2020 wasn’t all bad. In April of last year, we released our first public data file. Though Crossref metadata is always openly available––and our board recently cemented this by voting to adopt the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI)––we’ve decided to release an updated file. This will provide a more efficient way to get such a large volume of records. The file (JSON records, 102.6GB) is now available, with thanks once again to Academic Torrents.
Our colleague and friend, Kirsty Meddings, passed away peacefully on 10th December at home with her family, after a sudden and aggressive cancer. She was a huge part of Crossref, our culture, and our lives for the last twelve years.
Kirsty Meddings is a name that almost everyone in scholarly publishing knows; she was part of a generation of Oxford women in publishing technology who have progressed through the industry, adapted to its changes, spotted new opportunities, and supported each other throughout.
Crossref has supported depositing metadata for preprints since 2016 and peer reviews since 2018. Now we are putting the two together, in fact we will permit peer reviews to be registered for any content type.
2020 has been a very challenging year, and we can all agree that everyone needs a break. Crossref will be providing very limited technical and membership support from 21st December to 3rd January to allow our staff to rest and recharge. We’ll be back on January 4th raring to answer your questions. Amanda explains more about why we made this decision.
After you’ve applied for membership and paid your pro-rated membership fee for the remainder of the current year, we set you up with your own Crossref DOI prefix, plus a username and password that you’ll use to access our systems and register your content.
If you work with a third party (such as a platform provider or typesetter), they will be able to use these details too.
If you’ve joined through a Sponsor, we’ll send these details to your Sponsor.
There are three key steps to getting started, and you can even start step one before you’ve received your new prefix.
Your DOIs and metadata are stored with us as XML, and there are different ways to register them with us depending on whether you are comfortable creating XML, or if you would prefer to use a helper tool that lets you type text into an online form.
b) Decide how you’ll construct your DOI suffixes
A DOI has several sections, including a prefix and a suffix. A DOI will always follow this structure:
https://0-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/[your prefix]/[a suffix of your choice]
We provide you with your prefix, but you decide what’s in the suffix for each of your DOIs when you register them with us. Your DOIs will look something like this:
If you use the Crossref XML plugin for OJS, they can provide suffixes for you by default, but otherwise you’ll need to decide on your own suffix pattern.
You should assign Crossref DOIs to anything that’s likely to be cited in the scholarly literature - journals and journal articles, books and book chapters, conference proceedings and papers, reports, working papers, standards, dissertations, datasets, and preprints.
Working with Crossref is about more than just DOIs. When you register content with us, you do register the DOI and the resolution URL, but you also register a comprehensive set of metadata - rich information about the content. This metadata is then distributed widely and used by many different services throughout the scholarly community, helping with discoverability of your content.
We store metadata and DOIs for many types of research-related content, and we currently accept these content types:
Dissertations: includes single dissertations and theses, but not collections.
Grants: grants include both direct funding, and other types of financial support, such as the use of equipment and facilities. Registering a grant includes assigning it a DOI (or grant ID), which can be referenced in all resulting research activities, linking funding with outputs.
Don’t forget to display your DOI on the landing page of each item you register - this is an obligation of membership. You’ll need to display your DOI as a link like this:
Our support team is available to help if you have any problems, and you may find help from others in the Crossref community on our Crossref Forum. We also run regular “Ask Me Anything” webinars for new members - learn more about our webinars and register to attend.
Once you’ve started registering your content with Crossref and displaying your DOIs on your landing pages, it doesn’t stop there. You need to continue to register your new content, and make sure you keep your metadata updated for existing DOIs. It’s particularly important to update your resource resolution URLs if your content moves. You need to make sure to link your references by adding the DOIs of other members against relevant content on your reference lists. There are also a range of other services that you can use. Learn more about how to level up your membership and ensure that you are meeting the membership obligations.
Page owner: Laura J. Wilkinson | Last updated 2020-April-08
