Blog

Version 5.4.0 metadata schema update now available

Patricia Feeney – 2025 March 19

In MetadataSchema

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 The new status field allows repositories to flag a preprint as ‘withdrawn’ or ‘removed,’ a situation specific to posted content.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 ‘organization’ 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!