Blog

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.

It’s been a while, here’s a metadata update and request for feedback In Spring 2023 we sent out a survey to our community with a goal of assessing what our priorities for metadata development should be - what projects are our community ready to support? Where is the greatest need? What are the roadblocks? The intention was to help prioritize our metadata development work. There’s a lot we want to do, a lot our community needs from us, but we really want to make sure we’re focusing on the projects that will have the most immediate impact for now.

In the first half of this year we’ve been talking to our community about post-publication changes and Crossmark. When a piece of research is published it isn’t the end of the journey—it is read, reused, and sometimes modified. That’s why we run Crossmark, as a way to provide notifications of important changes to research made after publication. Readers can see if the research they are looking at has updates by clicking the Crossmark logo.

We’re happy to note that this month, we are marking five years since Crossref launched its Grant Linking System. The Grant Linking System (GLS) started life as a joint community effort to create ‘grant identifiers’ and support the needs of funders in the scholarly communications infrastructure. The system includes a funder-designed metadata schema and a unique link for each award which enables connections with millions of research outputs, better reporting on the research and outcomes of funding, and a contribution to open science infrastructure.

In our previous blog post about metadata matching, we discussed what it is and why we need it (tl;dr: to discover more relationships within the scholarly record). Here, we will describe some basic matching-related terminology and the components of a matching process. We will also pose some typical product questions to consider when developing or integrating matching solutions. Basic terminology Metadata matching is a high-level concept, with many different problems falling into this category.

Update 2024-07-01: This post is based on an interview with Euan Adie, founder and director of Overton._ What is Overton? Overton is a big database of government policy documents, also including sources like intergovernmental organizations, think tanks, and big NGOs and in general anyone who’s trying to influence a government policy maker. What we’re interested in is basically, taking all the good parts of the scholarly record and applying some of that to the policy world.

Since we first launched our REST API around 2013 as a Labs project, it has evolved well beyond a prototype into arguably Crossref’s most visible and valuable service. It is the result of 20,000 organisations around the world that have worked for many years to curate and share metadata about their various resources, from research grants to research articles and other component inputs and outputs of research. The REST API is relied on by a large part of the research information community and beyond, seeing around 1.

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.