eLife among winners of Crossref Metadata Excellence Awards
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. 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.”
Fred Atherden, eLife Head of Production Operations.
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.