You can now register rich metadata for a variety of record types in Metadata Manager using simple, guided workflows. The tool is used by many in our community to register grant and journal article records, and it has now been expanded to support books and chapters, reports, dissertations, and post-publication updates for journal content.
Metadata Manager makes it easier to capture identifiers for contributors and their affiliations, funding information, references, and more. Thanks to automated reference matching by Crossref, this offers greater visibility for the works, while the affiliations and funding information can serve as important trust signals for the community.
This year’s edition of the FORCE11 conference was hosted in June by Singapore Management University. Its title, “To Go Far, Go Together: Advancing Scholarly Communication Across Boundaries and Disruptions” truly resonates with Crossref’s truths; it takes a village! Crossref only works as long as the scholarly research community wants to work together globally, across all disciplines, for integrity and openness of the scientific record. The conversations were influenced by a genuinely diverse mix of librarians, researchers, open infrastructures, and service providers, and that mix shaped almost every interaction we had at the conference.
We have some rather unusual news to share: Crossref fees are going down again. At its meeting in Paris earlier this month, the Crossref Board approved two further recommendations from the Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability (RCFS) project: effective 1st January 2027, we will reduce the majority of Content Registration fees for all 25,000 members, and remove fees for back-year records altogether.
Content Registration fees haven’t increased in around 20 years, and this is the first significant change to them in that time—downwards. Since these fees account for the largest share of Crossref’s revenue (around 60%), and since every member registers DOI records, these changes reach further than anything we’ve announced under the RCFS project so far.
The infrastructure that registers and distributes Crossref metadata has been running and growing for more than two decades. It now does considerably more than it was built to do, and it shows: two large, tightly coupled monoliths (Content System and REST API), where a change in one place risks breaking something in another.
In its July meeting, the Crossref board approved the use of Crossref surplus funds for a three-year project to accelerate the redesign of the Crossref system. Our plan is to use $1.6 million a year for three years (~USD $4.9M in total) from our surplus funds, which will help us set up a modern infrastructure consisting of separate services for the different functionalities that the Crossref system offers.
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
