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.
The Review selection provides a condensed view of all the metadata you’ve provided in the form, so you can check it before submitting the record for deposit. Click Continue at the top of the form, and select Review. You can also Review All submissions on the To deposit screen before submitting the deposit.
Submitting a deposit
When you have finished adding article metadata and would like to deposit, click Continue from the article form, and select Add to deposit.
You can also do this from the Record List - select the article(s) you would like to deposit by checking the box to the left of the article title. You will then see the Action menu, and you can select Add to deposit. You can also move to, duplicate, and remove selected records using these buttons in the Action menu. If you select Remove for a record that has not been deposited, it will be erased from Metadata Manager. Records previously deposited will not be deleted from our system, only removed from the Metadata Manager workspace. If you created an article outside of a volume or issue, you can associate it with a volume or issue using Move to.
To submit your item(s) for deposit, click To deposit at the top of the screen. Please submit a maximum of 20 articles at a time. This will reduce the chance of an error with Metadata Manager.
Here, you can collect and review all your journal-specific records using Review all. The system will display any errors with a red flag by the respective record(s). You must correct these errors before you can deposit. If there are no errors, the Deposit button will be activated. Click Deposit and the system will immediately process your deposit request.
Page owner: Sara Bowman | Last updated 2022-July-22
