Metadata Manager on Crossref

Mission Accessible: building better user interfaces for everyone

Lena Stoll — Thu, 21 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day, and accessibility has been on our minds lately. We’ve recently completed an internal audit of all our user interfaces, and have added a new accessibility page to our website, where you can find the accessibility documentation that we put together as part of the audit.

Why accessibility matters

Of course we want to keep the barriers to participation in Crossref as low as possible for users with various disabilities. But also, more accessible tools work better for everyone. A person’s access needs can change really quickly: even if you consider yourself to be relatively able-bodied, you are only one minor inconvenience away from at least a temporary disability. All it takes is some dazzling sunlight hitting your eye or your phone screen, or perhaps your dog going after a rabbit in an awkward direction while you are holding the lead (ask me how I know!) - and before you know it, you will be relying on accessibility features to navigate the digital and/or physical world for a while.

An accessible user interface is one that you can navigate and interact with by various methods, including a mouse or touchpad, keyboard, screen reader, voice control, and other assistive technologies. It can be used on various screen sizes and supports zooming in or out without losing any content or functionality. It has sufficient colour contrast, doesn’t flash fast-moving images at you, and has a clear structure that can be understood by both humans and machines.

Where we are today

It is worth mentioning that we didn’t only start thinking about accessibility when we started tackling the full audit of our user interfaces in March 2026. For example, Patrick Vale has previously written in this blog about a browser extension he has created to improve the accessibility of DOI links anywhere on the Internet. And we have known for a long time that there were accessibility gaps in many of our tools, but we didn’t have this centrally documented anywhere.

When we did begin testing all our interfaces for compliance with level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.2) as part of the audit, we knew that some of what we would find was not going to be pretty. In the 26+ years of working with and for the scholarly community, Crossref has built countless tools and reports to offer to members and users, many of which we still maintain today. These are often decades old and have been built in a way that makes it virtually impossible to make them more accessible without rebuilding them entirely. So we know that we will continue to have accessibility gaps for the foreseeable future, but at least now we have a better idea of the scale of the challenge.

It’s also not all doom and gloom: more recently created user interfaces, such our new Metadata Manager, performed much better in the audit than legacy alternatives such as the web deposit form. We found a similar trend when looking at our report interfaces. To illustrate this, compare what happens when running the axe DevTools extension for Google Chrome on a member’s participation report - this is a user interface that was completely re-implemented in 2025. Doing this brings up 26 issues:

Meanwhile, the browsable title list, which has completed a few more trips around the sun, has 254 issues listed:

Beyond WCAG

If you’ve read this far, I hope you are convinced that accessibility is more than just ticking boxes on a conformance report. But especially for a global community like ours, there are other, less technical barriers to participation that we have to consider. For example, language is a major accessibility factor: much of what we as Crossref staff write and say is in English. When we host community events, we enable captions, and we try to leave space for these captions at the bottom of our slides.

We have also started experimenting with simultaneous interpretation during our online events, such as our recent project showcase event for the 2026 metadata sprint in São Paulo. You can find recordings of this event in Spanish, Portuguese, and English on our YouTube channel to see the promising results of these efforts.

What we are working on next

We are currently addressing the accessibility issues identified in our audit of the Crossmark service. Many Crossref members have implemented the Crossmark button and pop-up on their own platforms and websites, so we thought this was a great place to start the remediation efforts following our audit.

We are also in the process of redesigning our main website, www.crossref.org, following an information architecture review completed in 2025. Making changes to the design and navigation of our website will be the perfect opportunity to make our content not just more discoverable and more understandable, but also more accessible.

Clearly there is even more to be done, so watch this space for more updates on our accessibility roadmap and improvements. And if you have first-hand experience of using Crossref services and interfaces with assistive technologies, or you have other input or feedback you’d like to share, leave a comment below or start a discussion in our community forum.

References

Vale, P. (2025). Enhancing DOI Accessibility for All Users. Crossref. https://doi.org/10.64000/pp4rw-mtv44
World Wide Web Consortium (2024). Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2. Retrieved May 8, 2026, from https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG22/
Montilla, L. & Mahomed, R. (2026). Voices from Crossref Metadata Sprint in São Paulo. Crossref. https://doi.org/10.64000/a5qzf-k1738
Stoll, L. & Korzec, K. (2025). Request for proposals: Crossref website information architecture review. Crossref. https://doi.org/10.64000/058mr-k3s56

The sunset is on the horizon for Metadata Manager. What's next?

Lena Stoll — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR. Metadata Manager will be retired at the end of 2025. Over the past four years, we have been developing a new helper tool to replace it, and that tool has now reached a stage of maturity that means we will be able to switch off Metadata Manager by the end of the year.

How did we get here?

