replicability. They provide transparency in reporting key methodological and analytical information. They are also used for sharing the artifacts which make up a processing trail for the results: data, material, analytical code, and related software on which the conclusions of the paper rely. Where expert feedback was also shared, such reviews further enrich this record. We capture these ideas and build on the notion of the “article nexus” blogpost with a new variation: “the research nexus.”

Some of Crossref’s publishing community are encouraging the scholarly communication practices surrounding these tools in a variety of ways: incorporating them into the publishing workflow, integrations between the tools and publishing systems, as well as linking and exposing the artifacts in the publications for readers to access. A special set of publishers have gone all the way and included these links into their Crossref metadata record. They insert them directly into the metadata deposit when they register the content (technical documentation). Doing so, these connections reach further than the publisher platform and propagate to systems across the research ecosystem including places like indexers, research information management systems, sharing platforms (oh, the list goes on!). We highlight a small set of examples to illustrate how these outstanding publishing practices are supporting good research.

1. Linking to an entire collection of methods

Crossref member, Protocols.io, is supporting transparency and methods reproducibility with their open access repository of science methods. Leitão-Goncalves R, Carvalho-Santos Z, Francisco AP, et al. investigated the concerted action of the commensal bacteria Acetobacter pomorum and Lactobacilli in Drosophila melanogaster, demonstrating how the interaction of specific nutrients within the microbiome can shape behavioral decisions and life history traits. Findings were published in PLOS Biology earlier this year: https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.1371/journal.pbio.2000862. Authors deposited detailed methods and protocols used in the project (Drosophila rearing, media preparations, and microbial manipulations) as a collection in Protocols.io: https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.17504/protocols.io.hdtb26n. So Protocols.io registered their content with us, linking the protocol to the paper. This creates the crosswalk between both so that users can get from one to the other through the metadata. The full metadata record can be found here.

2. Linking to video protocol

If a picture is worth a thousand words, the truism might apply to moving pictures many times over. Fasel B, Spörri J, Schütz P, et al. proposed a set of calibration movements optimized for alpine skiing and validated the 3D joint angles of the knee, hip, and trunk during alpine skiing in a PLOS ONE paper: https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.1371/journal.pone.0181446. These movements consisted of squats, trunk rotations, hip ad/abductions, and upright standing. The specific team responsible for designing them (Fasel B, Spörri J, Kröll J, and Aminian K) described the set of calibration movements performed but found videos to be a far more effective way to communicate the technical movements used in their study. They made the visuals available too: https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.17504/protocols.io.itrcem6. So Protocols.io deposited the link between video protocol and paper to the Crossref metadata record (full metadata record).

3. Linking to software and peer reviews

The Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) is an academic journal about high quality research software across broadly diverse disciplines. Sara Mahar works on the effectiveness of organisations funded by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development to combat homelessness. She collaborated with computational physicist Matthew Bellis to create a python tool for researchers to visualize and analyze data from the Homeless Management Information System:https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.21105/joss.00384. The software was archived in Zenodo: https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.5281/zenodo.13750 and the peer review artifacts were also published. JOSS deposited all these links in the metadata record (found here).

4. Linking to preprint, data, code, source code, peer reviews

Gigascience, published by Oxford University Press, is experimenting with a number of new tools in their mission to promote reproducibility of analyses and data dissemination, organisation, understanding, and use. In a recent paper Luo R, Schatz M, and Salzberg S shared the results of the firstly publicly available implementation of variant calling using a 16-genotype probabilistic model for germline variant detection: https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.1093/gigascience/gix045. Prior to formal peer review, the group posted the preprint in bioRxiv: https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.1101/111393. When the paper was published, the authors made the supporting data available, including snapshots of the test and result data, in a public repository: http://dx.doi.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.5524/100316. OUP included this data citation in their Crossref metadata record via the routes recommended in our previous blog post about depositing data citations. The researchers made the code available in Github, and the algorithm is ready for researchers to run on Code Ocean, a cloud-based computational reproducibility platform that allows researchers to wrap and encapsulate the data, code, and computation environment linked to an article: https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.24433/CO.0a812d9b-0ff3-4eb7-825f-76d3cd049a43. For further transparency, expert reviews of the manuscript from the peer review history were published in Publons: http://dx.doi.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.5524/review.100737 and http://dx.doi.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.5524/review.100738. (As of last month, publishers can register peer reviews at Crossref). The full metadata record contains links to the entire set of materials listed above.

5. Linking to preprint, Code, Docker hub, video, reviews

Narechania A, Baker R, DeSalle R, et al. used bird flocking behavior to design an algorithm, Clusterflock, for optimizing distance-based clusters in orthologous gene families that share an evolutionary history. Their paper was published in Gigascience last year: https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.1186/s13742-016-0152-3. Supporting data, code snapshots and video were published in GigaDB: http://dx.doi.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.5524/100247. Code was maintained in GitHub. And authors also created a Docker application for Clusterflock, a lightweight, stand-alone, executable package of the software which includes everything needed to run it: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries, settings (Docker Hub link here). They created a video demo of the algorithm. Publons reviews were published http://dx.doi.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.5524/review.100507 and http://dx.doi.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.5524/review.100508. Gigascience shared all these assets in their publication, including the link to the original bioRxiv preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/03/25/045773). The full metadata record containing these links can be found here.

The Research Nexus: better research through better metadata

These five are just a few exemplary cases showing how publishers are declaring the relationships between their publications and other associated artifacts to support reproducibility and discoverability of their content. We welcome you to check out our overview of relationships between DOIs and other materials for more information. Members who are enriching your publishing pipeline in similar ways, please register these links to make your reach go further. We also welcome everyone to retrieve these relations in our REST API (technical documentation).

Peer reviews are open for registering at Crossref

Jennifer Lin — Tue, 24 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

About 13-20 billion researcher-hours were spent in 2015 doing peer reviews. What valuable work! Let’s get more mileage out of these labors and make these expert discussions citable, persistent, and linked up to the scholarly record. As we previously shared during Peer Review week, Crossref is lauintroducing support for a new record type to support the registration of peer reviews. We’re one step closer to changing that. Today, we are excited to announce that we’re open for deposits.

If you missed the first episode, here’s a recap:

Publishers have been registering reviews with us for a while (ex: Example 1, Example 2, and Example 3). But these have been shoehorned into other content: article, dataset, or component. So we are extending Crossref’s infrastructure to properly treat this special scholarly artifact. This includes a range of outputs made publicly available from the peer review history (referee reports, decision letters, author responses, community comments) across any and all review rounds. We welcome scholarly discussions of journal articles before or after publication (e.g. “post-publication reviews”).

We collect metadata that characterizes the peer review asset (for example: recommendation, type, license, contributor info, competing interests). We also collect metadata, which offers a view into the review process (e.g. pre/post-publication, revision round, review date).

This special set will support the discovery and investigation of peer reviews as it is linked up to the article discussed. It will also enable the following:

Enable tracking of the evolution of scholarly claims through the lineage of expert discussion
Support enrichment of scholarly discussion
Enable reviewer accountability
Credit reviewers and editors for their scholarly contribution
Support publisher transparency
Connect reviews to the full history of the published results
Provide data for analysis and research on peer review

Please come check out our documentation for more information.

As publishers are implementing this, we are finishing up the delivery of this metadata for machine and human access, across all the Crossref interfaces (REST API, OAI-PMH, Crossref Metadata Search) to enable discoverability across the research ecosystem. We are also working to make it possible for members to get Cited-by data for the peer reviews they register.

If you are interested in registering your peer review content with us, please get in touch.