The Crossref Grant Linking System (GLS) has been facilitating the registration, sharing and re-use of open funding metadata for six years now, and we have reached some important milestones recently! What started as an interest in identifying funders through the Open Funder Registry evolved to a more nuanced and comprehensive way to share and re-use open funding data systematically. That’s how, in collaboration with the funding community, the Crossref Grant Linking System was developed. Open funding metadata is fundamental for the transparency and integrity of the research endeavour, so we are happy to see them included in the Research Nexus.
Crossref and the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) have been working closely together for many years, sharing resources and supporting our overlapping communities of organisations involved in communicating research. Now we’re delighted to share that we have agreed on a new set of objectives for our partnership, centred on further development of the tools that our shared community relies upon, as well as building capacity to enable richer metadata registration for organisations using the Open Journal Systems (OJS).
To mark Crossref’s 25th anniversary, we launched our first Metadata Awards to highlight members with the best metadata practices.
GigaScience Press, based in Hong Kong, was the leader among small publishers, defined as organisations with less than USD 1 million in publishing revenue or expenses. We spoke with Scott Edmunds, Ph.D., Editor-in-Chief at GigaScience Press, about how discoverability drives their high metadata standards.
What motivates your organisation/team to work towards high-quality metadata? What objectives does it support for your organisation?
Our objective is to communicate science openly and collaboratively, without barriers, to solve problems in a data- and evidence-driven manner through Open Science publishing. High-quality metadata helps us address these objectives by improving the discoverability, transparency, and provenance of the work we publish. It is an integral part of the FAIR principles and UNESCO Open Science Recommendation, playing a role in increasing the accessibility of research for both humans and machines. As one of the authors of the FAIR principles paper and an advisor of the Make Data Count project, I’ve also personally been very conscious to practice what I preach.
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.
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 maintainer: Sara Bowman Last updated: 2022-July-22
