As a Datacite member, I’m not very familiar with Crossref schema, however, I’m very interested in learning more about improvements around data citations.
We constantly see papers with references to dataset (i.e. Datacite) DOIs—but the majority of these are lost in the metadata, ending up as unstructured references. I could provide hundreds of examples.
I wonder if you could share some light on this issue—and whether the proposed schema changes help address this?
The changes mostly directly apply to members who submit structured (tagged) reference metadata. They’ll be able to provide dataset-specific metadata, identifiers beyond DOIs, and flag each citation with a publication type. Unstructured references may also be flagged with a publication type and include an identifier.
If a DOI is provided in an unstructured citation we’re usually able to pull it out of the citation and explicitly tag it. If you’re not seeing that within our references, I’d love to see some examples, we’re always trying to improve that process.