A Researcher’s Guide to Understanding Metadata Integration in Increasing Discoverability of African Research

Crossref, AfricArxiv, and the Training Centre in Communication (TCC Africa) today announced that they will collaborate to increase awareness of supporting discoverability in Africa through metadata and integrations between repositories and indexing platforms. 

This collaboration will include talks from Crossref staff alongside speakers from AfLia, AfricArXiv, TCC Africa, and AJOL in a three-part webinar series. 

You will learn: 

• Who Crossref is, what they do for the benefit of the scholarly community
• What a DOI is and how publishers and others register research content with Crossref 
• What metadata is and where this information about your research goes
• How people use metadata and how it integrates with scholarly discovery services. 

This webinar series is relevant for publishers, researchers, editors, service providers, hosting platforms, funders, and librarians; really anyone interested in finding out a bit more about what Crossref is and does and how they work with others in the scholarly community. 

This webinar series will be in English. Each webinar will last 60 minutes including time for Q&A. Each session will be recorded and links to the recording and materials will be shared afterward. 

There is no cost to attend, but registration is required.  

Schedule

Times for all three sessions: 6 PM EAT / 5 PM CAT/ 3 PM GMT

Part 1: Introduction to Crossref

Crossref makes research outputs easy to find, cite, assess, and re-use. Learn more about the work we do, how we fit into the scholarly research community, and the importance of metadata. Along with where to get started as a member, the benefits of membership include our collaborative services, and how to find further information and support.

Thursday, 21st April 

Part 2: How Crossref metadata integrates with scholarly research tools and discovery systems 

Learn how Crossref metadata is used in services such as manuscript tracking systems, search services, bibliographic management software, library systems, author profiling tools, specialist subject databases, scholarly sharing networks, and more.

Date: Thursday, 28th April

Part 3: How members work with Crossref to register research content

Learn how publishers and others register their content with Crossref, assign persistent identifiers (DOIs) to their work, and submit rich metadata so that others, from researchers to funders to library discovery systems, find it easier to search and discover research.

Date: Thursday, 5th May

About the Organizers

Crossref makes research objects easy to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse.

We’re a not-for-profit membership organization that exists to make scholarly communications better. We currently work with over 16,000 members across more than 140 countries. Membership in Crossref is open to organizations that produce professional and scholarly materials and content and includes publishers, government agencies, research funders, and many more. Crossref members register their research outputs and contribute their metadata to the global scholarly record. 

Website: https://www.crossref.org.

The Training Centre in Communication (TCC Africa) is the first African-based training center to teach effective communication skills to scientists. TCC Africa is an award-winning Trust, established as a non-profit entity in 2006 and is registered in Kenya.  TCC Africa provides capacity support in improving researchers’ output and visibility through training in scholarly and science communication.
Website: https://www.tcc-africa.org/about.

AfricArXiv is a community-led digital archive for African research, working towards building an African-owned open scholarly repository; a knowledge commons of African scholarly works to catalyze the African Renaissance. We partner with established scholarly repository services to provide a platform for African scientists of any discipline to present their research findings and connect with other researchers on the African continent and globally.
Website: https://info.africarxiv.org/