Isaac joined Crossref in April 2018 having previously been a member. He worked for the Society of Exploration Geophysicists as their Digital Publications Manager. In addition to more than five years of experience in digital publishing, he has previous experience in community building, volunteer engagement, and education. In 2024, Isaac took on the expanded role on the Senior Management Team of Head of Participation and Support. He enjoys writing, music, podcasts, his family, and the outdoors, in no particular order. Isaac works remotely from Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Isaac Farley, Thursday, Jan 25, 2024
In Content RegistrationOpen SupportReportsReferencesPersistenceResearch Nexus
My name is Isaac Farley, Crossref Technical Support Manager. We’ve got a collective post here from our technical support team - staff members and contractors - since we all have what I think will be a helpful perspective to the question: ‘What’s that one thing that you wish you could snap your fingers and make clearer and easier for our members?’ Within, you’ll find us referencing our Community Forum, the open support platform where you can get answers from all of us and other Crossref members and users. We invite you to join us there; how about asking your next question of us there? Or, simply let us know how we did with this post. We’d love to hear from you!
Quality metadata is foundational to the research nexus and all Crossref services. When inaccuracies creep in, these create problems that get compounded down the line. No wonder that reports of metadata errors from authors, members, and other metadata users are some of the most common messages we receive into the technical support team (we encourage you to continue to report these metadata errors).
We make members’ metadata openly available via our APIs, which means people and machines can incorporate it into their research tools and services - thus, we all want it to be accurate. Manuscript tracking services, search services, bibliographic management software, library systems, author profiling tools, specialist subject databases, scholarly sharing networks - all of these (and more) incorporate scholarly metadata into their software and services. They use our APIs to help them get the most complete, up-to-date set of metadata from all of our publisher members. And of course, members themselves are able to use our free APIs too (and often do; our members account for the vast majority of overall metadata usage).
We inadvertently deleted data in our authentication sandbox that stored member credentials for our Test Admin Tool - test.crossref.org. We’re restoring credentials using our production data, but this will mean that some members have credentials that are out-of-sync. Please contact support@crossref.org if you have issues accessing test.crossref.org.
Earlier today the credentials in our authentication sandbox were inadvertently deleted. This was a mistake on our end that has resulted in those credentials no longer being stored for our members using our Test Admin Tool - test.crossref.org.
Isaac Farley, Wednesday, Sep 8, 2021
We missed an error that led to resource resolution URLs of some 500,000+ records to be incorrectly updated. We have reverted the incorrect resolution URLs affected by this problem. And, we’re putting in place checks and changes in our processes to ensure this does not happen again.
Our technical support team was contacted in late June by Wiley about updating resolution URLs for their content. It’s a common request of our technical support team, one meant to make the URL update process more efficient, but this was a particularly large request. Shortly thereafter, we were provided with nearly 1,200 separate files by Atypon on behalf of Wiley in order to update the resolution URLs of ~9 million records. We manually spot checked over 50 of these files, because, prior to this issue, our technical support team did not have a mechanism to automatically check for errors. That labor intensive review did not turn up any problems. That is, those 50 samples had no errors with the headers, like were found later.
Some of you who have submitted content to us during the first two months of 2021 may have experienced content registration delays. We noticed; you did, too.
The time between us receiving XML from members, to the content being registered with us and the DOI resolving to the correct resolution URL, is usually a matter of minutes. Some submissions take longer - for example, book registrations with large reference lists, or very large files from larger publishers can take up to 24 to 48 hours to process.
