This blog post is from Lettie Conrad and Michelle Urberg, cross-posted from the The Scholarly Kitchen.
As sponsors of this project, we at Crossref are excited to see this work shared out.
The scholarly publishing community talks a LOT about metadata and the need for high-quality, interoperable, and machine-readable descriptors of the content we disseminate. However, as we’ve reflected on previously in the Kitchen, despite well-established information standards (e.g., persistent identifiers), our industry lacks a shared framework to measure the value and impact of the metadata we produce.
When Crossref began over 20 years ago, our members were primarily from the United States and Western Europe, but for several years our membership has been more global and diverse, growing to almost 18,000 organizations around the world, representing 148 countries.
As we continue to grow, finding ways to help organizations participate in Crossref is an important part of our mission and approach. Our goal of creating the Research Nexus—a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organizations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society—can only be achieved by ensuring that participation in Crossref is accessible to all.
In August 2022, the United States Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memo (PDF) on ensuring free, immediate, and equitable access to federally funded research (a.k.a. the “Nelson memo”). Crossref is particularly interested in and relevant for the areas of this guidance that cover metadata and persistent identifiers—and the infrastructure and services that make them useful.
Funding bodies worldwide are increasingly involved in research infrastructure for dissemination and discovery.
Preprints have become an important tool for rapidly communicating and iterating on research outputs. There is now a range of preprint servers, some subject-specific, some based on a particular geographical area, and others linked to publishers or individual journals in addition to generalist platforms. In 2016 the Crossref schema started to support preprints and since then the number of metadata records has grown to around 16,000 new preprint DOIs per month.
The depositor report is used for checking basic info about your DOI registrations.
Depositor reports list all DOIs by member and title for journals, books, and conference proceedings. We currently have depositor reports for journals, books, and conference proceedings (but not for other content types). The index page is updated weekly. Title-level reports are updated as your metadata is updated with us.
Each title-level report lists all DOIs registered for the title as well as (for each DOI) the owning prefix, the deposit timestamp, the date the record was last updated, and the number of Cited-by matches. To view each title-level report, select the member name then the appropriate title.
Field/missing metadata report: You can also see what basic bibliographic metadata fields are populated for your journal articles - click on the green triangle to the right of each member name to view a field / missing metadata report.
DOI crawler: We crawl a broad sample of journal DOIs to make sure the DOIs are resolving to the appropriate page. For each journal crawled, a sample of DOIs that equals 5% of the total DOIs for the journal up to a maximum of 50 DOIs is selected. You can access the crawler details for a given journal by selecting the linked date in the ‘last crawl date’ column.
Click on a member name in the report, and you will see a list of that member’s titles below the name. Click on any publication title to open a text file which list all DOIs for that title.
The initial view shows:
Name: name of the member. Members with more than one prefix will appear multiple times
Journal/Book/Conf Proc count: number of journal, book, or conference proceeding titles associated with the member
Total DOIs: total number of DOIs deposited for the selected title
Field report: shows missing metadata fields for each member, select the icon to view
The expanded view shows:
Name of each journal, book, or conference proceeding with DOI names deposited by the member
DOIs: Total number of DOIs registered for each journal, book, or conference proceeding deposited by the member
Last crawl date: date of last crawler report (if available)
Depositor report title view
Select a journal, book, or conference proceeding title to retrieve a list of DOIs for the title (DOI), the owner prefix of the DOI (OWNER), the timestamp value for the DOI (DEPOSIT-TIMESTAMP) the date the DOI was last updated (LAST-UPDATED), and the number of Cited-by matches for the DOI:
Title-level depositor report data may also be retrieved using format=doilist - learn more about retrieving DOIs by title.
Page owner: Isaac Farley | Last updated 2020-April-08