In 2020 we released our first public data file, something weâve turned into an annual affair supporting our commitment to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI). Weâve just posted the 2022 file, which can now be downloaded via torrent like in years past.
We aim to publish these in the first quarter of each year, though as you may notice, weâre a little behind our intended schedule. The reason for this delay was that we wanted to make critical new metadata fields available, including resource URLs and titles with markup.
Unfortunately, Bryan Vickery has moved onto pastures new. I would like to thank him for his many contributions at Crossref and we all wish him well.
Iâm now pleased to announce that Rachael Lammey will be Crossrefâs new Director of Product starting on Monday, May 16th.
Rachaelâs skills and experience are perfectly suited for this role. She has been at Crossref since 2012 and has deep knowledge and experience of all things Crossref: our mission; our members; our culture; and our services.
Since we announced last September the launch of a new version of iThenticate, a number of you have upgraded and become familiar with iThenticate v2 and its new and improved features which include:
A faster, more user-friendly and responsive interface A preprint exclusion filter, giving users the ability to identify content on preprint servers more easily A new âred flagâ feature that signals the detection of hidden text such as text/quotation marks in white font, or suspicious character replacement A private repository available for browser users, allowing them to compare against their previous submissions to identify duplicate submissions within your organisation A content portal, helping users check how much of their own published content has been successfully indexed, self-diagnose and fix the content that has failed to be indexed in iThenticate.
A re-cap We kicked off our Ambassador Program in 2018 after consultation with our members, who told us they wanted greater support and representation in their local regions, time zones, and languages.
We also recognized that our membership has grown and changed dramatically over recent years and that it is likely to continue to do so. We now have over 16,000 members across 140 countries. As we work to understand whatâs to come and ensure that we are meeting the needs of such an expansive community, having trusted local contacts we can work closely with is key to ensuring we are more proactive in engaging with new audiences and supporting existing members.
Funders are joining Crossref to register their grants so that they can more easily and accurately track the outputs connected to the research they support.
Once you’re a member, registering grants with us means giving us information about each awarded grant, including a DOI which uniquely and persistently identifies each record. At the moment just direct XML deposit methods is supported but we’re working on a manual form to deposit and update grant metadata. This section focuses on grants, but research funders can also register other content types such as reports, data, and working papers.
Something to consider before you begin
Decide which grants to register first, as you get into the swing of things. For example, pilot a particular country, or area of support. Itâs better to start with newly-awarded grants, and then move on to older or long-running awards - these are cheaper to register, and are more likely to have produced research papers, so theyâre great for demonstrating the full potential of connected research metadata.
Constructing your identifiers (DOIs)
A DOI is made up of a DOI resolver, a prefix, and a suffix. When you join Crossref as a member, we give you a DOI prefix. You combine this with a suffix of your choice to create a DOI. Although some funders choose to use their internal grant identifier as the DOI suffix, we advise you to make your suffix opaque, meaning that it does not encode or describe any information about the work. Your DOI becomes active once it is successfully registered with us. Read more about constructing your DOIs.
Should a grant move to a new landing page, the URL in the grantâs metadata is updated to point to the new location. Thereâs no charge to update metadata for existing deposits.
Formatting grant metadata for registration
Grants can be registered for all sorts of support provided to a research group or individual, such as awards, use of facilities, sponsorship, training, or salary awards.
Hereâs the section of our schema for grant metadata. If youâre working with a third-party system, such as Proposal Central or EuroPMC, they may be able to help with this piece of work.
You may be able to map your own data and identifiers to our schema. See our example deposit file - this is a full example, and many of the fields it contains are optional, but we encourage you to provide as much information as you can. Rich metadata helps maximum reuse of the grant records you register with Crossref. This .xsd file helps explain what goes into each field, and the parameters (length, format) of what is accepted in each field. Hereâs a less techy version.
When youâve created your XML files, use our checker to test them - this will show any potential errors with your files. For help with resolving problems, send your XML file and the error message to Support.
Uploading your files to Crossref
Once youâre happy with your files, upload them to us using the admin tool, or submit them through HTTPS POST.
Once your submission is successful, your grant DOIs are âliveâ and ready to be used. Itâs good practice to add the grant DOI to the landing page for the grant, as in this example for https://doi.org/10.37717/220020589:
Spread the word about your grant identifiers
Let your grant submission systems, awardees, and other parties know you are supporting Crossref grant identifiers, and that they should start collecting these identifiers too. Crossref grant metadata (including grant DOIs) is made openly available through our APIs, so it can be used by third parties (including publishers, grant tracking systems) to link grants to related research outputs.
Page owner: Rachael Lammey | Last updated 2020-April-08
