Blog

Underreporting of matched references in Crossref metadata

Geoffrey Bilder

Geoffrey Bilder – 2019 February 05

In APIsCitationMetadata

TL;DR

About 11% of available references in records in our OAI-PMH & REST API don’t have DOIs when they should. We have deployed a fix, but it is running on billions of records, and so we don’t expect it to be complete until mid-April.

Note that the Cited-by API that our members use appears to be unaffected by this problem.

What can often change, but always stays the same?

Hello. Isaac here again to talk about what you can tell just by looking at the prefix of a DOI. Also, as we get a lot of title transfers at this time of year, I thought I’d clarify the difference between a title transfer and a prefix transfer, and the impact of each.

Resolutions 2019: Journal Title Transfers = Metadata Manager

UPDATE, 12 December 2022
Due to the scheduled sunsetting of Metadata Manager, this title transfer process has been deprecated. Please find detailed guidance for transferring titles on our documentation site here.

When you thought about your resolutions for 2019, Crossref probably didn’t cross your mind—but, maybe it should have…

Newly approved membership terms will replace existing agreement

In its July 2018 meeting, the Crossref Board voted unanimously to approve and introduce a new set of membership terms. At the same meeting, the board also voted to change the description of membership eligibility in our Bylaws, officially broadening our remit beyond publishers, in line with current practice and positioning us for future growth.

Good, better, best. Never let it rest.

Best practices seem to be having a moment. In the ten years since the Books Advisory Group first created a best practice guide for books, the community beyond Crossref has developed or updated at least 17 best practice resources, as collected here by the Metadata 2020 initiative. (Full disclosure: I co-chair its Best Practices group.)

Metadata Manager: Members, represent!

Over 100 Million unique scholarly works are distributed into systems across the research enterprise 24/7 via our APIs at a rate of around 633 Million queries a month. Crossref is broadcasting descriptions of these works (metadata) to all corners of the digital universe.

100,000,000 records - thank you!

100,000,000. Yes, it’s a really big number—and you helped make it happen. We’d like to say thank you to all our members, without your commitment and contribution we would not be celebrating this significant milestone. It really is no small feat.

Where does publisher metadata go and how is it used?

Earlier this week, colleagues from Crossref, ScienceOpen, and OPERAS/OpenEdition joined forces to run a webinar on “Where does publisher metadata go and how is it used?”.

Leaving the house - where preprints go

“Pre-prints” are sometimes neither Pre nor Print (c.f. https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.11408.1, but they do go on and get published in journals. While researchers may have different motivations for posting a preprint, such as establishing a record of priority or seeking rapid feedback, the primary motivation appears to be timely sharing of results prior to journal publication.

So where in fact do preprints get published?

3,2,1… it’s ‘lift-off’ for Participation Reports

Metadata is at the heart of all our services. With a growing range of members participating in our community—often compiling or depositing metadata on behalf of each other—the need to educate and express obligations and best practice has increased. In addition, we’ve seen more and more researchers and tools making use of our APIs to harvest, analyze and re-purpose the metadata our members register, so we’ve been very aware of the need to be more explicit about what this metadata enables, why, how, and for whom.