At Crossref and ROR, we develop and run processes that match metadata at scale, creating relationships between millions of entities in the scholarly record. Over the last few years, we’ve spent a lot of time diving into details about metadata matching strategies, evaluation, and integration. It is quite possibly our favourite thing to talk and write about! But sometimes it is good to step back and look at the problem from a wider perspective.
This year’s public data file is now available, featuring over 156 million metadata records deposited with Crossref through the end of April 2024 from over 19,000 members. A full breakdown of Crossref metadata statistics is available here.
Like last year, you can download all of these records in one go via Academic Torrents or directly from Amazon S3 via the “requester pays” method.
Download the file: The torrent download can be initiated here.
Earlier this year, we reported on the roundtable discussion event that we had organised in Frankfurt on the heels of the Frankfurt Book Fair 2023. This event was the second in the series of roundtable events that we are holding with our community to hear from you how we can all work together to preserve the integrity of the scholarly record - you can read more about insights from these events and about ISR in this series of blogs.
Crossref is undertaking a large program, dubbed 'RCFS' (Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability) that will initially tackle five specific issues with our fees. We haven’t increased any of our fees in nearly two decades, and while we’re still okay financially and do not have a revenue growth goal, we do have inclusion and simplification goals. This report from Research Consulting helped to narrow down the five priority projects for 2024-2025 around these three core goals:
A DOI may refer to a journal or book (a title-level DOI), or to a specific article or chapter.
Journals and DOIs
Like a set of nesting dolls, a journal may be made up of volumes, each containing a number of issues, each containing a number of articles. You can assign a DOI at each level, for example:
journal-level-DOI (sometimes called the title-level-DOI) 10.5555/QYPF2031. Like an ISSN, it refers to the whole journal
volume-level-DOI 10.5555/FFFU4804
issue-level-DOI 10.5555/QKLE5634
article-level-DOI 10.5555/CNBT7653
The role of the journal-level-DOI, volume-level-DOI, and issue-level-DOI is to link persistently to a point in the journal structure. These DOIs do not have any associated content, and it does not cost anything to register these DOIs.
However, article-level-DOIs do have associated content, and therefore a fee applies to register these DOIs.
Books and DOIs
Like a set of nesting dolls, a book may be made up of chapters. Again, you can assign a DOI at each level, for example:
book-level-DOI (sometimes called the title-level-DOI) 10.5555/ZAAR1365. Just like an ISBN, it refers to the whole book.
chapter-level-DOI 10.5555/TFWD2627
Both book-level-DOIs and chapter-level-DOIs have associated content, and therefore a fee applies to register these DOIs.