FAQs on Crossref

Help with reports

Patricia Feeney — Thu, 12 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I love reports but you never send me any - what’s up?

Emailed reports come from reports@crossref.org. You should make sure the emails aren’t being caught by your spam filter. It’s also possible that we don’t have current contact information for your organization, or you aren’t the designated reports person in our database. Contact us and we’ll sort it out for you.

I hate reports, can you stop emailing them to me?

We can’t stop them entirely - they’re important! We can send reports to a different email address. If you don’t find our reports useful, please let us know and we’ll see what we can do.

I need information about something that’s not covered by your reports, can you help me?

Maybe. You can get a lot of information out of our REST API. If that doesn’t suite your needs, contact us and we’ll see how we can help.

What does this email mean?

We send out a few reports intended to help you keep your metadata records up to date. Some are sent by email, some are available on our website. The reports delivered via email are:

DOI error report questions

You sent me a DOI error report - what do I do with it?

You should review the .csv file attached to your emailed report, and make sure that no ‘real’ DOIs are listed. Any DOIs included in your report have not been registered.

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 Google 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 publishers to PubMed. If it’s still a mystery, contact us.

Resolution report questions

What should I do with my resolution report?

The Resolution report gives you an overview of DOI resolution traffic, and can identify problems with your DOI links. Review our resolution report guide for details.

My Resolution report tells me I have a high resolution failure rate, what should I do?

The overall resolution failure rate is around 2-4%. If you exceed that, you should take a close look at the .csv file of failed DOIs attached to your account and make sure the DOIs listed do not need to be registered. New members are often concerned about resolution rates. If your overall number of resolutions is low, a few bad DOI clicks can lead to a high failure rate. If you are registering your content on time, you don’t need to worry.

If you aren’t able to determine the source of the failed DOIs, we can run additional reports to tell where the resolutions are coming from. Unfortunately our resolution logs often do not have referring URL information so we’re not always able to determine the source of resolution failures.

Why is this DOI on my Resolution report failed DOI list? It is registered.

We send you all failed resolutions from the preceding month, even if the content has been registered. If an unregistered DOI is clicked on December 5 but not registered until December 6, we count that as a resolution failure. If you find a lot of registered DOIs in your failed DOI list, you should make sure you aren’t distributing your DOIs before they have been registered.

Will a high resolution failure rate impact my membership?

It won’t impact your membership status (unless you’re truly negligent and regularly distribute DOIs without registering them) but a Crossref membership is of limited value if you don’t register your DOIs and provide quality metadata.

I want to know the number of clicks for each DOI, can you give me that?

We aren’t currently able to provide that level of detail but may do so in the future.

My resolution numbers are high (or low) this month - how can I get more information?

We can run a report to identify the top IP addresses accessing your DOIs, contact support@crossref.org

What am I supposed to do with this ‘failed DOIs’ list?

The failed DOI .csv attached to your Resolution Report contains a list of all DOIs with failed resolution attempts. This means, if a user clicks on a DOI with your DOI prefix and the DOI is not registered, it will be included on your report.

There’s a certain amount of noise with these reports (resolutions from crawlers or automated processes) but they quite often point to problems so please pay attention to them.

Where do the resolution report statistics come from?

Resolution statistics are based on the number of DOI resolutions made through the DOI proxy server (https://doi.org/) on a month-by-month basis. These statistics give an indication of the traffic generated by users clicking DOIs. CNRI (the organization that manages the DOI resolver) sends us resolution logs at the end of every month and we pass along a selection of the data to you. We do our best to filter out obvious crawlers and machine activity.

What do you mean by “unique DOI”

The “unique DOI” number is the number of distinct DOIs that have been resolved. If your report lists 20 resolutions and 1 unique DOI, this means 1 DOI was resolved 20 times.

Other reports

How often are the depositor reports updated?

The index page is updated weekly. Title-level reports are updated dynamically.

Do you have depositor reports for standards, dissertations, preprints, etc?

We currently only have depositor reports for journals, books, and conference proceedings.

I received a Conflict report alert, what do I do with this?

A ‘conflict’ can happen when two (or more) records are created with identical metadata. Read more about conflicts and your conflict report in our technical documentation.

What is ‘Schematron’

Schematron is a pattern-based XML validation language, more information is available at http://www.schematron.com/.

Why do you have a special metadata quality report, can’t you just stop this stuff from being registered?

We try to block obvious issues but because of a diversity of publication practices there are some things we can’t block. For example, most surnames in our database that end with ‘jr’ are the result of a publisher including a suffix (Jr.) in a surname, but there are of course surnames ending with ‘jr’.

More questions? Review other FAQs or visit our Support Center to open a support ticket or review detailed technical documentation.

Help with multiple resolution

Patricia Feeney — Wed, 14 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

How much does Multiple Resolution cost?

Nothing. There are no fees associated with multiple resolution.

How do I update my Multiple Resolution URLs?

If you are the primary depositor, the primary URL may be updated through usual means. If you need to update a secondary URL you’ll need to re-send the secondary XML file to us with the updated URLs included. When updating, note that we need the item label value and the depositor login to be consistent with those used in the previous update - this is how we know what URL to update.

I want my links to go to one place now - how do I turn off multiple resolution?

