Participation Reports help Crossref members drive research further

This article aims to explain the key metadata elements listed in Participation Reports, why it’s important to check them regularly, and how Crossref members can improve their scores. Crossref members register a lot of metadata in Crossref. That metadata is machine-readable, standardized, and then shared across discovery services and author tools. This is important because richer metadata makes content more discoverable and useful to the scholarly community. It’s not always easy to know what metadata Crossref members register in Crossref. This is why Crossref created an easy-to-use tool called Participation Reports to show editors, and researchers the key metadata elements Crossref members register to make their content more useful. The key metadata elements include references and whether they are set to open, ORCID iDs, funding information, Crossmark metadata, licenses, full-text URLs for text-mining, and Similarity Check indexing, as well as abstracts. ROR IDs (Research Organization Registry Identifiers), that identify institutions will be added in the future. This data was always available through the Crossref ’s REST API (Representational State Transfer Application Programming Interface) but is now visualized in Participation Reports. To improve scores, editors should encourage authors to submit ORCIDs in their manuscripts and publishers should register as much metadata as possible to help drive research further.