DataCite, the registration agency for the DOI identifier, has announced a new version of its metadata schema number 4.6.
A summary of the main new features:
New “Project” value for the resourceTypeGeneral field.
This update allows organizations registering DOIs for research activities or projects, including the RAiD consortium, to use a dedicated value that is more specific than “Text” or “Other”.
New value “Award” for the resourceTypeGeneral field
Earlier this year, DataCite developed guidelines for registering DataCite DOIs for funding and other types of research support. The new value is intended to help consistently identify various types of support – grants, fellowships, and other types of awards.
Use of RelatedIdentifier to link to RRID and CSTR identifiers
The relatedIdentifierType field can now be used to link DOIs to Research Resource Identifiers (RRID) and Common Science and Technology Resources (CSTR) identifiers. RRID identifiers are used to uniquely identify key inputs to an experiment, especially biological resources, and associated instruments. CSTR identifiers are widely used in China for scientific and technical resources.
New value “Translator” for the contributorType field, new value “IsTranslationOf” and “HasTranslation” for RelatedIdentfier
It is now possible to add translators as contributors. It is also possible to indicate the relationship between the original version of a work and its translation.
New “Coverage” value for the dateType field
Allows you to include time coverage information in the Date property, either as a single date or as a date range.
Specification of allowed values for language codes
A more precise description of what values are accepted as language codes.
You can read more about the changes on the DataCite blog: https://datacite.org/blog/announcing-datacite-metadata-schema-4-6/
More about the DataCite metadata schema and its new version 4.6 can be found here: https://schema.datacite.org/