This past year has been a captivating journey of immersion within the Crossref community, a mix of online interactions and meaningful in-person experiences. From the engaging Sustainability Research and Innovation Conference in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, to the impactful webinars conducted globally, this has been more than just a professional endeavour; it has been a personal exploration of collaboration, insights, and a shared commitment to pushing the boundaries of scholarly communication.
One of the challenges that we face in Labs and Research at Crossref is that, as we prototype various tools, we need the community to be able to test them. Often, this involves asking for deposit to a different endpoint or changing the way that a platform works to incorporate a prototype.
The problem is that our community is hugely varied in its technical capacity and level of ability when it comes to modifying their platform.
When each line of code is written it is surrounded by a sea of context: who in the community this is for, what problem we’re trying to solve, what technical assumptions we’re making, what we already tried but didn’t work, how much coffee we’ve had today. All of these have an effect on the software we write.
By the time the next person looks at that code, some of that context will have evaporated.
It turns out that one of the things that is really difficult at Crossref is checking whether a set of Crossref credentials has permission to act on a specific DOI prefix. This is the result of many legacy systems storing various mappings in various different software components, from our Content System through to our CRM. To this end, I wrote a basic application, credcheck, that will allow you to test a Crossref credential against an API.
If you plan to set up the plugin to register content with Crossref automatically, you’ll need to add your Crossref account credentials into the username and password field in the plugin.
Depositor name - Name of the organization registering the DOIs (note: this field is not authenticated with Crossref)
Depositor email - email address of the individual responsible for registering content with Crossref (note: this field is not authenticated with Crossref)
Username - the Crossref username that will be passed to us to authenticate your submission(s). This might also be an email address - more on role versus user credentials below.
Password - the password associated with your Crossref credentials
Note: if the combination of username and password is incorrect, OJS will return a 401 unauthorized status code error at the time of registration. This error indicates that the username and password are incorrectly entered. That is, they do not match the username and/or password set with Crossref.
If you are using organization-wide, shared role credentials, you can simply add in your shared username and password.
If you are using personal user credentials that are unique to you, you’ll need to add your email address and your role into the username field, and your personal password into the password field. Here’s an example of what this will look like:
In addition to the Crossref XML plugin for OJS, there are also other important plugins that can be enabled in OJS to enrich your metadata records:
Reference linking and deposit plugin - As of OJS 3.1.2, it is possible to enable a reference linking plugin for Crossref. The plugin will use the Crossref API to check against plain text references and locate possible DOIs for articles. The plugin will also allow the display of reference lists on the article landing page in OJS and deposit them as part of your metadata deposit. Linking references is a requirement of Crossref membership.
Crossmark plugin - OJS 3.2 includes support for Crossmark, which gives readers quick and easy access to the current status of an item of content, including any corrections, retractions, or updates to that record.
Funding Metadata plugin - As of OJS 3.1.2, it is possible to enable a funding registry plugin for submitting funding information to Crossref. The plugin will use the Open Funder Registry to check against existing funding agencies. The plugin will include funding information in your Crossref DOI deposits.
Similarity Check plugin - if you are using OJS 3.1.2 or above, you are able to use the Similarity Check plugin. This will enable you to automatically send manuscripts to your iThenticate account to check their similarity to already published content. You will need to be subscribed to Crossref’s Similarity Check service for this to work.
Getting help with OJS plugins
The team at Crossref didn’t create these plugins - they were either created by the team at PKP, or by third party developers. Because of this, we aren’t able to give in-depth help or troubleshooting on problems with these plugins.
If you need more help, you can learn more at PKP’s Crossref OJS Manual, plus there’s a very active PKP Community Forum which has more information on how to modify your OJS instance to submit metadata and register DOIs with Crossref.