In 2021, we said that we would be retiring the deprecated Metadata Manager as soon as we can offer members a suitable replacement for registering their journal content. So this news has been a long time coming - Metadata Manager has been very challenging for us to support, and we have found it impossible to develop additional features. However, we did not want to take the final step of switching off the interface until we were able to offer a suitable replacement for members who rely on manual helper tools to register their journal content.

That replacement, our new record registration form, has now been used by many members for over a year to register their journal content. The feedback so far has been positive, and we have been able to add functionality to the tool at a pace that we are happy with.

In July 2025, we contacted those members who are still using Metadata Manager to let them know that the tool will no longer be available after December 2025. So if you are affected by this news, you were probably already aware of it. But we wanted to go into a little more detail on the sunsetting of Metadata Manager, why we are doing it, and what’s next for Crossref’s content registration helper tools.

What has happened since 2021?

We have been developing the record registration form ever since that announcement in 2021. It began its life as a helper tool for registering grant records, but we knew we wanted to expand it to cover journal articles and other record types as soon as we could.

To see whether the concept behind the grants form could be applied to journal content, we first built an initial prototype and tested it with a number of Crossref ambassadors and volunteers. We wanted to ensure that the tool was intuitive to use, and to understand what functionality it would need to support for it to be truly useful to our members. Following some iteration on the invaluable feedback we received from our testers, we finally released the tool to production in September 2024 and began encouraging members to use it for their real-life article deposits.

We have been continuously adding new functionality since then, from additional fields for registering richer metadata to a feature that allows members to edit their articles’ metadata without having to re-enter everything into the form.

Now, about two months from the target date for retiring Metadata Manager, the record registration form is used by members to register about 200 articles per day, while Metadata Manager still sees about double that volume of submissions. So we have some way left to go.

Why is now the right time to retire Metadata Manager?

2025 has been a year of addressing technical debt for Crossref. My colleague Sara wrote about this co-ordinated push towards modernising our system in her post about our cloud migration in the summer.

Having the long-awaited replacement for Metadata Manager in place will allow us to free up the resources that have been tied up for years by troubleshooting Metadata Manager, in terms of both technology and user support, so that we can focus on projects and initiatives that align with our longer-term strategy.

How will we avoid the new tool developing the same problems as Metadata Manager?

As stated above, Metadata Manager has caused us many issues and headaches in different ways - but we have also learned a lot from dealing with these problems. As Bryan Vickery wrote in 2020, Metadata Manager is “not flexible enough to easily add other record types, like books/book chapters, or to include any changes we may make to our input schema.” To address this, we built the record registration form in a schema-driven way, which makes it adaptable to any future schema changes. It also means that we can spin up prototypes of new forms for additional record types quite quickly.

So while Metadata Manager was custom-built in a way that could only ever work for journal content, the record registration form already supports two record types and will support more in future. This is key for our goal of building a complete research nexus, which extends far beyond journal content, and even beyond “content” as such (did someone say grants?).

What happens next?

Metadata Manager will no longer be available from January 2026.
Starting next year, if you attempt to access Metadata Manager at https://www.crossref.org/metadatamanager/, you will be redirected to a deprecation note on https://www.crossref.org/deprecated/ which will link out to the new tool.

What options do I have for registering my journal content going forward?

If your organisation still uses Metadata Manager to register metadata for your journal articles, now is a good time to begin familiarising yourself with the alternatives available to you from 2026 forward - these include, but are not limited to, the new record registration form.

If your journal has an ISSN

We recommend you begin using the record registration form as soon as possible. Simply go to https://manage.crossref.org/records and sign in with your Crossref account credentials to register a journal article. You can also see a list of all the journal article records you have previously registered using our manual helper tools at https://manage.crossref.org/records/edit and edit their metadata using the form.

To help you make the switch from Metadata Manager, we will be hosting an interactive webinar on 13 November about how to transition to the new tool. Register here or look out for the recording, which will be shared in our events archive.

If your journal does not have an ISSN

The record registration form currently only supports ISSNs as journal identifiers. Title-level and volume/issue-level DOIs, which are at the core of how Metadata Manager handles journal metadata, have been the cause for some of the problems we have had over the years with that particular tool. Also, Crossref DOIs have always been intended primarily as citation identifiers, and entire journals/volumes/issues are very rarely cited. For that reason, we built the Record Registration Form such that it doesn’t support registering or using journal-level DOIs.

With that being said, if you do not (yet) have an ISSN for your journal for whatever reason, you can use our web deposit form to register your articles with journal DOI. If you do obtain an ISSN for your title later on, you can then simply begin using the record registration form from that point onward.

How will the new tool continue to be developed?

