This blog post is from Lettie Conrad and Michelle Urberg, cross-posted from the The Scholarly Kitchen.
As sponsors of this project, we at Crossref are excited to see this work shared out.
The scholarly publishing community talks a LOT about metadata and the need for high-quality, interoperable, and machine-readable descriptors of the content we disseminate. However, as we’ve reflected on previously in the Kitchen, despite well-established information standards (e.g., persistent identifiers), our industry lacks a shared framework to measure the value and impact of the metadata we produce.
When Crossref began over 20 years ago, our members were primarily from the United States and Western Europe, but for several years our membership has been more global and diverse, growing to almost 18,000 organizations around the world, representing 148 countries.
As we continue to grow, finding ways to help organizations participate in Crossref is an important part of our mission and approach. Our goal of creating the Research Nexus—a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organizations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society—can only be achieved by ensuring that participation in Crossref is accessible to all.
In August 2022, the United States Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memo (PDF) on ensuring free, immediate, and equitable access to federally funded research (a.k.a. the “Nelson memo”). Crossref is particularly interested in and relevant for the areas of this guidance that cover metadata and persistent identifiers—and the infrastructure and services that make them useful.
Funding bodies worldwide are increasingly involved in research infrastructure for dissemination and discovery.
Preprints have become an important tool for rapidly communicating and iterating on research outputs. There is now a range of preprint servers, some subject-specific, some based on a particular geographical area, and others linked to publishers or individual journals in addition to generalist platforms. In 2016 the Crossref schema started to support preprints and since then the number of metadata records has grown to around 16,000 new preprint DOIs per month.
The Metadata Manager tool is in beta and contains many bugs. It’s being deprecated at the end of 2021. We recommend using the web deposit tool as an alternative, or the OJS plugin if your content is hosted on the OJS platform from PKP.
Once you click Deposit, we immediately process the deposit and display the results for accepted and rejected deposits. All deposit records accepted by the system have a live DOI.
All deposit results are archived and available for reference on the Deposit history tab on the top menu bar.
You can also see your deposit history in the admin tool - go to the Administration tab, then the Submissions tab. Metadata Manager deposit filenames begin with MDT. You can even review the XML that Metadata Manager has created your behalf.
Updating existing records and failed deposits
Metadata Manager also makes it easy to update existing records, even if you didn’t use Metadata Manager to make the deposit in the first place. You must add the journal to your workspace before you can update the records associated with it - learn more about setting up a new journal in your workspace.
Accepted and Failed submissions can be updated using the respective tabs in the workspace. Click into the journal, and then click into the article. Add or make changes to the information, and then deposit.
What does the status “warning” in my submission result mean?
When similar metadata is registered for more than one DOI, it’s possible that the additional DOIs are duplicates. Because DOIs are intended to be unique, the potentially duplicated DOI is called a conflict. Learn more about the conflict report.
In Metadata Manager, if you register bibliographic metadata that is very similar to that for an existing DOI, you will see a status “warning” with your submission result. This is accurate.
When you return to your journal workspace in Metadata Manager to review your list of DOIs, the DOI that returned the “warning” will display as “failed”. This is inaccurate, as you can see if you try to resolve the DOI in question. We are working on improving the wording in this part of the process to make it less confusing.
Page owner: Sara Bowman | Last updated 2022-July-22
