2025 June 17
Evolving the preprint evaluation world with Sciety
This post is based on an interview with Sciety team at eLife.
A Schematron report tells you if there’s a metadata quality issue with your records.
Schematron is a pattern-based XML validation language. We try to stop the deposit of metadata with obvious issues, but we can’t catch everything because publication practices are so varied. For example, most family names in our database that end with jr are the result of a publisher including a suffix (Jr) in a family name, but there are of course surnames ending with ‘jr’.
We do a weekly post-registration metadata quality check on all journal, book, and conference proceedings submissions, and record the results in the schematron report. If we spot a problem we’ll alert your technical contact via email. Any identified errors may affect overall metadata quality and negatively affect queries for your content. Errors are aggregated and sent out weekly via email in the schematron report.
The report contains links (organized by title) to .xml files containing error details. The XML files can be downloaded and processed programmatically, or viewed in a web browser:
Download Crossref’s Schematron rules for batch processing