We will continue to work with our members and community to develop additional functionalities for the journal article form. Currently we are working on allowing relationships metadata to be registered using the form.

Ultimately, the goal is for the record registration form to become the one-stop shop for members who manually register and update their metadata. To this end, we are working on expanding the tool to cover additional record types - we have recently developed a prototype for registering books and chapters, and we will be looking to test this in the coming months with volunteers who are currently registering their book metadata via other avenues such as the web deposit form.

If you would like to support these efforts, or you have begun using the new tool and would like to share your feedback, come join the discussion in our community forum.

References

Bowman, S. (2021). Next steps for Content Registration. Crossref. https://doi.org/10.64000/30vzx-r5x16
Bowman, S. (2025). We’ve migrated to the cloud; we hope you didn’t notice (but maybe you did). Crossref. https://doi.org/10.64000/wd6rx-vpq73
Vale, P. (2022). Forming new relationships: Contributing to Open source. Crossref. https://doi.org/10.64000/cvq2e-q8t24

Next steps for Content Registration

Sara Bowman — Mon, 17 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

UPDATE, December 2025: The legacy Metadata Manager interace will be switched off on 1 January 2026. We have been in touch with affected members throughout the year with guidance and resources on making the switch to our newest helper tool or alternative content registration methods.

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Hi, I’m Sara, one of the Product Managers here at Crossref. I joined the team in April 2020, primarily tasked with looking after Content Registration mechanisms. Prior to Crossref, I worked on open source software to support scientific research. I’ve learned a lot in the last year about how our community works with us, and I’m looking forward to working more closely with you in the coming year to improve Content Registration tools.

Just over a year ago, we updated you on the status of Metadata Manager. TL;DR: We learned that our approach with the tool wasn’t flexible enough to easily and quickly add other record types or update the input schema, and paused new development. We’re back with another update on Metadata Manager and our strategy for Content Registration user interfaces (UIs) going forward.

Our helper tools for Content Registration

The bulk of content registered with us is done so programmatically; that is, our members’ (or their service providers’) machines talking to our machines using our APIs. But, there are plenty of our members that don’t have the technical expertise to work with us this way. For those members, we provide various helper tools to assist with manual content registration.

We offer a variety of interfaces for registering many different types of content, including Web Deposit form for most record types, Metadata Manager for journal content, and Simple Text Query to register references. Each of these has its own use cases and limitations, leading to a confusing and inconsistent experience for members who are manually depositing metadata. From our perspective, maintaining this many interfaces in different codebases is inefficient, in part because an update to the schema likely leads to separate updates in each of them. A unified user interface to register content would both improve and simplify the user experience for you, our community, and make updates quicker and more efficient. The original goal of Metadata Manager was to be this unified interface. But we’ve learned that the approach we took was flawed: there have been problems reported by users, and the tool itself isn’t flexible enough to easily and quickly add new record types or support new fields when our input schema changes.

A new approach to helper tools

So we’ve decided to build something new and retire the old. We’ll be focusing on creating a brand new Content Registration user interface that will eventually replace Metadata Manager, the Web Deposit form, and Simple Text Query. And what we’ve learned from our experiences with Metadata Manager and Web Deposit has greatly influenced our strategy going forward. The new tool will:

Have a Community focus

Design for small - Our membership demographic is evolving. A large (and growing) number of our members are very small, often with a single publication and no technical resources. Creating XML can be a barrier to participating in Crossref, and our helper tools are designed to lower that barrier.
Accessibility and localization support - All of our UIs should support major international accessibility guidelines and translation into local languages, to meet the needs of our global membership.
Open source code - Build in the open, so that others can contribute. This could mean an entire UI that we haven’t prioritized, or adding a new translation file, or tweaking some CSS.

Follow user-centered design processes

Unified user interface - Improve user experience and simplify tools and services by providing members with one place to go to register content via a UI.
Rapid iteration - Focus on a technical solution that allows for rapid development of UIs to support new record types and updates to our schema.
Building the right features for the right users - The needs of our large members and smaller members are different. Experience has shown us that the core audience for a helper tool is smaller members; we’ll tailor the features to solve the challenges of our smaller members.

Allow us to build content for the future

Tactical approach to record types - Quickly build UIs in a strategic order. We can’t build support for every record type at once, so we want to identify and build in the areas of highest impact/lowest effort first.
Deliberate approach to supported fields - Not all members will supply metadata for all fields in our schema. Building a UI to support all fields for a specific record type before moving on to another slows progress on that next record type. We’ll identify the most-used and most-useful fields to support first, and add more in a future iteration if needed.

