3. Why do non-members contact support?
Help looking up DOIs
Where to start
Can’t find what they need
Undeposited DOIs
DOI resolving to error page
New!
Ugly metadata
Incorrect metadata
4. Hello, This isn't an error as such, it is an illustration of poor
practice followed by a publisher or publishers during journal
transfer. The journal title, Child Psychology and Psychiatry
Review, was originally published by CUP until vol. 6, 2001. It was
transferred to B___ and changed title to Child and Adolescent
Mental Health from vol. 7, 2002. Subsequently W__ and B__
merged. W__ lost sight of the former title and hosts the article
under the wrong title and ISSN, and has assigned a new DOI to
the articles. C__ only hosts the abstracts, so the original DOI links
to that level. W__'s "new" DOI links to the article level, but cites
the wrong title. The problem is likely to affect all articles from vols
1-6, 1996-2001 and can lead to discovery problems. Kind regards,
xxxxxe-resources librarian,
xxxx University Library
5. Only the first author is linked to this DOI. So, I can't include this
article on my Lattes, as I'm a co-author. Best regards xxxx
It does resolve but it points to T__ ebook store and not to this
particular publication. I did find the publication in the store
eventually, but am I wrong to expect the DOI to be pointing to
the individual record? Hope this makes sense! Thanksxxxx
6. Essential metadata is missing for this DOI. Metadata returned
has correct journal name and publication year, but lists title as
"Aop. " and omits the authors. Thank you.
Hello, I have been sent this DOI by a colleague. Neither of us
can get a link to the article. Could this be because the article
hasn't yet been published? It is due for publication in Dec 2013.
Article title is 'More than just “Snap, Crackle, and Pop:
Draw, write, and tell: An innovative research method with young
children.' Journal of Advertising Research , pp. 89-102. Many
thanks for your help.
7. Everyone makes mistakes
568 prefixes with
reported errors
5431 DOIs reported
5156 distinct DOIs
935 fixed (in October)
DOI errors by prefix
8. What you can do
Pay attention:
Resolution reports
DOI error reports
Schematron reports
Review your deposited metadata:
Deposit Harvester
I want to point out some support resources:We have considerable help documentationWe provide mostly email support through support@crossref.org I want to plug our announcements feed, we use this to announce new tools, any changes to our system, any outages or planned maintenance etc.
We get a fair amount of support traffic, most of the questions are from members but we’ve been getting more and more tickets from non-members. Non-members contact us for a few reasons, they need help looking for DOIs and don’t know how to get started, more ofthen they’ve tried our tools and can’t find what they need. They also contact us about broken DOIs.We also hear from users through our DOI error report. If someone tries to resolve a DOI that has not been deposited, they can submit a form and include commments, we pass those along to the publishers associated with the broken DOI. We also have a form on our website, users can submit through that as well. You do get a resolution report every month butfor some problems the DOI error report is more meaningful since someone took the time to press ‘submit’. I’m going to go through some of the types of comments we’ve been seeing lately. The’ve changed over the years.
This is an example of the type of metadata quality complaint we’ve always gotten – it’s from a librarian who has identified a significant problem with a set of DOIs - a publisher is depositing DOIs under the current version of a title, instead of the title that was used when the DOIs were originally created. Citations usually (or always) use the journal title the article was published under, so it creates a discovery problem if the titles don’t match up.
1. We’ve been getting more and more reports from authors. This author is missing from the metdata deposited for a DOI, she can’t link herself to her citation on Plataforma Lattes, a platform run by the Brazilian government, because they apparently use CrossRef DOI metadata to populate their database. We’ve had a few of these inquiries, usually when we contact the publisher they end up depositing the extra authors for that item, but it’s a lot of hassle for everyone. We recommend that all metadata be deposited, some publishers continue to deposit the bare minimum.2. This is a common one – the DOI exists but it points to the publisher website instead of to a specific item, a user is desperately trying to give you her money but can’t find the book she needs easily.
Someone is reporting incomplete metadata - this has been happening a lot, either authors are trying to pull in CrossRef metadata for ORCID profiles, or a metadata services subscriber notices a problem - it’s unlikely someone would come across this DOI on their own, the DOI wouldn’t be discovered without a page number, article title, or author, so the DOI is essentially just a persistent identifier.Another example, someone came across a Doi for something that hasn’t been published – presumably the DOI will be active when the item is actually published, it’s a good illustration of how these things get passed around.
