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.
We test a broad sample of DOIs to ensure resolution. For each journal crawled, a sample of DOIs that equals 5% of the total DOIs for the journal up to a maximum of 50 DOIs is selected. The selected DOIs span prefixes and issues.
The results are recorded in crawler reports, which you can access from the depositor report expanded view. If a title has been crawled, the last crawl date is shown in the appropriate column. Crawled DOIs that generate errors will appear as a bold link:
Click Last Crawl Date to view a crawler status report for a title:
The crawler status report lists the following:
Total DOIs: Total number of DOI names for the title in system on last crawl date
Checked: number of DOIs crawled
Confirmed: crawler found both DOI and article title on landing page
Semi-confirmed: crawler found either the DOI or the article title on the landing page
Not Confirmed: crawler did not find DOI nor article title on landing page
Bad: page contains known phrases indicating article is not available (for example, article not found, no longer available)
Login Page: crawler is prompted to log in, no article title or DOI
Exception: indicates error in crawler code
httpCode: resolution attempt results in error (such as 400, 403, 404, 500)
httpFailure: http server connection failed
Select each number to view details. Select re-crawl and enter an email address to crawl again.
Page owner: Isaac Farley | Last updated 2020-April-08