Deprecating Metadata Manager

In order to free up the resources to develop the new Content Registration UIs, we need to stop doing other things - that means not adding to, supporting, or bug-fixing other Content Registration tools. We’re setting an aggressive goal of sunsetting Metadata Manager by the end of 2021, with a commitment to a smooth transition to our new tool. This means that new members should not start using Metadata Manager. New members who need a helper tool have a few choices:

those who use the OJS platform from PKP to host their journals (OJS V3 and above) should use the third party Crossref OJS plugin to register their content.
other new members should use the Web Deposit form
current members who are using Metadata Manager may continue to do so, but are advised that we won’t be doing bug fixes or further development on the tool, and that support will be scaled back. If possible, you should transition over to using the Web Deposit form.

This wasn’t a decision made lightly, but one made after considering multiple options and all the data available to us about member usage and internal resources.

To highlight some of the data that led to this decision: the Support team tracks the types of support tickets they handle. In 2020, the 3rd most common ticket type was Metadata Manager-related. But less than 4% of metadata records registered with us are registered using Metadata Manager. Supporting Metadata Manager requires resources disproportionate to the amount of use the tool gets. For comparison, twice as many records are registered using the Web Deposit Form, but it generates far fewer Support tickets. To fix the bugs and issues reported about Metadata Manager requires an equally disproportionate amount of developer resources. So far, we have been unable to free up resources we would need to fix them all. Continuing to maintain this tool is effectively preventing us from building something new that will better meet the needs of our smaller members.

We know this will surprise and concern some of you, especially heavy users of Metadata Manager. We’re committed to making this a smooth transition, and over the coming months, we’ll provide more guidance to help current members migrate to our other tools.

Involving the community

Building a tool that allows us to create and adapt content registration forms based on example input files is an exciting new approach - one that will allow us to better serve the needs of our smaller members across multiple record types and support those who want to adapt our tools to their own needs. We’ve already begun work on a proof-of-concept tool aligned with this new strategy and I’m excited to drive it to production. As this project develops, we’ll keep in close contact with members, conducting user interviews, feedback sessions, and using usage data to help guide our decision-making on features and design. As we’ll be building in the open, we’ll have prototypes to share along the way as we iterate to produce a tool that will stand the test of time as well as scale to support even more content and members in future. We welcome your feedback over on our Community Forum, where we’ve set up a dedicated category to discuss this topic.

Metadata Manager Update

Bryan Vickery — Tue, 24 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

At Crossref, we’re committed to providing a simple, usable, efficient and scalable web-based tool for registering content by manually making deposits of, and updates to, metadata records. Last year we launched Metadata Manager in beta for journal deposits to help us explore this further. Since then, many members have used the tool and helped us better understand their needs.

What we’ve learned has made us realize how useful such a tool can be to both large and small publishers, but also that the approach we took with Metadata Manager needs to be changed - it’s not flexible enough to easily add other record types, like books/book chapters, or to include any changes we may make to our input schema.

With that in mind, we’re pausing development on Metadata Manager to allow us to properly evaluate what we’ve learned. If you’re currently using Metadata Manager for journal deposits without any problems, please do continue - you’re helping us learn a lot! But if you haven’t used Metadata Manager before, or are having problems, please:

use our existing Web Deposit Form instead, or
upload XML directly through the deposit system admin interface

We won’t be fixing bugs in Metadata Manager, except for providing any essential security updates. Of course, if you still need help please read our Content Registration help pages, or contact the Support team.

Metadata Manager’s features will be reimagined as part of our planned Member Center (working title, subject to change) project, where we will start to bring together all business and technical information for our members, service providers and metadata users. The Member Center will be the heart of our strategy to make it easier for you to work with Crossref to:

register and update metadata
view, update and transfer titles
visualize your activity/participation and act on problems with metadata
understand your bills and invoices
manage your users and service providers and their access and entitlements
and more

We’re in the early stages of planning for the Member Center and will be seeking feedback from members, service providers and metadata users in the coming months.

Metadata Corrections, Updates, and Additions in Metadata Manager

Shayn Smulyan — Mon, 13 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been a year since Metadata Manager was first launched in Beta. We’ve received a lot of helpful feedback from many Crossref members who made the switch from Web Deposit Form to Metadata Manager for their journal article registrations.

The most common use for Metadata Manager is to register new DOIs for newly published articles. For the most part, this is a one-time process. You enter the metadata, register your DOI, and success!

But everything doesn’t always go quite as expected. Humans make mistakes, and typos in metadata are bound to happen on occasion, even for the most careful users.

We always want to make it as easy as possible for our members to find and correct metadata errors, and to add additional metadata when it becomes available. Our Schematron, Conflict, and Resolution reports can help you identify existing metadata errors. We never charge content registration fees for metadata updates, additions, or corrections, so cost won’t be a barrier to getting the most accurate and thorough metadata possible. And, now, Metadata Manager can make those corrections easier to do.

