Funding is one of the key enablers of the research lifecycle, but has been one of the hardest parts of the scholarly record to identify, describe and connect. This is slowly changing as we have recently reached a very exciting milestone for Crossref’s Grant Linking System (GLS). What makes it remarkable is not only the numbers reached, but where the data comes from. Research funders, who joined Crossref as members, have actively contributed more than 200,000 grants to the Research Nexus (Figure 1).
We are pleased to announce the re-launch of the Crossref Service Providers Program. From today, we are accepting applications from organisations providing tools for metadata registration to Crossref members. Participation in this program is free and the application involves an accreditation process to determine eligibility and the appropriate participation tier.
As a membership organisation, Crossref supports its members to provide rich and complete metadata which facilitates integrity judgements, increases discoverability, linking among scholarly objects and activities, and improves transparency. Service providers are key collaborators in this work because they enable our members to adopt better metadata practices.
Three years ago, we asked our members what they needed from Crossref’s metadata. We received confirmation that we were going in the right direction, as well as some new ideas to explore. This helped set the course for our metadata development work since then, and continues to guide where we’re headed next.
For many years, PubPub has made it possible for communities to assign DOIs to a range of outputs and component Pubs. Knowledge Futures and Crossref are building together to test the limits of what’s possible for high-volume, high-granularity DOI management. That means fast prototypes, real building, and learning through the process.
Pending publication is a way of creating a DOI and depositing metadata for a content item any time after a manuscript has been accepted but before it is published online. This is possible for all standard record types (such as articles, books, conference proceedings).
Because a pending publication has not yet been published, its DOI will resolve to a publicly-available Crossref-hosted landing page. Once the work is published online, this same DOI will resolve to the URL for that content.
The pending publication record type serves as a temporary placeholder for your content - like a “coming soon” or preview of the great work to come. For a pending publication, you register basic metadata for your content item before registering all the formal metadata that comes with a version of record. Take care not to share a DOI before it has been deposited with us, or it will not resolve for your readers, and will lead to a failed resolution in your resolution report. Learn more about the pending publication consultation.
Use cases for pending publication
Before the pending publication record type existed, we recommended you to register DOIs at the time content was published online, or shortly after. As the communication needs of our members (researchers, funders, institutions, and publishers) evolve, we have created this new solution to aid you and your work, and allow you to register DOIs before content is published online. With pending publication:
Members can:
address timing issues related to press embargos
publicly establish scholarly precedence for their articles
meet the conditions in full for new funder policies and mandates, which focus on acceptance as a key event to report on
ensure that institutional repositories use the DOI to link to the member-stewarded copy
Researchers can provide formal evidence of all publications in employment and grant applications
Funders can fully track all publications funded by their research grants
Institutions can fully track the scholarly output of their faculty members
Technology vendors that support scholarly research management can account for all outputs
How does pending publication work?
When registering your publication as pending there are two things you need to do:
Register a subset of the metadata (as a minimum: member name, journal title, and accepted date) under the Pending Publication record type.
After you do this, the DOI will resolve to a Crossref-hosted landing page displaying your logo, a banner showing the manuscript has been accepted for publication, and the metadata you’ve provided. As with all registered content, pending publication metadata will be publicly available in our XML API (and updated as you update your metadata records). Unfortunately, we do not yet support pending publications in our REST API.
Once your work is published, you need to register the full metadata for the work - this is not an automatic process. You must update the metadata for each pending publication DOI, so that each DOI will resolve directly to the content (and not the pending publication landing page).
Pending publication workflow diagram
Crossmark participants please note that you can deposit Crossmark metadata at any point, but during the Beta version of the pending publication rollout, the Crossmark badge will not be displayed to readers.
Fees for pending publications
Content Registration (metadata deposit) fees still apply, but there are no additional fees for using pending publication. So, you’ll be charged once when you register the pending publication, but any subsequent updates, including the update on publication, are not charged.
History
Pending publication has been supported since 2019 and was designed in response to community feedback:
