eLife recently won a Crossref Metadata Award for the completeness of its metadata, showing itself as the clear leader among our medium-sized members. In this post, the eLife team answers our questions about how and why they produce such high-quality open metadata. For eLife, the work of creating and sharing excellent metadata aligns with their mission to foster open science and supports their preprint-centred publication model, but it also lays the groundwork for all kinds of exciting potential uses.
TLDR: We’ve successfully moved the main Crossref systems to the cloud! We’ve more to do, with several bugs identified and fixed, and a few still ongoing. However, it’s a step in the right direction and a significant milestone, as, whilst it is a much larger financial investment, it addresses several risks and limitations and shores up the Crossref infrastructure for the future.
The American Society for Microbiology (ASM) has earned recognition in Crossref’s Participation Reports for its exceptional metadata coverage among large publishing members––an achievement built on intentional change, technical investment, and collaborative work. In this Q&A, the ASM team shares what that journey looked like, the challenges they’ve tackled, and how centering metadata has helped them better connect research with the global scientific community.
Registering your DOI records using OJS version 3.4
You can register your DOI records with us using the OJS (Open Journal Systems) platform with two extra plugins - the DOI plugin, and the Crossref XML plugin for OJS. We highly recommend including your references in the metadata you send to us, too - you can do this by adding the OJS references plugin. The instructions below are for configuring OJS version 3.4.
As Journal Manager, under Settings, click Website > Plugins.
Under Installed Plugins, scroll down to the section labelled Generic Plugins.
Click the checkbox next to the plugin description to enable the plugin.
Step 2: Setting up automatic DOI registrations in OJS 3.4
Go to the Distribution menu
Select the DOI tab
Click on the Setup option
Check the box to allow DOIs to be assigned to your published works
Check the box to determine which items DOI will be assigned
Enter your Crossref assigned DOI prefix. Your prefix will start with 10. and is in the format 10.xxxx (e.g., 10.5555).
Select your preferred stage for automatic DOI assignment to your articles (can be upon the article reaching copyediting stage or upon article publication).
Select your preferred method of DOI suffix generation (can be Default, None for manual entry of suffixes, or Custom pattern)
Next, switch to the ‘Registration’ tab menu
Select Crossref your ‘Registration Agency’ from the drop down options. If you don’t see “Crossref” in the list, navigate to Website > Plugins > Plugin Gallery to enable the ‘Crossref Manager Plugin’.
Check the box under ‘Automatic Deposit’ to enable automatic DOI deposits from your OJS instance.
Enter your name here as the depositor.
Enter your email here as the depositor (all deposit emails will be sent to this email).
Enter your assigned Crossref username. For example support@crossref.org/abcd
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 organisation-wide, shared role credentials (i.e. your username is a collection of letters), you can simply add in your shared username and password.
If you are using personal user credentials that are unique to you (i.e. your username is your email address), 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:
Funding Metadata plugin - as of OJS 3.1.2, it is possible to enable a funder 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.
ROR plugin - the ROR Plugin for OJS enables authors to add the ROR ID for the organization they are affiliated with.
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.