Correcting Errors

Because accurate and comprehensive metadata is so important for the linking and discoverability of your publications, it’s important to catch these occasional errors and correct them.

We send out reports that automatically screen for particular types of metadata errors, and we pass along comments from users who contact us with concerns about metadata quality to our contacts at the relevant publisher.

The “Review all” feature in Metadata Manager also allows you to do a final check of all the metadata you entered right before you’re about to submit your deposits. So, we also rely on you to evaluate your own accuracy there as well.

Once you’ve identified an error, you’ll need to correct it. To do that, you must resubmit a whole new metadata deposit for the affected item. The newly deposited metadata will entirely overwrite the previously deposited metadata.

If you’re used to using the Web Deposit Form, you know that the redeposit can be a little tedious. For example, if you find that you misspelled an author’s last name, you’d have to manually type in or copy-paste not just the corrected last name, but all of the journal-level, issue-level, and article-level metadata that applies to the article.

Using Metadata Manager, the process is much simpler. The full metadata record is retained or imported and you only need to correct the error itself.

For articles originally registered using Metadata Manager

If you find a metadata error in an article which you initially registered in Metadata Manager itself, you can locate the article in one of two ways:

Navigate through the list of Accepted articles within a given journal
Or, search by article title in the Deposit History

Once you’ve located the relevant article, click on the article title to open the article’s metadata record. From there, you can make the necessary corrections. With the corrections complete, click “Continue” and then “Add to deposit.” After that, the process is exactly the same as depositing a new article.

For articles registered using the Web Deposit Form or any other deposit method

If you registered an article using the Web Deposit Form, an XML deposit, or the OJS plugin, you can still use Metadata Manager to quickly correct an error. But, first you have to import the article’s metadata into Metadata Manager.

To do this, click into the relevant journal from your Metadata Manager home page. Then, search for the article title using the “Add existing article” search box. Select “Add” next to the article title in the search results, which will import the article’s metadata record into Metadata Manager.

From here, make any necessary corrections and click “Continue” and then “Add to deposit.” Navigate to the “To deposit” tab and “Review all” to ensure that your metadata record is accurate. Then select “Deposit” to finalize your submission. You’ll receive immediate feedback as to whether your metadata deposit was successful or not.

Adding additional metadata

Perhaps there are no problems with your metadata, and everything is completely accurate. That’s great! But, we encourage our members to submit metadata that is not just accurate, but also as thorough as possible. Check your Participation Report to see if there are any types of metadata that you haven’t been submitting yet, or that you haven’t been submitting for certain journals.

Metadata Manager allows you to deposit references, licenses, and relationships between your articles and other DOIs, which weren’t possible to add using the Web Deposit Form. The same process described above for corrections will allow you to import previously registered articles and add in these new metadata elements.

We also know that many of our members register DOIs for their articles when they’re first published online, but aren’t yet included in an issue. When the articles are published in their final versions, there is important metadata added which wasn’t yet available when the DOI was first registered. This includes things like volume number, issue number, page numbers, and full publication date, all of which are extremely important for linking and discoverability. Sometimes the resolution URL changes when the article is moved from its pre-publication status to its final version.

So, when each issue is published, you can use Metadata Manager to pull up all the already-registered articles included in that issue and add in the newly relevant metadata like page numbers, issue number, URL, etc. Then add them to a new deposit, review, and submit.

Please check out the full Metadata Manager help documentation for more details, or join us on an upcoming workshop to test out Metadata Manager in real-time with us. And, as always, feel free to email us at support@crossref.org with any questions.

Improved processes, and more via Metadata Manager

Shayn Smulyan — Thu, 17 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Hi, Crossref blog-readers. I’m Shayn, from Crossref’s support team. I’ve been fielding member questions about how to effectively deposit metadata and register content (among other things) for the past three years. In this post, I’ll take you through some of the improvements that Metadata Manager provides to those who currently use the Web Deposit form.

We recently announced the launch of Metadata Manager, a new tool from Crossref that makes it easier for you to submit robust, accurate, and thorough metadata for the content you register. Metadata Manager already covers journals and articles; more record types will be supported soon. It offers some extra features that will make your experience less stressful, make your metadata better, and ultimately make your content more discoverable.

Metadata Manager has the potential to improve your metadata registration experience in a number of ways:

by correcting one-off errors in previously registered metadata
by directly allowing you to add references, license data, funder information, or any other ancillary metadata to items that have previously been registered
by updating Crossmark data, in the case of a retraction or withdrawal

With the Web Deposit form, you finish entering your metadata for a new issue of your journal, and then get asked for your password, and of course that’s when you realize you’ve forgotten it (it happens a lot!). With Metadata Manager, the very first step is to log in, so you know your login credentials are accurate before you get down to the task of entering your metadata.

Easily import journals, or add new ones

When you switch to Metadata Manager, you can import the journals already associated with your account. Simply go to the search bar on the Home screen, search for your journal by title, then click ’Add’. If you are registering your first article for a journal that you’ve not registered before, you can add the journal information on the Home screen, by clicking “New Publication”.

Adding a Journal DOI

In the Web Deposit form, the Journal DOI is optional, as long as you include a valid ISSN. However, with Metadata Manager, a Journal DOI must be created for each journal you register. So, you need to enter a Journal DOI and a Journal URL for each of your journals before your deposits can be submitted. The Journal DOI won’t become active until you submit your first successful deposit for an article within that journal.

If you’ve never registered a Journal DOI before and are unsure what to use for your Journal DOI’s suffix, take a look at our suggested best practice for constructing DOI suffixes.

Adding new articles

Once your journal is added, the process of adding articles in Metadata Manager should be familiar, as it’s similar to the Web Deposit form process. You type in or paste as plain text (without formatting) all your relevant, accurate, and thorough metadata into the appropriate fields in the form.

Save your work as you go

In Metadata Manager there is no need to complete a full issue’s worth of articles at once. And, you don’t need to worry about losing your progress if you accidentally close your browser window, or your laptop runs out of battery while you’re in the middle of a deposit. You can simply and easily ‘save-as-you-go’, one article at a time, until you’re ready to submit them all. You can even review your saved metadata to make sure there aren’t any errors before the deposit is finalized.

Other metadata fields you didn’t know you needed (but you do!)

Have you ever wanted to add an abstract to your content’s metadata? How about license information, so that other organisations know what they can and can’t do with the work? Does your journal use article ID numbers instead of page numbers? These are all elements that can be added to Metadata Manager that were not available in the Web Deposit form. Additionally, you can add funding data, Similarity Check links, and relationships between your articles and other content. These types of metadata are hugely valuable for building a robust, interconnected web of scholarly communication.

Adding references

Unlike the Web Deposit form, Metadata Manager allows you to easily add references to your article’s metadata—this is an important requirement for participating in our Cited-by service.

To add references to an article’s metadata, you can copy and paste its reference list into the references field on the same screen as the rest of the article metadata (as per the image below).

Metadata Manager will match DOIs to those references (where available), and include the full list in your record. So, if you’ve been putting off participating in Cited-by because the reference deposit requirement was too much of a hassle, we hope this will help ease the way! The more references everyone registers, the more robust our Cited-by counts and Cited-by data become.

Edit mistakes without having to re-enter all your metadata

Mistakes happen. Sometimes you put an author’s first name in the last name field. Sometimes you copy and paste some stray HTML tags into your abstract. You might break a link by leaving a space in the middle of a URL, or enter the first-page number as 3170 instead of 317.

With Metadata Manager you can fix any errors quickly and easily right in the interface, then just click to redeposit the article with its metadata corrected. You won’t need to re-enter all the metadata or worry about editing the XML files directly.

We’ll have another blog post coming soon that will be devoted entirely to updating, correcting, or otherwise editing metadata for already-registered DOIs in Metadata Manager.

Find out immediately if your registration was successful

When you have finished adding the metadata for your articles, navigate to the “To deposit” section and click ‘Deposit’ to submit them. Instead of having to wait for your content to go through our processing queue, you’ll get immediate feedback. The number of Accepted and Failed deposits show immediately. Any articles which have failed are clearly marked with a red triangle icon and an explanation for the error. If you don’t understand an error message or how to correct the metadata, please contact us at support@crossref.org.

To get started with Metadata Manager take a look at our full help documentation.

Resolutions 2019: Journal Title Transfers = Metadata Manager

Isaac Farley — Thu, 03 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

UPDATE, 12 December 2022
Due to the scheduled sunsetting of Metadata Manager, this title transfer process has been deprecated. Please find detailed guidance for transferring titles on our documentation site here.

When you thought about your resolutions for 2019, Crossref probably didn’t cross your mind—but, maybe it should have…

Because we know—with a high level of certainty—that Shayn, Paul and I will be spending the first few weeks of the year transferring the ownership of many journal titles. Last year we processed almost 60 journal transfer requests during this time, and we’re heading toward a similar number for 2019. There’s no objection; it’s a just a fact. We’re happy to do it, but there is another way.

Unlike previous years, we now have a tool that gives you the control to transfer titles without any intervention from the Crossref support team—Metadata Manager. With just a few clicks, you, as the disposing publisher, can transfer your journal to the acquiring publisher yourself. Here’s how:

Transferring your journal in five easy steps using Metadata Manager:

Log into Metadata Manager using your username and password (the same one you use for the Crossref Web Deposit form).

