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.
The American Society for Microbiology (ASM) has earned recognition in Crossref’s Participation Reports for its exceptional metadata coverage among large publishing members––an achievement built on intentional change, technical investment, and collaborative work. In this Q&A, the ASM team shares what that journey looked like, the challenges they’ve tackled, and how centering metadata has helped them better connect research with the global scientific community.
Some of the typical users (outer) and uses (inner) of Crossref metadata
People using Crossref metadata need it for all sorts of reasons including metaresearch (researchers studying research itself such as through bibliometric analyses), publishing trends (such as finding works from an individual author or reviewer), or incorporation into specific databases (such as for discovery and search or in subject-specific repositories), and many more detailed use cases.
All Crossref metadata is open and available for reuse without restriction. Our 170 million records include information about research objects like articles, grants and awards, preprints, conference papers, book chapters, datasets, and more. The information covers elements like titles, contributors, descriptions, dates, references, connecting identifiers such as Crossref DOIs, ROR IDs and ORCID iDs, together with all sorts of metadata that helps to determine provenance, trust, and reusability—such as funding, clinical trial, and license information.
Anyone can retrieve and use >170 million records without restriction. So there are no fees to use the metadata but if you really rely on it then you might like to sign up for Metadata Plus which offers greater predictability, higher rate limits, monthly data dumps in XML and JSON, and access to dedicated support from our team.
Options for retrieving metadata
All Crossref metadata is completely open and available to all. Whatever your experience with metadata, there are several tools, techniques, and support guides to help—whether you’re just beginning, exploring occasionally, or need an ongoing reliable integration.
BEGINNING?
You’ve heard Crossref metadata might be useful and want to know where to start.
You rely on Crossref metadata and need to incorporate it into your product at scale.
You might want to jump straight to subscribing to Metadata Plus, which is our premium service for the REST API that comes with monthly data dumps in JSON and XML, higher rate limits, and fast support. But we always recommend that you try out the public version first to make sure it will work for your product. If you’re looking for a single DOI record in multiple formats (e.g. RDF, BibTex, CSL) you can use content negotiation.
Watch the animated introduction to metadata retrieval
