Crossref adopts the Scholix Metadata Schema for Exchange of Scholarly Communication Links
The Crossref challenge runs two ways. Our publisher members register metadata with us, and when that metadata cites related research data, whether as a reference or as the data underlying the article itself, we want to collect the information in a standardized format (with related identifiers). We also want to let publishers do so in a way that it enables us to let the repository hosting the data know that the data was cited. From the publisher side, there’s also interest in seeing which datasets reference publications - in some cases these links are bidirectional and in some cases they are not.
Being able to harvest both article/data links and data/article links in a standard format then helps this information to be used by consumers of bulk data-article links to build services or metrics and graph and link aggregators or hubs. We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel to communicate this information. Starting from scratch to define a metadata format, minimally required information etc. takes a lot of time and effort. Buy-in from the community takes even more.sing existing initiatives and recommendations is frequently our preferred method.
We adopted the recommendation from the Scholarly Link Exchange (Scholix) WG. This group created the Scholix metadata specification for the expression of scholarly links between literature and datasets which is exactly what we were trying to achieve.
We work closely with our community, including publisher members and with the team at DataCite. They involved us in the Scholix Working Group so that we could provide input and implement information on article/data links in a way that would standardise the information across different stakeholders to maximise use of the information by any interested party. The data we provide and the recommendations adopted are openly available, both of which are important to our support of open scholarly infrastructure.
One of the main benefits of Crossref adopting the Scholix format is that it creates efficiencies for publishers in sharing their article to dataset links so that they can be used by the wider community in a standard way. When publishers send us links to data in their Crossref metadata in specific formats, we do the rest - making these links available via Event Data and therefore in the Scholix format, too. So, any publisher registering this information with us is automatically providing Scholix-compliant information, without having to do additional conversion/workflow tasks which can have time and therefore cost associated with them. Rachael Lammey (Programme Manager at CrossRef)
Read the full adoption story here >>
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