eLife is proud to be named one of the inaugural winners of the Crossref Metadata Excellence and Enrichment Awards, recognising its leadership and innovation in delivering complete, high-quality metadata across the research it publishes. The announcement was made today at Crossref’s Midyear Community Update, where eLife was named among six outstanding recipients across the two categories: metadata excellence and metadata enrichment.
Complete and rich metadata enhances the discoverability, usability and impact of research. Crossref’s Metadata Excellence and Enrichment Awards, aim to celebrate exemplary metadata practices among its members. They are part of Crossref’s broader mission to co-create the Research Nexus – a vision for an open, interconnected network of relationships that make research objects easier to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse.
eLife has been recognised in the metadata excellence category due to its consistently high metadata completeness. For example, 98% of eLife journal articles include ROR IDs for author and editor affiliations, 99% contain authenticated ORCID iDs, and extensive use of Crossref’s relationships ensures machine readable connections to other research outputs such as preprints, datasets and code.
“A lot of our efforts go toward ensuring our metadata is not only complete, but also meaningful and actionable,” says Fred Atherden, eLife Head of Production Operations. “Metadata is a core part of how research is communicated, not just with humans but with the systems and tools that connect and analyse scholarly information. Being recognised by Crossref is a welcome affirmation of the behind-the-scenes work we do to enable open science.”
eLife took innovative approaches to metadata when it launched the eLife Model for publishing in 2023. This model ends traditional accept–reject decisions after peer review, instead publishing all papers that are sent for review as Reviewed Preprints, along with public reviews and eLife Assessments. Authors can submit revised versions of their Reviewed Preprint, which all remain accessible online. eLife registers a unique digital object identifier (DOI) for each version of the Reviewed Preprint and the Version of Record, alongside an ‘umbrella’ DOI that always resolves to the most up-to-date version. These DOIs all make use of Crossref’s relationships service to link back to previous versions and crucially the preprint itself on the preprint server. This approach follows best practice, enabling citations for specific versions to be tracked accurately while also ensuring transparency of the scholarly record.
eLife was also the first publisher to incorporate grant DOIs into its metadata, facilitating the connection between research outputs and the funding that enabled them, helping to improve transparency and attribution in the research ecosystem.
“Rich metadata improves discoverability of and trust in published works across stakeholder groups, and drives a vast, and growing range of critical activities. Marking our 25th anniversary, we launch the Crossref Metadata Awards to emphasise our community’s role in stewarding the scholarly record, and recognise members, who show dedication to the best metadata practices. We’re delighted to recognise eLife as one of the leaders in metadata best practices.” says Kora Korzec, Crossref Director for Community.
“So much of what makes research discoverable and usable happens behind the scenes,” says Damian Pattinson, eLife Executive Director. “This award shines a light on the importance of metadata, and on the dedicated teams working to ensure that research is connected, citable and accessible to all. Fred and the team at eLife work diligently to uphold the highest standards in our metadata, and this award is a testament to their efforts.”
eLife would like to congratulate the other awardees: Noyam Publishers, GigaScience Press, American Society for Microbiology, and Universidad La Salle Arequipa for the Crossref Metadata Excellence Awards, and Instituto Geologico y Minero de Espana with the Crossref Metadata Enrichment Award.
For more information, please see Crossref’s announcement at https://www.crossref.org/blog/crossref-metadata-awards/.
Media contacts
Emily Packer
eLife
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+441223855373George Litchfield
eLife
g.litchfield@elifesciences.org
About
eLife transforms research communication to create a future where a diverse, global community of scientists and researchers produces open and trusted results for the benefit of all. Independent, not-for-profit and supported by funders, we improve the way science is practised and shared. From the research we publish, to the tools we build, to the people we work with, we’ve earned a reputation for quality, integrity and the flexibility to bring about real change. eLife is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, the Max Planck Society and Wellcome. Learn more at https://elifesciences.org/about.