Find the journal you’re transferring on your Metadata Manager workspace using the “search publications” box and click to load the journal’s container (or, dashboard).

Within the journal container, select Transfer Title from the Action drop-down.

On the transfer title screen select the acquiring (destination) publisher’s name and DOI prefix of where ownership will be transferred to. Click Transfer.

(In addition to transferring ownership of the title itself, all existing journal article DOIs previously registered will also be transferred to the new owner using this mechanism. They will persist on their original prefix, but the acquiring publisher will be able to update the metadata associated with these DOIs).

Confirm the title transfer. It may take up to 24 hours for the transfer to be reflected within Metadata Manager, and we’ll send a courtesy email to the acquiring (destination) publisher’s technical contact when the transfer has been completed.

As always, if you have questions, need guidance as you’re working through this process, or have recommendations on how we can improve title transfers—or anything else within Metadata Manager (the tool is in beta)–please let us know at support@crossref.org. There’s also comprehensive support documentation available for Metadata Manager to help and guide you.

Data Citation: what and how for publishers

Rachael Lammey — Fri, 23 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve mentioned why data citation is important to the research community. Now it’s time to roll up our sleeves and get into the ‘how’. This part is important, as citing data in a standard way helps those citations be recognised, tracked, and used in a host of different services.

This week A Data Citation Roadmap for Scientific Publishers was published in Scientific Data. This roadmap is the outcome of a collaboration between different publishers that worked on identifying all steps you need to take as a publisher to implement data citation. If you want to know more about establishing a data policy, capturing data citations at the point of submission, or tagging data citations in your XML, we recommend you take a look at this article!

In this blog post, we’ll discuss the steps you need to take after you’ve implemented this roadmap. The steps in the roadmap describe how you can track & tag data citation yourself. Here we describe how Crossref can help you make these available to the rest of the community.

The ‘what’

Here’s the recap! From the Crossref perspective, there are two ways to add data citation links into the metadata that you register:

1. Metadata deposits using the references section of the schema

This is where ‘citations’ are normally recorded. Publishers include the data citation into the deposit of bibliographic references for each publication.

Publishers can deposit the full data or software citation as a unstructured reference. For guidance here, we recommend that authors cite the dataset or software based on community best practice (Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles, FORCE11 citation placement, FORCE11 Software Citation Principles).

<citation key="ref=3">
<unstructured_citation>Morinha F, Dávila JA, Estela B, Cabral JA, Frías Ó, González JL, Travassos P, Carvalho D, Milá B, Blanco G (2017) Data from: Extreme genetic structure in a social bird species despite high dispersal capacity. Dryad Digital Repository. http://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.684v0</unstructured_citation\>
</citation>
</citation_list>

Or they can employ any number of reference tags currently accepted by Crossref.

<citation key="ref2">
<doi>10.5061/dryad.684v0</doi>
<cYear>2017</cYear>
<author>Morinha F, Dávila JA, Estela B, Cabral JA, Frías Ó, González JL, Travassos P, Carvalho D, Milá B, Blanco G</author>
</citation>

We are exploring JATS4R recommendations to expand the current collection and better support these citations - more on this soon. We also encourage additional suggestions from the community.

2. Metadata deposits using the relations section of the schema

This is where other relationships can be recorded. Publishers assert the data link in the relationship section of the metadata deposit. Here, publishers can identify data which are direct outputs of the research results if this is known. This level of specificity is optional, but we’d recommend it as it can support scientific validation and research funding management.

Data and software citations via relation type enables precise tagging of the dataset and its specific relationship to the research results published. To tag the data & software citation in the metadata deposit, we ask for the description of the dataset & software (optional), dataset & software identifier and identifier type (DOI, PMID, PMCID, PURL, ARK, Handle, UUID, ECLI, and URI), and relationship type.

<program xmlns="http://www.crossref.org/relations.xsd">
<related_item>
<description>Data from: Extreme genetic structure in a social bird species despite high dispersal capacity</description>
<inter_work_relation relationship-type="references" identifier-type="doi">10.5061/dryad.684v0</inter_work_relation>
</related_item>
</program>
</doi_relations>

In general, use the relation type references for data and software resources.

Publishers who wish to specify that the data or software resource was generated as part of the research results can use the isSupplementedBy relation type.

The ‘how’

I create my own XML and register it with Crossref

Add links to datasets into your reference lists, including their DOIs if available as shown above and deposit them with Crossref. We’ll do the rest. If you want to add references to existing metadata records, you don’t need to redeposit the full article metadata, you can send us a resource-only deposit that just contains the reference metadata to append that to the existing metadata for the article. You can also use this method if you prefer to deposit references in a separate workflow to registering your content (we know some members prefer to work this way).

