Content Registration

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Academic and professional research travels further if it’s linked to the millions of other published papers. Crossref members register content with us to let the world know it exists, instead of creating thousands of bilateral agreements.

They send information called metadata to us. Metadata includes fields like dates, titles, authors, affiliations, funders, and online location. It also includes digital object identifiers (DOIs) that stay with the work even if it moves websites.

Richer metadata makes content useful and easier to find. Participation Reports (beta) give a clear picture for anyone to see the metadata Crossref has. See for yourself where the gaps are, and what our members could improve upon. Understand best practice through seeing what others are doing, and learn how to level-up.

Through Crossref, members are distributing their metadata downstream, making it available to numerous systems and organizations that together help credit and cite the work, report impact of funding, track outcomes and activity, and more.

Members maintain and update metadata long-term, telling us if content moves to a new website, and they include more information as time goes on. This means that there is a growing chance that content is found, cited, linked to, included in assessment, and used by other researchers.

This is Crossref infrastructure. You can’t see infrastructure, yet research—and researchers all over the world—rely on it.

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How it works

All our members are encouraged to register and update the fullest possible metadata. Metadata can be registered either by members themselves, or agents acting on their behalf—such as hosting platforms. Content can be registered manually or by machine in the following ways:

For manual metadata registration

Our Metadata Manager tool—initially for journals—supports both single and multiple journal deposits, allows multiple formats and deposit sizes, automatically validates the format of certain metadata elements, and processes your deposits immediately, in real time. The help documentation walks you through how to get started. Our web deposit form—for all other content types—accepts manually entered information as well as JATS-formatted XML files. Get started with the web deposit form.

For machine metadata registration

XML registration of metadata via HTTPS POST
Bulk .csv upload of metadata, such as funding and full-text URLs
The Crossref plugin for OJS (Open Journal Systems) will automatically (if you have configured the plugin to work automatically) deposit your metadata without your intervention.

It is important to note that while we collect, preserve and make metadata available for the scholarly community, we do not correct, edit, or change submitted metadata.

Common tasks

Different schemas exist for different content types. For example, the preprints schema is different from the journals schema. So, deposits in XML must be prepared according to each schema. See more on content types below.
Corrections and enhancements of submitted metadata are very much encouraged! There is no charge for re-depositing existing metadata.

Content types

We store metadata and DOIs for many types of research-related content. The content types that we currently accept are below. If you have a content type that isn’t listed please contact us. At the moment we’re developing schemas for conferences and projects.

Journals and journal articles: at the journal title and article level and includes supplemental materials.
Books, chapters, and reference works: book title and/or chapter-level records, books can be deposited as a monograph, series, or set. Read our best practice for book content.
Conference proceedings: information about a single conference and records for each conference paper/proceeding.
Reports/working papers: this includes content that is formally published and is published with an ISSN or ISBN.
Standards: includes publications from Standards Development Organizations and Standards Setting Organizations.
Datasets: includes database records or collections. (See also DataCite).
Dissertations: includes single dissertations and theses - not collections.
Preprints: consists of preprints, eprints, working papers, reports, and other types of content that has been posted but not formally published.
Grants: for research funders to register awarded grants including use of facilities or equipment, salary awards, etc.
Peer reviews: any number of reviews, reports, or comments attached to an associated article.
Components: typically assigned to parts of a whole, most commonly including figures, tables, and supplemental materials for a journal article or book chapter.

If you’re new to Content Registration we encourage you to verify and test your XML prior to submission.

How to participate

Please see the Get started guide for details.

As this summary shows, the process of registering content and depositing metadata is relatively straightforward:

Step 1: Each new member receives a DOI prefix and account information.
Step 2: Members (or agents acting on their behalf) create DOIs by using the assigned prefix and by adding their own unique suffix (Prefix + Suffix = DOI).
Step 3: Members (or their agents) prepare their deposit by gathering all DOIs, the URLs where the content sits and all metadata associated with the content.
Step 4: Members (or their agents) deposit their metadata according to the Crossref schema. Our support site offers sample formatted deposits for all content types.

Once processed, the DOI is live and clickable after the deposit has been processed (usually within minutes) and the metadata is available for use in systems throughout scholarly communications.

Best practice

To make publications discoverable—and to derive the greatest benefit from Crossref membership—we ask our members to deposit as much rich metadata as possible.

Richer metadata includes information such as journal title, article author, publication date, page numbers, ISSN, references, abstracts, ORCID iDs, funding information, clinical trials numbers, license information (access indicators for text and data mining) and more. Please see our support site for detailed information about content registration.

Obligations & fees

Member terms cover in detail the important work of depositing metadata.

Content Registration fees are different for different types of content and sometimes include volume discounts for large batches or backfile material.

FAQs

Please see our FAQs for more information on Content Registration.

Additional help is provided in our extensive support pages, to assist you with the important work of registering content.

Please contact our member services team with any questions or to get set up, or contact our technical support specialists for any technical or troubleshooting questions.

Funding data

Linking research funding and published outcomes Funding data is used by funders to track the publications that result from their grants including use of facilities or equipment, salary awards, etc.). Publishers can contribute by depositing the funding acknowledgements from their publications as part of their standard metadata. The deposit should include funder names, funder IDs, and associated grant numbers. Funder names from acknowledgements should be matched with the corresponding unique funder ID from the Funder Registry, a curated list of over 13,000 international funding bodies.

Preprints

Our members asked for the flexibility to register content at different points in the publishing lifecycle, so we extended our infrastructure to support members who want to register preprints. Our custom support for preprints ensures that links to these publications persist over time; that they are connected to the full history of the shared research results; and that the citation record is clear and up-to-date. Publishing preprints is about more than simply getting a DOI We have designed a schema together with a working group that included preprint advisors bioRxiv and arXiv, along with some members including PLOS, Elsevier, AIP, IOP, ACM.

Multiple resolution

Content can travel from place to place online, and it can also live in multiple locations. With Multiple Resolution, you can assign multiple URLs to a single metadata record. Members often use multiple resolution for co-hosted content or content in transition from one platform to another. Instead of resolving directly to a single page a multiple resolution-enabled link will instead land on an interim page. The interim page presents a list of link choices to the end user.

Co-access

Sometimes, book content can live in several locations as many small book publishers use multiple aggregator platforms to host their online content. This can often result in confusion over who assigns a DOI to the content on the aggregators platform, especially when the book publisher chooses not to assign their own DOI. This is where Co-access can help. This feature of our Content Registration Service allows multiple Crossref members to register content and create DOIs for the same book content; both whole titles or individual chapters.

Peer reviews

Our members asked for the flexibility to register content for the reviews and discussions of scholarly content which they publish, so we’ve extended our infrastructure to support members who post them. We support a whole host of outputs made publicly available from the peer review history, as they vary greatly based on journal. This may include referee reports, decision letter, and author response. The overall set may include outputs from the initial submission only or those from all subsequent rounds of revisions.

Research grants

Launched in 2019, our registration service for grants allows funders and the wider research community to connect support with outputs and activities. Background Whilst the scholarly community has adopted standard persistent identifiers (PIDs)—for people (e.g. ORCID), content (e.g. DOIs, PMIDs), and now organizations (ROR) including funders (Open Funder Registry)—the record of the award was not captured in a consistent way across funders worldwide. These awards were not easily linked up with the literature or with researchers or with institutions.