We believe in Persistent Identifiers. We believe in defence in depth. Today we’re excited to announce an upgrade to our data resilience strategy.
Defence in depth means layers of security and resilience, and that means layers of backups. For some years now, our last line of defence has been a reliable, tried-and-tested technology. One that’s been around for a while. Yes, I’m talking about the humble 5¼ inch floppy disk.
Recording data citations supports data reuse and aids research integrity and reproducibility. Crossref makes it easy for our members to submit data citations to support the scholarly record.
TL;DR Citations are essential/core metadata that all members should submit for all articles, conference proceedings, preprints, and books. Submitting data citations to Crossref has long been possible. And it’s easy, you just need to:
Include data citations in the references section as you would for any other citation Include a DOI or other persistent identifier for the data if it is available - just as you would for any other citation Submit the references to Crossref through the content registration process as you would for any other record And your data citations will flow through all the normal processes that Crossref applies to citations.
At Crossref, we care a lot about the completeness and quality of metadata. Gathering robust metadata from across the global network of scholarly communication is essential for effective co-creation of the research nexus and making the inner workings of academia traceable and transparent. We invest time in community initiatives such as Metadata 20/20 and Better Together webinars. We encourage members to take time to look up their participation reports, and our team can support you if you’re looking to understand and improve any aspects of metadata coverage of your content.
What’s in the metadata matters because it is So.Heavily.Used.
You might be tired of hearing me say it but that doesn’t make it any less true. Our open APIs now see over 1 billion queries per month. The metadata is ingested, displayed and redistributed by a vast, global array of systems and services that in whole or in part are often designed to point users to relevant content. It’s also heavily used by researchers, who author the content that is described in the metadata they analyze.
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.
