This blog post is from Lettie Conrad and Michelle Urberg, cross-posted from the The Scholarly Kitchen.
As sponsors of this project, we at Crossref are excited to see this work shared out.
The scholarly publishing community talks a LOT about metadata and the need for high-quality, interoperable, and machine-readable descriptors of the content we disseminate. However, as we’ve reflected on previously in the Kitchen, despite well-established information standards (e.g., persistent identifiers), our industry lacks a shared framework to measure the value and impact of the metadata we produce.
When Crossref began over 20 years ago, our members were primarily from the United States and Western Europe, but for several years our membership has been more global and diverse, growing to almost 18,000 organizations around the world, representing 148 countries.
As we continue to grow, finding ways to help organizations participate in Crossref is an important part of our mission and approach. Our goal of creating the Research Nexus—a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organizations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society—can only be achieved by ensuring that participation in Crossref is accessible to all.
In August 2022, the United States Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memo (PDF) on ensuring free, immediate, and equitable access to federally funded research (a.k.a. the “Nelson memo”). Crossref is particularly interested in and relevant for the areas of this guidance that cover metadata and persistent identifiers—and the infrastructure and services that make them useful.
Funding bodies worldwide are increasingly involved in research infrastructure for dissemination and discovery.
Preprints have become an important tool for rapidly communicating and iterating on research outputs. There is now a range of preprint servers, some subject-specific, some based on a particular geographical area, and others linked to publishers or individual journals in addition to generalist platforms. In 2016 the Crossref schema started to support preprints and since then the number of metadata records has grown to around 16,000 new preprint DOIs per month.
You can now easily search for publications and add them to your ORCID profile in the new beta of Crossref Metadata Search (CRMDS). The user interface is pretty self-explanatory, but if you want to read about it before trying it, here is a summary of how it works.
When you go to to CRMDS, you will see that there is now a small ORCID sign-in button on the top right-hand side of the screen.
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Clicking on this button allows you to connect CRMDS to your ORCID profile and authorises CRMDS to add publications to your profile. First, if you are not already logged into ORCID, CRMDS will ask ORCID to log you in:
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Once you have logged in, ORCID will ask you if you want to allow CRMDS to be able to view and update your ORCID profile:
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After you authorise CRMDS to access your profile, you will be returned to the CRMDS screen and the top right corner of the CRMDS page will indicate that you have connected to your ORCID profile (note, you can always de-authorise CRMDS from accessing your ORCID profile in your ORCID settings):
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Once you are logged in, you can enter search terms that are likely to return records of your publications:
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Each search result will show an icon telling you whether that particular item is visible in your ORCID profile. If the item is not in your ORCID profile, you see an icon like this:
And if the item is already in your ORCID profile, you will see an icon like this:
In the following search results you can see that 1 item is already in Josiah Carberry’s profile, and 2 items are not:
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Clicking on the “Add to Profile” button will confirm that you want to add the specified publication to your ORCID profile:
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After clicking on “Yes” to add the publication to your profile, the search results will refresh to reflect that the item has been added.
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You can then just continue searching for and adding any publications that are not in your ORCID profile.
Note that, occasionally, you may see an orange icon that says that an item is “Not Visible”
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This only occurs when you have previously added an item to your profile using CRMDS and then either:
Set the ORCID privacy for that particular work item to “Private” in your ORCID profile.
Deleted the work from your ORCID profile.
Unfortunately, CRMDS has no way to determine which of these two events occurred However, If you click on the “Not Visible” icon, you will be prompted with two ways to resolve this issue. Either you can:
Reset the privacy settings on the specified work to “Public” or “Limited”
Confirm to CRMDS that you have deleted the item from your profile.
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If the issue was your privacy settings, then once you have changed the privacy settings to public/limited you can simply click on the “Refresh” button and CRMDS will reflect the correct status of the work.
The best way to avoid this kind of confusion is to go to your ORCID settings and set the default privacy level for “works” to either “limited” or “public.”
Crossref Metadata Search is still a “Crossref Labs” project and, as such, we are very interested to hear feedback on this new ORCID functionality for CRMDS. Please send comments, etc. to:
