The Crossref Grant Linking System (GLS) has been facilitating the registration, sharing and re-use of open funding metadata for six years now, and we have reached some important milestones recently! What started as an interest in identifying funders through the Open Funder Registry evolved to a more nuanced and comprehensive way to share and re-use open funding data systematically. That’s how, in collaboration with the funding community, the Crossref Grant Linking System was developed. Open funding metadata is fundamental for the transparency and integrity of the research endeavour, so we are happy to see them included in the Research Nexus.
Lots of exciting innovations are being made in scientific publishing, often raising fundamental questions about established publishing practices. In this guest post, Ludo Waltman and André Brasil discuss the recently launched MetaROR publish-review-curate platform and the questions it raises about good practices for Crossref DOI registration in this emerging landscape.
Crossref and the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) have been working closely together for many years, sharing resources and supporting our overlapping communities of organisations involved in communicating research. Now we’re delighted to share that we have agreed on a new set of objectives for our partnership, centred on further development of the tools that our shared community relies upon, as well as building capacity to enable richer metadata registration for organisations using the Open Journal Systems (OJS).
To mark Crossref’s 25th anniversary, we launched our first Metadata Awards to highlight members with the best metadata practices.
GigaScience Press, based in Hong Kong, was the leader among small publishers, defined as organisations with less than USD 1 million in publishing revenue or expenses. We spoke with Scott Edmunds, Ph.D., Editor-in-Chief at GigaScience Press, about how discoverability drives their high metadata standards.
What motivates your organisation/team to work towards high-quality metadata? What objectives does it support for your organisation?
Our objective is to communicate science openly and collaboratively, without barriers, to solve problems in a data- and evidence-driven manner through Open Science publishing. High-quality metadata helps us address these objectives by improving the discoverability, transparency, and provenance of the work we publish. It is an integral part of the FAIR principles and UNESCO Open Science Recommendation, playing a role in increasing the accessibility of research for both humans and machines. As one of the authors of the FAIR principles paper and an advisor of the Make Data Count project, I’ve also personally been very conscious to practice what I preach.
The DOI error report is sent immediately when a user informs us that they’ve seen a DOI somewhere which doesn’t resolve to a website.
The DOI error report is used for making sure your DOI links go where they’re supposed to. When a user clicks on a DOI that has not been registered, they are sent to a form that collects the DOI, the user’s email address, and any comments the user wants to share. We compile the DOI error report daily using those reports and comments, and send it via email to the technical contact at the member responsible for the DOI prefix as a .csv attachment.
If you would like the DOI error report to be sent to a different person, please contact us.
The DOI error report .csv file contains (where provided by the user):
DOI - the DOI being reported
URL - the referring URL
REPORTED-DATE - date the DOI was initially reported
USER-EMAIL - email of the user reporting the error
COMMENTS
We find that approximately 2/3 of reported errors are ‘real’ problems. Common reasons why you might get this report include:
you’ve published/distributed a DOI but haven’t registered it
the DOI you published doesn’t match the registered DOI
a link was formatted incorrectly (a . at the end of a DOI, for example)
a user has made a mistake (confusing 1 for l or 0 for O, or cut-and-paste errors)
What should I do with my DOI error report?
Review the .csv file attached to your emailed report, and make sure that no legitimate DOIs are listed. Any legitimate DOIs found in this report should be registered immediately. When a DOI reported via the form is registered, we’ll send out an alert to the reporting user (if they’ve shared their email address with us).
I keep getting DOI error reports for DOIs that I have not published, what do I do about this?
It’s possible that someone is trying to link to your content with the wrong DOI. If you do a web search for the reported DOI you may find the source of your problem - we often find incorrect linking from user-provided content like Wikipedia, or from DOIs inadvertently distributed by members to PubMed. If it’s still a mystery, please contact us.
Page maintainer: Isaac Farley Last updated: 2024-July-19
