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.
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.
Registering new articles and working with volumes/issues
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Registering new articles and working with volumes/issues
The Metadata Manager tool is in beta and contains many bugs. It has been deprecated since 2021 and will be sunset at the end of 2025. We recommend using an alternative such as the web deposit form, our new record registration form for journal articles and grants, or the OJS plugin if your content is hosted on the OJS platform from PKP.
Click into the journal to view all of its associated articles in your workspace. You will only see previous deposits made using Metadata Manager. To see deposits made using other deposit methods, manually add them by searching for the article using Search.
If your journal does not have volumes or issues, click Add record, select New article, and go to add article metadata.
New article in new volume and/or issue
If the article is part of a new volume and/or issue, click Add record and select New volume/issue. Complete the fields in the volume/issue form. The blue/asterisk * mark indicates a required field. Click Save, then click Close. The volume/issue is now added into your workspace (you only need to do this once for all articles associated with this volume/issue). The volume/issue now appears in your journal Record List - click Add article on the right of that row.
If the new article is part of an existing volume or issue, click on Add article by the relevant volume/issue. To add an existing volume/issue to your workspace, enter its DOI into the search bar and click Add.
Provide contributor, funding, license, references, and additional metadata by clicking on each section to open it out. The blue/asterisk * mark indicates a required field, and we recommend that you deposit as much metadata as possible for the optional fields.
At any time, click Continue (at the top right of the screen) and select Add to deposit, Save, or Review.
If you would like to know more about the metadata for each field, we provide tool tips that appear on the right side of the form. You can turn these off be selecting Off in Show help slider at the top of the form. For a broader overview, explore our metadata best practices.
Metadata Manager checks your metadata to ensure that you provide the correct type of information needed for a successful deposit. You will see warnings when the metadata does not validate, which contain guidance on the type of metadata we are expecting. These do not need to be corrected until you are ready to submit the deposit.
If you participate in Crossmark, you can also add Crossmark metadata to the article record using Metadata Manager. This section will automatically appear at the bottom section of the article form for Crossmark participants - please contact us if the section doesn’t appear for you.
Page maintainer: Sara Bowman Last updated: 2022-July-22
