Metadata is one of the most important tools needed to communicate with each other about science and scholarship. It tells the story of research that travels throughout systems and subjects and even to future generations. We have metadata for organising and describing content, metadata for provenance and ownership information, and metadata is increasingly used as signals of trust.
Following our panel discussion on the same subject at the ALPSP University Press Redux conference in May 2024, in this post we explore the idea that metadata, once considered important mostly for discoverability, is now a vital element used for evidence and the integrity of the scholarly record.
For the third year in a row, Crossref hosted a roundtable on research integrity prior to the Frankfurt book fair. This year the event looked at Crossmark, our tool to display retractions and other post-publication updates to readers.
Since the start of 2024, we have been carrying out a consultation on Crossmark, gathering feedback and input from a range of members. The roundtable discussion was a chance to check and refine some of the conclusions we’ve come to, and gather more suggestions on the way forward.
https://0-doi-org.lib.rivier.edu/10.13003/ief7aibi
In our previous blog post in this series, we explained why no metadata matching strategy can return perfect results. Thankfully, however, this does not mean that it’s impossible to know anything about the quality of matching. Indeed, we can (and should!) measure how close (or far) we are from achieving perfection with our matching. Read on to learn how this can be done!
How about we start with a quiz?
We’re in year two of the Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability (RCFS) research. This report provides an update on progress to date, specifically on research we’ve conducted to better understand the impact of our fees and possible changes.
Crossref is in a good financial position with our current fees, which haven’t increased in 20 years. This project is seeking to future-proof our fees by:
Making fees more equitable Simplifying our complex fee schedule Rebalancing revenue sources In order to review all aspects of our fees, we’ve planned five projects to look into specific aspects of our current fees that may need to change to achieve the goals above.
We encourage you to include references (citation lists, bibliographies, data and software citations) with all content you register. A key benefit is that they will appear in Cited-by query results. You can include references when your first register content, or you can add them to existing DOIs later. Learn more about the benefits of registering your references.
Including references (or adding them to an existing deposit) can be done by:
Crossref XML plugin for OJS: You must first enable References as a submission metadata field and then enable the Crossref reference linking plugin, to include references in your initial deposit, or add them later.
Metadata Manager: If you’re still using the deprecated Metadata Manager, there’s a field where you can add references and Metadata Manager will even match your references to their DOIs. If you want to add references to an existing deposit, simply find the existing journal record, add your references, and resubmit. Learn more about updating article metadata using Metadata Manager.
Simple Text Query allows you to both find the DOIs for your references and add them to the metadata for a DOI that you have already registered with Crossref. Please note that this method will overwrite any references previously deposited for the content item - if you’ve previously added references to an item, and want to add more references using Simple Text Query, you need to include both the existing and the new references in your deposit.
If your details have been entered correctly, you will see a success message, showing that your deposit has been submitted to the system queue for processing. When the reference deposit has been submitted, you will receive an email containing the XML deposit generated by the form. After that submission has been processed (usually within minutes of your submission), you will receive a submission log by email with the results of your submission.
