At Crossref and ROR, we develop and run processes that match metadata at scale, creating relationships between millions of entities in the scholarly record. Over the last few years, we’ve spent a lot of time diving into details about metadata matching strategies, evaluation, and integration. It is quite possibly our favourite thing to talk and write about! But sometimes it is good to step back and look at the problem from a wider perspective.
This year’s public data file is now available, featuring over 156 million metadata records deposited with Crossref through the end of April 2024 from over 19,000 members. A full breakdown of Crossref metadata statistics is available here.
Like last year, you can download all of these records in one go via Academic Torrents or directly from Amazon S3 via the “requester pays” method.
Download the file: The torrent download can be initiated here.
Earlier this year, we reported on the roundtable discussion event that we had organised in Frankfurt on the heels of the Frankfurt Book Fair 2023. This event was the second in the series of roundtable events that we are holding with our community to hear from you how we can all work together to preserve the integrity of the scholarly record - you can read more about insights from these events and about ISR in this series of blogs.
Crossref is undertaking a large program, dubbed 'RCFS' (Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability) that will initially tackle five specific issues with our fees. We haven’t increased any of our fees in nearly two decades, and while we’re still okay financially and do not have a revenue growth goal, we do have inclusion and simplification goals. This report from Research Consulting helped to narrow down the five priority projects for 2024-2025 around these three core goals:
If you plan to set up the plugin to register content with Crossref automatically, you’ll need to add your Crossref account credentials into the username and password field in the plugin.
Depositor name - Name of the organization registering the DOIs (note: this field is not authenticated with Crossref)
Depositor email - email address of the individual responsible for registering content with Crossref (note: this field is not authenticated with Crossref)
Username - the Crossref username that will be passed to us to authenticate your submission(s). This might also be an email address - more on role versus user credentials below.
Password - the password associated with your Crossref credentials
Note: if the combination of username and password is incorrect, OJS will return a 401 unauthorized status code error at the time of registration. This error indicates that the username and password are incorrectly entered. That is, they do not match the username and/or password set with Crossref.
If you are using organization-wide, shared role credentials, you can simply add in your shared username and password.
If you are using personal user credentials that are unique to you, you’ll need to add your email address and your role into the username field, and your personal password into the password field. Here’s an example of what this will look like:
In addition to the Crossref XML plugin for OJS, there are also other important plugins that can be enabled in OJS to enrich your metadata records:
Reference linking and deposit plugin - As of OJS 3.1.2, it is possible to enable a reference linking plugin for Crossref. The plugin will use the Crossref API to check against plain text references and locate possible DOIs for articles. The plugin will also allow the display of reference lists on the article landing page in OJS and deposit them as part of your metadata deposit. Linking references is a requirement of Crossref membership.
Crossmark plugin - OJS 3.2 includes support for Crossmark, which gives readers quick and easy access to the current status of an item of content, including any corrections, retractions, or updates to that record.
Funding Metadata plugin - As of OJS 3.1.2, it is possible to enable a funding registry plugin for submitting funding information to Crossref. The plugin will use the Open Funder Registry to check against existing funding agencies. The plugin will include funding information in your Crossref DOI deposits.
Similarity Check plugin - if you are using OJS 3.1.2 or above, you are able to use the Similarity Check plugin. This will enable you to automatically send manuscripts to your iThenticate account to check their similarity to already published content. You will need to be subscribed to Crossref’s Similarity Check service for this to work.
Getting help with OJS plugins
The team at Crossref didn’t create these plugins - they were either created by the team at PKP, or by third party developers. Because of this, we aren’t able to give in-depth help or troubleshooting on problems with these plugins.
If you need more help, you can learn more at PKP’s Crossref OJS Manual, plus there’s a very active PKP Community Forum which has more information on how to modify your OJS instance to submit metadata and register DOIs with Crossref.