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 Metadata Manager tool is in beta and contains many bugs. It’s being deprecated at the end of 2021. We recommend using the web deposit tool as an alternative, or the OJS plugin if your content is hosted on the OJS platform from PKP.
When you log in using your account credentials, you’ll see a view of all the publications that have been added to your workspace.
To add a publication for which you have already registered metadata with Crossref, enter its title or title-level DOI into the search bar, and click Add. Once added to your workspace, you can update the title record by hovering your mouse over the publication title and select Edit, which will take you to the Edit journal record screen. If your publication does not already have a title-level DOI, you will need to add one. Learn more about title-level DOIs. Provide additional metadata for the publication record if available (the blue/asterisk * mark indicates a required field).
To bring an article into your workspace, click into the chosen journal, and enter the article title into the Article search field.
To add a publication for which you have never registered metadata with Crossref, click New publication. On the Edit journal record screen, add details for the publication (the blue/asterisk * mark indicates a required field).
Click Save, then Close to return to the journal list. The publication will now appear in your workspace.
Page owner: Sara Bowman | Last updated 2022-July-22
