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.
Metadata Manager (beta) offers a way to deposit and update metadata for journal articles for both single and multiple deposits.
You’ll now see your Metadata Manager workspace. This is where all deposits occur, both new deposits and updates to content you’ve already registered with Crossref. To return to this view at any time, click Home at the top of the screen.
Your workspace holds your list of publications, and it will be blank when you first log in. As you add the publications you want to manage to Metadata Manager, they’ll start collecting on this screen.
You can add new publications and edit existing publications you have previously submitted to our system from your workspace. You can also click into each publication and add or edit articles against them.
The home button - Return to the overview of all your publications by clicking Home.
Deposit history - See your previous deposits made via Metadata Manager (excludes deposits via other deposit methods such as HTTPS POST, or the web deposit form).
To deposit - Shows items for which you’ve entered information, but have not yet deposited with us. The number next to To deposit shows how many records are awaiting deposit.
Your username - Shows the credential you’ve used to log in. Click the down arrow to access account functions, log out, and view a tutorial of Metadata Manager.
Search publication - This search bar allows you to find and add publications to your workspace. You can search by title name or title-level DOI.
New publication - This section allows you to create a new journal and add it to your workspace.
Page owner: Sara Bowman | Last updated 2022-July-22
