Metadata is one of the most important tools needed to communicate with each other about science and scholarship. It tells the story of research that travels throughout systems and subjects and even to future generations. We have metadata for organising and describing content, metadata for provenance and ownership information, and metadata is increasingly used as signals of trust.
Following our panel discussion on the same subject at the ALPSP University Press Redux conference in May 2024, in this post we explore the idea that metadata, once considered important mostly for discoverability, is now a vital element used for evidence and the integrity of the scholarly record.
For the third year in a row, Crossref hosted a roundtable on research integrity prior to the Frankfurt book fair. This year the event looked at Crossmark, our tool to display retractions and other post-publication updates to readers.
Since the start of 2024, we have been carrying out a consultation on Crossmark, gathering feedback and input from a range of members. The roundtable discussion was a chance to check and refine some of the conclusions we’ve come to, and gather more suggestions on the way forward.
https://doi.org/10.13003/ief7aibi
In our previous blog post in this series, we explained why no metadata matching strategy can return perfect results. Thankfully, however, this does not mean that it’s impossible to know anything about the quality of matching. Indeed, we can (and should!) measure how close (or far) we are from achieving perfection with our matching. Read on to learn how this can be done!
How about we start with a quiz?
We’re in year two of the Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability (RCFS) research. This report provides an update on progress to date, specifically on research we’ve conducted to better understand the impact of our fees and possible changes.
Crossref is in a good financial position with our current fees, which haven’t increased in 20 years. This project is seeking to future-proof our fees by:
Making fees more equitable Simplifying our complex fee schedule Rebalancing revenue sources In order to review all aspects of our fees, we’ve planned five projects to look into specific aspects of our current fees that may need to change to achieve the goals above.
The DOI error report is sent immediately when a user informs us that they’ve seen a DOI somewhere which doesn’t resolve to a website.
The DOI error report is used for making sure your DOI links go where they’re supposed to. When a user clicks on a DOI that has not been registered, they are sent to a form that collects the DOI, the user’s email address, and any comments the user wants to share. We compile the DOI error report daily using those reports and comments, and send it via email to the technical contact at the member responsible for the DOI prefix as a .csv attachment.
If you would like the DOI error report to be sent to a different person, please contact us.
The DOI error report .csv file contains (where provided by the user):
DOI - the DOI being reported
URL - the referring URL
REPORTED-DATE - date the DOI was initially reported
USER-EMAIL - email of the user reporting the error
COMMENTS
We find that approximately 2/3 of reported errors are ‘real’ problems. Common reasons why you might get this report include:
you’ve published/distributed a DOI but haven’t registered it
the DOI you published doesn’t match the registered DOI
a link was formatted incorrectly (a . at the end of a DOI, for example)
a user has made a mistake (confusing 1 for l or 0 for O, or cut-and-paste errors)
What should I do with my DOI error report?
Review the .csv file attached to your emailed report, and make sure that no legitimate DOIs are listed. Any legitimate DOIs found in this report should be registered immediately. When a DOI reported via the form is registered, we’ll send out an alert to the reporting user (if they’ve shared their email address with us).
I keep getting DOI error reports for DOIs that I have not published, what do I do about this?
It’s possible that someone is trying to link to your content with the wrong DOI. If you do a web search for the reported DOI you may find the source of your problem - we often find incorrect linking from user-provided content like Wikipedia, or from DOIs inadvertently distributed by members to PubMed. If it’s still a mystery, please contact us.
Page owner: Isaac Farley | Last updated 2024-July-19
