This month marks one year since the Dutch Research Council (NWO) introduced grant IDs—an important milestone in our journey toward more transparent and trackable research funding. We created over 1,600 Crossref Grant IDs with associated metadata. We are beginning to see them appear in publications. These early examples show the enormous potential Grant IDs have. They also highlight that publishers could extend their efforts to improve the quality of funding metadata of publications.
eLife recently won a Crossref Metadata Award for the completeness of its metadata, showing itself as the clear leader among our medium-sized members. In this post, the eLife team answers our questions about how and why they produce such high-quality open metadata. For eLife, the work of creating and sharing excellent metadata aligns with their mission to foster open science and supports their preprint-centred publication model, but it also lays the groundwork for all kinds of exciting potential uses.
Hablamos con Nacho Pérez Alcalde, Vicedirector Técnico de Editorial CSIC, la editorial al mando de ´Boletín Geológico y Minero’, ganadora del Crossref Metadata Award en la categoría de Metadata Enrichment. Miembro de Crossref desde 2008, Editorial CSIC publica 41 revistas en acceso abierto Diamante, y juega un papel esencial en la diseminación del conocimiento científico a nivel internacional. Exploramos lo que este premio ha significado para Editorial CSIC y qué planes para el futuro tienen para seguir mejorando la calidad y uso de sus metadatos.
TLDR: We’ve successfully moved the main Crossref systems to the cloud! We’ve more to do, with several bugs identified and fixed, and a few still ongoing. However, it’s a step in the right direction and a significant milestone, as, whilst it is a much larger financial investment, it addresses several risks and limitations and shores up the Crossref infrastructure for the future.
Having joined the Crossref team merely a week previously, the mid-year community update on June 14th was a fantastic opportunity to learn about the Research Nexus vision. We explored its building blocks and practical implementation steps within our reach, and within our imagination of the future.
Read on (or watch the recording) for a whistlestop tour of everything – from what on Earth is Research Nexus, through to how it’s taking shape at Crossref, to how you are involved, and finally – to what concerns the community surrounding the vision and how we’re going to address that.
Summary of presentations
Click on image above to access the presentation.
The idea is simple in principle: scholarly records ought to be transparent – available to examine and learn from for all. Much of scientific production and communication these days has a heavy digital footprint so the Nexus is nothing but simply connecting the loose strands, right? Yet, as the scholarly record is a reflection of the continuous progress made by multiple actors within the context of scientific structures and processes, bringing the Nexus to life is a little short of simple.
“What we think of as metadata is expanding, and the notion of ‘record types’ is changing” – said Ginny Hendricks. A great majority of scholarly ‘objects’, whether they are data sets, research articles, monographs, or others, undergo many processes (including review, publication, licensing, correction, derivation) and influence knowledge and practice over time.
Making that progress visible and discoverable will allow for tracing the development of ideas and changes in our thinking over time. Transparency of the complete scholarly records will help to understand the impact of science funding and changing policies. It can support a more robust and comprehensive assessment of research, and contribute to improving integrity within as well as public trust in sciences.
Patricia Feeney has given us reasons for optimism in building a robust Nexus. She’s shown areas of greatest growth in metadata reported to Crossref and shared a public roadmap of types of information we’re asked to enable in the future. We’re seeing a true boom of datasets and peer review reports registrations, and the relationship metadata for our records is improving too. At the dawn of defaulting to open references, 44% of records we hold have associated references and that is growing. Provision of the newly enabled affiliation information (ROR IDs) is on the rise, as is the funder information. Some conversations and questions followed highlighting the need for further guidance in these areas.
To make a case for enriching metadata records, Martyn Rittman demonstrated examples of traceability of research influence on realities outside academia. He captured recent examples of data citations and other references present not just between scholarly papers, but also in policy documents and popular media. These allow for greater discoverability of literature – but also show the public influence and impact of the research and the work’s context in our wider society.
While Martyn shared our blue-skies aspiration to streamline Crossref’s APIs to offer insight to all these relationships with a single service, Joe Wass grounded those ambitions in the reality of technical work underway. His team’s attention is divided between three main areas. They continue to maintain and de-bug our existing infrastructure. They are developing self-service solutions for members. Finally, they are mapping and planning improved infrastructure, evaluating technology against the Research Nexus vision.
Bringing it back to the source (of metadata), Rachael Lammey offered a very practical guide to key activities enabling Research Nexus that all members can take on now. She highlighted the benefits of collecting and registering data citations, ROR IDs, and grant funding information. She went on to talk about challenges of subject classification (at a journal level) that our research and development efforts are focusing on at the moment.
Summary of discussions
Publishing has changed dramatically and our members recognise increasing opportunities for transparency of the scholarly record. Breaking the distant vision of Research Nexus down into actionable chunks made it more relatable for call participants. Many reflected on seeing their place in it properly for the first time. Yet, challenges remain and many were brought to the fore in the discussions.
The reliability and usability of the technology for registering metadata with Crossref needs to improve. We need to do better in supporting multi-language and multi-alphabet information. Not just developing systems anew, but also streamline the way content is registered and annotated, and continue to disambiguate the competing identifiers. Different record types, chiefly books, present specific challenges in this regard. Finally, making all that metadata accessible and usable is key to enabling insights from the rich data we collectively make available.
Technology is important, but won’t overcome the barriers that exist in the mindsets. Siloed thinking means that publishers may not be sensitive to benefits that improved relationship metadata could have for colleagues working on assessment, even within the same institutions. Greater guidance or best practices for new identifiers, such as ORCID, ROR, grants, would allow more publishers to get on board with the changes. Researchers often don’t help the cause either – many don’t realise the role and benefits of metadata for their work and are reluctant to provide rich information related to it, perceiving it as a bureaucratic burden.
In a nutshell, I learnt that – while the concept of Research Nexus is pretty complex – we’re all already participating in making it a reality. I’m grateful to the call participants for sharing their challenges and ideas so generously. It means we can work to address those. I’ll be sure to follow-up on requests for support and clearer guidelines about citing data, recording ROR IDs and grants information in the metadata, and we’ll engage our community on complex topics of record updates (corrections, retractions and versions). Be sure to keep in touch with the conversations on the Community Forum. I’ll see you there!
