Ticket of the month - January 2025 - Affiliation or Organization?

Content Registration
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Hello, thanks for coming to the community forum and happy 2025.

I’d like to start the year by going through a common mistake in interpretation of the metadata elements we accept in our schema, and that are partially available to deposit through the Web Deposit Form.

The two elements I am referring to are affiliations and organizations. These are very similar but also very different at the same time. They can refer to establishments or groups which can represent an author’s relationship or connection to an establishment or entity. They can also refer to a group of contributors who were involved in a work.

Affiliations

Affiliations are an institution or organization associated with an item. In the examples I am using below, this is the contributor’s institutional affiliation.

You can see an example of this in the XML we accept in one of our example files here: best-practice-examples/journal.article5.3.0.xml · master · crossref / Schema · GitLab

Or in the below example:

<contributors>
    <person_name sequence="first" contributor_role="author">
        <given_name>Minerva</given_name>
        <surname>Housecat</surname>
        <affiliations>
            <institution>
                <institution_name>Department of Energy</institution_name>
                <institution_id type="ror">https://ror.org/01bj3aw27</institution_id>
            </institution>
        </affiliations>
        <ORCID authenticated="true">https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4011-3590</ORCID>
     </person_name>
</contributors>

You can also see the element in our schema here: affiliations

Organization

This element refers to the name of an organization (as opposed to a person) that contributed to an item. If an item was authored by individuals in addition to one or more organizations, people and organizations may be freely intermixed within the contributors’ section of the metadata we accept.

You can see an example of an organization in the contributors’ section of the example XML files we offer here: best-practice-examples/standard5.3.0.xml · master · crossref / Schema · GitLab

<contributors>
     <organization sequence="first" contributor_role="author">Crossref Standards TWG</organization>

In the example above, outside of the lead or first author, the individuals involved in this research have decided that they be recognized as organizational author contributors.

Why is this an issue for web deposit form users?

Unfortunately at the moment the Web Deposit Form doesn’t allow for the adding of affiliations against the authors. This has been confused by some members where the organization field has been used for these instead. It can be confusing if you don’t know the difference between the two, as adding an organization in that contributors’ list seems like it would be correct when looking to deposit affiliations for your contributors.

Here you can see the confusing aspects in the Web Deposit Form screenshot below. I have highlighted the organization sections which can be the issue when users are trying to actually add an author affiliation.

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Our new record registration form can help!

Thankfully, in our new and improved “Registration Form” you can see that we now accept author affiliations in the deposit of journal articles, which will be a huge benefit for our members and also for ourselves in the support team.

In case you missed the link above, here is the URL to the new registration form: Crossref

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I hope this helps for future deposits and allows more metadata correctness regarding the affiliations of contributors.

Thanks for reading,
Paul

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