You can remove secondary URLs by re-submitting your secondary URL deposit with an empty <item/> tag. Be sure the depositor supplying the XML is the same depositor who submitted the initial registration. If you wish to suspend multiple resolution activity entirely, you may supply a “lock” flag to remove all secondary URLs and prevent future secondary URL updates. Details are available in our technical documentation.

How does multiple resolution affect my resolution statistics?

A click on a multiple resolution DOI is still a single click and your resolution reports will reflect that. If you keep track of incoming traffic, multiple resolution clicks will be coming from an interim page instead of the DOI resolver. The interim page is hosted by Crossref (sample URL: http://www.crossref.org/iPage?doi=10.5555%2Fmrtest).

What if I want to do multiple resolution but sometimes want to send people directly to my site?

You can bypass the interim page by appending a label parameter to your DOI link. To force the DOI to resolve to the primary (original) host location, add the locatt=mode:legacy parameter at the end of the URL, for example:

https://doi.org/10.50505/200806091300?locatt=mode:legacy

To force the DOI to resolve to a secondary URL, add locatt=label:HOST-XYZ where ‘HOST-XYZ’ is the lable supplied in the secondary URL deposit, for example:

https://doi.org/10.50505/200806091300?locatt=label:HOST-XYZ

More information about the role of the DOI proxy in multiple resolution is available in our technical documentation.

What if I want to use different URLs based on where the user is coming from - do you support country codes?

Yes we do! You’ll need to supply a distinct URL with the appropriate country code - details are available in our technical documentation.

More questions? Review other FAQs or visit our Support Center to open a support ticket or review detailed technical documentation.

Help depositing metadata

Patricia Feeney — Sat, 09 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Here are some common questions (and answers) about content registration

How do I register my content?

You’ll need to send us your metadata via an XML deposit or using our web form. Note that you don’t send us the content itself – you create a metadata record that links persistently (via a persistent identifier) to the content on your site or hosting platform. Step-by-step instructions are available in the Content Registration guide.

What is my DOI suffix?

You get to decide what suffixes to use for your identifiers, we don’t supply them for you - some examples are available in the Content Registration guide.

What types of content can I register?

You can register journals and journal articles, books and book chapters, conference proceedings and papers, reports, working papers, standards, dissertations, datasets, and preprints.

I messed up - how do I correct my metadata record?

You can update your metadata by re-submitting your metadata deposit with the corrections included. Be sure to include all metadata in your deposit as any existing metadata will be overwritten. Some types of metadata may be updated in segments, review our resource deposit page for details. If you’ve registered the wrong DOI for an item we aren’t able to change the suffix of a DOI once it’s been registered. Instead, you’ll need to do the following: 1. Register the correct DOI 2. Alias the incorrect DOI to the correct DOI (or ask support to do this for you) The incorrect DOI will then be redirected to the newly registered DOI.

What does this error message mean?

You may run into error messages when reviewing your submission logs - common errors are listed in our support documentation. We validate titles and ISSN/ISBN to ensure the data we collect is consistent and accurate. If you’ve acquired a title and are registering or updating the content, or have otherwise made changes to your title data, you may see ISBN or ISSN-related errors.

My DOI is not working - what do I do?

You should first confirm your registration attempt was successful by reviewing your submission logs. Review any reported errors as needed. If your logs confirm your registration was successful, you can confirm that your DOI is linking by entering the DOI URL in your browser (for example: https://doi.org/10.5555/12345678).

More questions? Review other FAQs or contact our support team.

Help updating metadata

Patricia Feeney — Sat, 09 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Here are some common questions (and answers) about updating and maintaining your metadata records.

My content has moved, how do I update my URLs?

You can update your URLs by re-registering your content with the new URLs included, or send us a tab-separated list of DOIs and URLs and we’ll update them for you. If you are providing a tab-separate list, we can usually process your request within 24 hours. If you need your URLs updated on a specific day or have a large number of URLs to update (over 100,000) please to coordinate the update schedule with Support to avoid delays. We can provide a list of your existing DOIs and URLs if needed.

How do I tell you about my title change?

If you need to correct a journal, book, or conference proceeding title, send us the changes and we’ll update our records. If you need to change an article, paper, or chapter title, you must update your metadata with the changes.

Do I need to create a new DOI if I’ve missed something or provided incorrect metadata?

No, you can always update your metadata to make corrections or to provide missing data.

How do I update my metadata?

Re-submit your metadata record with the updates included. Be sure to supply the correct DOI in your submission to ensure we update the appropriate record. You may update your metadata records as often as needed at no additional fee.

Before you update:

Note that the value included in the <timestamp> element must be incremented each time a DOI is updated.
When making an update you must supply all the bibliographic metadata for record being updated, not just the fields that need to be changed. During the update process we overwrite the existing metadata with the new information you submit, and will insert null values for any fields not supplied in the update. This means, for example, that if you’ve supplied an online publication date in your initial deposit, you’ll need to include that date in subsequent deposits if you wish to retain it.

Some pieces of metadata may be added or updated independently using a resource-only deposit. These includes funding, license, Crossmark, relationship, and citation list metadata. See our technical documentation for details.

Can I delete records and/or DOIs?

No. DOIs are truly persistent. If you find yourself in a bind, review this topic in our technical documentation then contact us with the details of your problem.

More questions? Review other FAQs or contact our support team.