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.
The grant registration form can be used to deposit metadata for grant records. You do not need any knowledge of XML to use it. You can save your grant records to your local machine and upload to the form later to make edits. You can also save partial records to be used as templates in the future.
How to use the grant registration form
Start at the grants registration form and choose to create a new record or load a record you’ve already created using this form. If this is the first time you’ve used this form, you’ll choose New Record.
Create a new record
Give your grant record a name. This is the name for the file you’ll download to your computer for future edits or use - so make it something descriptive and useful, like the grant number. This name doesn’t get deposited with Crossref or appear in any metadata.
Add the metadata associated with your grant.
Download your record to your local computer for future edits. The form will download as a .json file, with the name you gave it in the beginning.
Submit your record
Click submit at the bottom of the form, and enter your Crossref account credentials. The submission will be made immediately and a success message will appear on the screen. You can also download the record from this page.
Load a saved record
If you’ve used this form before to create a grant record, you can load your saved copy to make edits and redeposit. Start at the grants registration form and choose Load Record. Select the appropriate .json file from your computer and click Open. Note: the record you load must be a .json file previously downloaded from the grant registration form.
Once the form is loaded, you can make edits to it, download a new version to your local machine, and submit your record to update the metadata with us.
Create a template
You can partially complete a form and download it for use as a template in the future. As an example, your depositor information (name, email address) and funder information (funder name, funder ID) is likely to be the same across all submissions, so you might complete just those parts of the form, download the record, and load it each time you need to submit a grant record.
Page owner: Sara Bowman | Last updated 2022-December-07
