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.
On behalf of the Nominating Committee, I’m pleased to share the slate of candidates for the 2025 board election.
Each year we do an open call for board interest. This year, the Nominating Committee received 51 submissions from members worldwide to fill five open board seats.
We have four large member seats and one small member seat open for election in 2025. We maintain a balanced board of 8 large member seats and 8 small member seats. Size is determined based on the organization’s membership tier (small members fall in the $0-$1,650 tiers and large members in the $3,900 - $50,000 tiers).
In 2022, we wrote a blog post “Rethinking staff travel, meetings, and events” outlining our new approach to staff travel, meetings, and events with the goal of not going back to ‘normal’ after the pandemic and said that in the future we would report on our efforts to balance online and virtual events, work life balance for staff, and track our carbon emissions. In December 2024, we wrote a blog post, “Summary of the environmental impact of Crossref,” that gave an overview of 2023 and provided the first report on our carbon emissions. Our report on 2023 only just made it into 2024, so we are happy to report on 2024 a little sooner in the year.
To date, there are about 100 Crossref members who have made use of our co-access service for one or more of their books. The service was designed to be a last-resort measure when multiple parties - book publishers, aggregators, and other members - had rights to register book content. Unfortunately, the service allowed members to register multiple DOIs for shared books and book chapters, thereby violating our own core tenet of one DOI per content item. We should not have created a service that violated that tenet, resulting in duplicate DOIs. As we are able to offer an alternative in the form of the multiple resolution service, it is time to switch co-access off. Among other benefits – for the publisher and the authors, creation of a single DOI for each item, regardless of where it might be hosted, will result in more accurate citation counts and usage statistics. We’re retiring co-access at the end of 2026.
Registering new articles and working with volumes/issues
Documentation Menu
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
