Current Affairs

A Look at the “Story of Crossref’s Metadata Development”

June 21, 2026

From a Crossref Post by Patricia Feeney:

A significant update is nearly here. Schema 5.5 will expand contributor metadata to support multiple roles per contributor, and will introduce support for CRediT — the ANSI/NISO taxonomy for contributor roles. This means that an individual’s complete contribution to a research output can finally be described in our metadata, rather than flattened into a single role or omitted entirely. The schema isn’t released yet, but the final version of the XML schema is available in our GitLab repository for those who want to get a head start.

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Our next planned major update will build substantially on the contributor work in version 5.5. In the next version (6.0) we will remodel names to expand our current limited structure to support a variety of name types as well as alternate names. We’ll also expand the contributor identifiers we collect to include ISNI and Wikidata identifiers, better supporting contributors for whom an ORCID is not possible. Our organizational contributor will be remodeled as well to include organization-level identifiers like ROR.

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Beyond 6.0, we’re exploring further support for provenance in metadata (to establish who is doing what to a metadata record), a rethinking of how we handle dates so that they better capture the lifecycle of a research object, better support for research objects we don’t yet fully support, and making our metadata inputs more consistent. The Metadata Development roadmap has full details on what’s being explored and prioritized.

Learn More, Read the Complete Post (about 750 words)

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