Blog

Patricia Feeney

Patricia’s role as Head of Metadata was created in 2018 to bring together all aspects of metadata, such as our strategy and overall vision, review and introduction of new record types, best practice around inputs (Content Registration) as well as outputs (representations through our APIs), and consulting with the community about metadata. During her 10 years at Crossref she’s helped thousands of publishers understand how to record and distribute metadata for millions of scholarly items. She’s also worked in various scholarly publishing roles and as a systems librarian and cataloger.

Read more about Patricia Feeney on their team page.

Some rip-RORing news for affiliation metadata

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.

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

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.

Crossref metadata for bibliometrics

Our paper, Crossref: the sustainable source of community-owned scholarly metadata, was recently published in Quantitative Science Studies (MIT Press). The paper describes the scholarly metadata collected and made available by Crossref, as well as its importance in the scholarly research ecosystem.

Proposed schema changes - have your say

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.

Request for feedback: Conference ID implementation

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.

Building better metadata with schema releases

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.

Request for feedback on grant identifier metadata

We first announced plans to investigate identifiers for grants in 2017 and are almost ready to violate the first rule of grant identifiers which is “they probably should not be called grant identifiers”. Research support extends beyond monetary grants and awards, but our end goal is to make grants easy to cite, track, and identify, and ‘Grant ID’ resonates in a way other terms do not. The truth is in the metadata, and we intend to collect (and our funder friends are prepared to provide) information about a number of funding types.