Isaac Farley

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.

TL;DR 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. The details 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.

TL;DR 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. How we got here 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.

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.

This blog is long overdue. My apologies for the delay. I promised you an update in February as a follow up to the resolution reports blog originally published in December by my colleague Jon Stark and me. Clearly we (I) missed that February projection, but I’m here today to provide said update. We received many great suggestions from our members as a result of the call for comments. For those of you who took time to write: thank you! We took extra time to review and evaluate all of your comments and recommendations. We have reached a decision about the major proposed change - removal of all filters from monthly resolution reports - as well as a couple of suggested improvements from that feedback.