Blog

RFP: Help evaluate the reach and effects of metadata

Jennifer Kemp

Jennifer Kemp – 2021 July 21

In MetadataCommunity

UPDATE, 14 October 2021: We received several excellent proposals in response to this RFP and we’d like to thank everyone involved for their time and enthusiasm. We are excited to announce the two projects that have been selected, to run through early 2023. Stay tuned! With or Without: Measuring Impacts of Books Metadata This project will test the premise that academic books metadata improves discoverability and usage by assessing the impact of book chapter records with DOIs (unique from metadata associated with the entire book) with associated chapter and book attributes.

An Advisory Group for Preprints

We are delighted to announce the formation of a new Advisory Group to support us in improving preprint metadata. Preprints have grown in popularity over the last few years, with increasing focus brought by the need to rapidly disseminate knowledge in the midst of a global pandemic. We have supported metadata deposits for preprints under the record type ‘posted content’ since 2016, and members currently register a total of around 17,000 new preprints metadata records each month.

Service Provider perspectives: A few minutes with our publisher hosting platforms

Service Providers work on behalf of our members by creating, registering, querying and/or displaying metadata. We rely on this group to support our schema as it evolves, to roll out new and updated services to members and to work closely with us on a variety of matters of mutual interest. Many of our Service Providers have been with us since the early days of Crossref. Others have joined as scholarly communications has grown and services have evolved.

Doing more with relationships - via Event Data

Crossref aims to link research together, making related items more findable, increasing transparency, and showing how ideas spread and develop. There are a number of moving parts in this effort: some related to capturing and storing linking information, others to making it available. By including relationship metadata in Event Data, we are taking a big step to improve the visibility of a large number of links between metadata. We know this is long-promised and we’re pleased that making this valuable metadata available supports a number of important initiatives.

Event Data: A Plan of Action

Event Data uncovers links between Crossref-registered DOIs and diverse places where they are mentioned across the internet. Whereas a citation links one research article to another, events are a way to create links to locations such as news articles, data sets, Wikipedia entries, and social media mentions. We’ve collected events for several years and make them openly available via an API for anyone to access, as well as creating open logs of how we found each event.

New public data file: 120+ million metadata records

Jennifer Kemp

Jennifer Kemp – 2021 January 19

In MetadataCommunityAPIs

2020 wasn’t all bad. In April of last year, we released our first public data file. Though Crossref metadata is always openly available––and our board recently cemented this by voting to adopt the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI)</agic––we’ve decided to release an updated file. This will provide a more efficient way to get such a large volume of records. The file (JSON records, 102.6GB) is now available, with thanks once again to Academic Torrents.

EASE Council Post: Rachael Lammey on the Research Nexus

This blog was initially posted on the European Association of Science Editors (EASE) blog: “EASE Council Post: Rachael Lammey on the Research Nexus”. EASE President Duncan Nicholas accurately introduces it as a whole lot of information and insights about metadata and communication standards into one post… I was given a wide brief to decide on the topic of my EASE blog, so I thought I’d write one that tries to encompass everything - I’ll explain what I mean by that.

Open Abstracts: Where are we?

The Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA) launched this week. The initiative calls on scholarly publishers to make the abstracts of their publications openly available. More specifically, publishers that work with Crossref to register DOIs for their publications are requested to include abstracts in the metadata they deposit in Crossref. These abstracts will then be made openly available by Crossref. 39 publishers have already agreed to join I4OA and to open their abstracts.

Come for a swim in our new pool of Education materials

After 20 years in operation, and as our system matures from experimental to foundational infrastructure, it’s time to review our documentation. Having a solid core of education materials about the why and the how of Crossref is essential in making participation possible, easy, and equitable. As our system has evolved, our membership has grown and diversified, and so have our tools - both for depositing metadata with Crossref, and for retrieving and making use of it.

Crossing the Rubicon - The case for making chapters visible

To help better support the discovery, sale and analysis of books, Jennifer Kemp from Crossref and Mike Taylor from Digital Science, present seven reasons why publishers should collect chapter-level metadata. Book publishers should have been in the best possible position to take advantage of the movement of scholarly publishing to the internet. After all, they have behind them an extraordinary legacy of creating and distributing data about books: the metadata that supports discovery, sales and analysis.