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Recording data citations supports data reuse and aids research integrity and reproducibility. Crossref makes it easy for our members to submit data citations to support the scholarly record.

TL;DR

Citations are essential/core metadata that all members should submit for all articles, conference proceedings, preprints, and books. Submitting data citations to Crossref has long been possible. And it’s easy, you just need to:

• Include data citations in the references section as you would for any other citation
• Include a DOI or other persistent identifier for the data if it is available - just as you would for any other citation
• Submit the references to Crossref through the content registration process as you would for any other record

And your data citations will flow through all the normal processes that Crossref applies to citations. And it will be distributed openly to the community (including DataCite!) via Crossref’s services and APIs. All data citations deposited with Crossref will be exposed in the (soon-to-be launched) Data Citation Corpus.

At Crossref, we care a lot about the completeness and quality of metadata. Gathering robust metadata from across the global network of scholarly communication is essential for effective co-creation of the research nexus and making the inner workings of academia traceable and transparent. We invest time in community initiatives such as Metadata 20/20 and Better Together webinars. We encourage members to take time to look up their participation reports, and our team can support you if you’re looking to understand and improve any aspects of metadata coverage of your content.

What’s in the metadata matters because it is So.Heavily.Used.

You might be tired of hearing me say it but that doesn’t make it any less true. Our open APIs now see over 1 billion queries per month. The metadata is ingested, displayed and redistributed by a vast, global array of systems and services that in whole or in part are often designed to point users to relevant content. It’s also heavily used by researchers, who author the content that is described in the metadata they analyze. It’s an interconnected supply chain of users large and small, occasional and entirely reliant on regular querying.

Our Perspectives blog series highlights different members of our diverse, global community at Crossref. We learn more about their lives and how they came to know and work with us, and we hear insights about the scholarly research landscape in their country, the challenges they face, and their plans for the future.

One of the main motivators for funders registering grants with Crossref is to simplify the process of research reporting with more automatic matching of research outputs to specific awards. In March 2022, we developed a simple approach for linking grants to research outputs and analysed how many such relationships could be established. In January 2023, we repeated this analysis to see how the situation changed within ten months. Interested? Read on!

Why the focus on funding information?

We are often asked who uses Crossref metadata and for what. One common use case is researchers in bibliometrics and scientometrics (among other fields) doing meta analyses on the entire corpus of records. As we pass the 10 year mark for the Funder Registry and 5 years of funders joining Crossref as members to register their grants, it’s worth a look at some recent research that focuses specifically on funding information. After all, there is funding behind so much scholarly work it seems obvious that it would be routinely documented in the scholarly record. But it often isn’t and that’s a problem. These sources make clear the need for accurate funding information and the problems that the lack of it creates.

Some small organizations who want to register metadata for their research and participate in Crossref are not able to do so due to financial, technical, or language barriers. To attempt to reduce these barriers we have developed several programs to help facilitate membership. One of the most significant—and successful—has been our Sponsor program.

Sponsors are organizations that are generally not producing scholarly content themselves but work with or publish on behalf of groups of smaller organizations that wish to join Crossref but face barriers to do so independently.  Sponsors work directly with Crossref in order to provide billing, technical, and, if applicable, language support to Members.

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. Building a network for the global community must include input from all of the global community. 

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. While this post does respond to the OSTP guidelines point-by-point, the information here applies to all funding bodies in all countries. It will be equally useful for publishers and other systems that operate in the scholarly research ecosystem.