This blog post is from Lettie Conrad and Michelle Urberg, cross-posted from the The Scholarly Kitchen.
As sponsors of this project, we at Crossref are excited to see this work shared out.
The scholarly publishing community talks a LOT about metadata and the need for high-quality, interoperable, and machine-readable descriptors of the content we disseminate. However, as we’ve reflected on previously in the Kitchen, despite well-established information standards (e.g., persistent identifiers), our industry lacks a shared framework to measure the value and impact of the metadata we produce.
When Crossref began over 20 years ago, our members were primarily from the United States and Western Europe, but for several years our membership has been more global and diverse, growing to almost 18,000 organizations around the world, representing 148 countries.
As we continue to grow, finding ways to help organizations participate in Crossref is an important part of our mission and approach. Our goal of creating the Research Nexus—a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organizations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society—can only be achieved by ensuring that participation in Crossref is accessible to all.
In August 2022, the United States Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memo (PDF) on ensuring free, immediate, and equitable access to federally funded research (a.k.a. the “Nelson memo”). Crossref is particularly interested in and relevant for the areas of this guidance that cover metadata and persistent identifiers—and the infrastructure and services that make them useful.
Funding bodies worldwide are increasingly involved in research infrastructure for dissemination and discovery.
Preprints have become an important tool for rapidly communicating and iterating on research outputs. There is now a range of preprint servers, some subject-specific, some based on a particular geographical area, and others linked to publishers or individual journals in addition to generalist platforms. In 2016 the Crossref schema started to support preprints and since then the number of metadata records has grown to around 16,000 new preprint DOIs per month.
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.