I took a detailed look at the DOI problems reported in October, it was a fairly typical month:568 prefixes with reported errors, that’s out of a total of 3704 prefixes (decent %, but not comprehensive)5431 legit-seeming DOIs reported (5772 DOIs total, I cleaned up some that were obvious typos or never real DOIs)5156 distinct DOIs – this implies that the reports aren’t all from a few rogue DOIs935 were ‘fixed’ in October (verified as resolving)The chart is the % of the # of DOI errors reported by prefix – the slices generally correspond to size, the larger slices actually have decent resolution failure rates, they just have a lot of DOIs registered overall. This tells me that ignoring a few error reports might not seem like a big deal, but cumulatively it makes a difference. We’d like to make things easier for you as well, so feel free to send support any complaints or suggestions on how this kind of info can be distributed to you.
Not all publishers have metadata issues, so if your resolution report rate is good and you don’t see DOI error or Schematron reports, you probably don’t have anything to worry about. If you do get these reports regularly please review them to see if you can spot any problems. We’re always happy to help.I also want to plug our deposit harvester, it can be used to retrieve all of your deposited metadata in our OAI-PMH format.
Updating metadata – we’ve added many new services over the past year or so, most involve depositing additional metadata for your DOIs. I’m going to go over the procedures available for updating metadata, it varies according to what needs updating.Core citation metadata can only be updated by resubmitting an entire deposit using the deposit schema. The new deposit completely overwrites the existing metadata - if your original deposit had a print date but no online date, you can’t just submit a deposit with the online date – if you do , the print date will be wiped out.There are some things that you can update independently.* URLs can be updated separately by a URL-only update.This is done by sending a list of DOIs and URLs to support, it’s pretty simple but manual. If the metadata is resubmitted after you’ve done a URL update, the new URL is overwritten by whatever is in the deposit. If you do URL-only updates, keep this in mind when resubmitting metadata, if you’ve got an old URL stored in your system you’ll be introducing bad metadata.We have a resource-only schema that can be used to add some pieces of metadata to a DOI. For a long time this was called the reference schema, it was used to deposit citation lists for cited-by linking,For example, If you submit a list of citations separately as a resource-only deposit, queries for the DOI will return the references as part of the DOIs metadata (if permitted, references are not openly distributed unless we have publisher permission). This featurehas carried over to new services as we’ve added, the new services require additional metadata that in most cases is not part of core metadata.* you can also deposit components as a separate deposit, this is done using the main metadata deposit schema since DOIs are created. Components are mainly used to deposit supplemental materials
Example: the ancillary metadata is added to the core metadata.
This means that if you do participate in new services, you don’t need to resubmit everything if your citation metadata is sound. You can deposit stand-alone submissions using our doi resources schema, and the ancillary metadata will be added to the core metadata. These stand-alone deposits work for citations (used for cited-by linking), multiple resolution URLs, as-crawled URLs (used for CrossCheck), CrossMark, FundRef, and AccessIndicators. You can also update your core metadata without including your ancillary metadata, if you’ve submitted a CrossMark update as either a metadata or stand-alone deposit, future updates can contain just the core citation metadata, whatever works. You do need to submit all of the ancillary metadata, if you submit a citation list with 16 citations, then later submit a citation list with 3 citations, the entire citaiton list is overwritten with the new deposit and will contain only 3 citations. If you get confused about what you’ve done you can always use the deposit harvester to retrieve your CrossRef metadata.We do accept ORCIDs in deposits, they are considered part of citation metadata since they are essentially an author name, so they need to be added/updated by a regular metadata deposit
So, what if you want to remove some metadata? Core citation metadata can’t be removed, it needs to be updated via a full metadata deposit. The ancillary metadata can be updated or deleted separately. To delete, submit an empty tag, usually it’s the parent element. The metadata is removed. So, for example, if you want to delete citations from a deposit, you’ll submit an empty citation tag, either as part of a metadata deposit or a resource-only deposit. You can’t delete component DOIs (since they contain DOIs) but the relationship to the parent DOI can be severed, the components are then orphaned and should be associated with another parent DOI. They can be linked to another DOI if needed via a regular metadata update.
We have a lot of schema:Several versions of our deposit schema – 4 for metadata deposits, 2 for resource-only deposits, plus some additional small schema to support new initiativesOne query input schema – it’s version 2.0, but is updated periodically when needed, the most recent addition was to add ORCID searching6 output schema – 3 metadata output types for our core services (2 versions of unixref to accommodate changes to book series metadata), an output schema for our CMS basic service, and the OAI-PMH output schema.
When/why are schema changed, versions incremented?Tiny changes – like tweaking a recipeLarge – adding new ingredient, like chocloate, or a namespaceWe try to make everything backwards compatible