I’ve started using Metadata Manager for journal article deposits

Article<->Data relationships in Crossref

You can deposit data citations using either method using our new Metadata Manager tool. When entering journal article metadata, you can use the ‘Related Items’ section to enter the DOI (or other identifier) for the dataset, the type of identifier, a description of the relation type e.g. ‘Data from: Extreme genetic structure in a social bird species despite high dispersal capacity’, and the relation type - ‘references’ or ‘is supplemented by’ depending on the relationship between the data and the article as described above. When you make the deposit, this relationship information will be registered in Crossref along with the rest of the article metadata.

Metadata Manager also has a section where you can enter and match your references, and then deposit these with Crossref. If you choose this method, enter any data citations into the references section before depositing the article metadata with Crossref.

If you want to add this information to deposits you have already made using Metadata Manager, you can search for the journals and articles in the interface, bring up the existing metadata and add in the additional information before redepositing.

I use “simple text query” to search for and deposit references

Make sure you include any citations to data in the references you add into Simple Text Query. When you use simple text query to deposit these references, they will then be added into the article metadata in the Crossref database.

If you use OJS, they’re working on functionality (due for release soon) that will make it easier to deposit reference metadata with Crossref, so you can include citations to data in that.

All of this metadata—registered with Crossref—make it possible to build up pictures of data citations, linking, and relationships. Whether the citations come from the authors in the reference list or they are extracted by the publisher and then deposited, Crossref collects them across publishers. We then make the aggregate set freely available via Crossref’s APIs in multiple interfaces (REST, OAI-PMH, OpenURL) and formats (XML and JSON). DataCite does the same for data repositories and so this provides an easy way for publishers and data repositories to exchange information about data citations. As mentioned previously, this all feeds in Event Data. Data is made openly available to a wide host of parties across the extended research ecosystem including funders, research organisations, technology and service providers, indexers, research data frameworks such as Scholix, etc.

Do you have questions about how to add these links to your Crossref or DataCite metadata? We’ll be running a series of webinars in early 2019 to give you a chance to join us live and ask any questions you have. Eager to get started in the meantime? Let us know and we’ll start to coordinate.

And our survey says...

Christine Cormack Wood — Mon, 11 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier this year we sent out a short survey inviting members to rate our performance. We asked what you think we do well, what we don’t do so well, and one thing we could do to improve our rating.

We were delighted to receive 313 responses and relieved that 93% of those were positive (phew!). It was very useful to hear your thoughts and to get such a variety of comments covering Product, Outreach, Marketing and Member Experience. There were a few recurring themes, three of which we’d like to address here:

1. Providing information in different languages

Not surprisingly, given the growing diversity of our member base, some respondents asked us to share information in languages other than English. We have been aware of this growing need for some time and have been working on a few developments in this area:

In January 2018 we will be launching a series of seven service videos in six different languages—French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese.
January also sees the launch of a new initiative called the Ambassador Program. Ambassadors will work closely with Crossref to help spread the word about our services, and support our global members in their own languages.
During 2017 we hosted two webinars in Brazilian Portuguese and one in Turkish, and aim to increase this in 2018.

2. Member-to-member discussion forum

Some respondents asked for a facility to enable members to reach out to each other, giving direct opportunity for discussions and/or sharing experiences online (and in their own languages). We have been working for a few months now to provide a member-to-member discussion area, which is planned for 2018. Following a soft launch covering a few areas/topics, we’ll broaden the scope to include technical support, too.

3. Registering metadata more easily using the web deposit form

Many respondents requested a more user-friendly process for registering metadata through our webform. Our Product and DevOps teams have been working on this for some time and have created a new interface called the Metadata Manager, which is currently in Beta but scheduled to launch in Q1 of 2018.

Finally, we’d like to thank you for participating in our survey. Your valuable feedback and suggestions help us understand your experience, improve our service, shape the course of particular projects and even direct our future strategy.

As this survey was anonymous, we are unable to respond to anyone on an individual basis, however, if you’d like to have your particular comments addressed, we would love to hear from you directly.

Metadata Manager on Crossref

Mission Accessible: building better user interfaces for everyone

Why accessibility matters

Where we are today

Beyond WCAG

What we are working on next

References

The sunset is on the horizon for Metadata Manager. What's next?

How did we get here?

What has happened since 2021?

Why is now the right time to retire Metadata Manager?

How will we avoid the new tool developing the same problems as Metadata Manager?

What happens next?

What options do I have for registering my journal content going forward?

If your journal has an ISSN

If your journal does not have an ISSN

How will the new tool continue to be developed?

References

Next steps for Content Registration

Our helper tools for Content Registration

A new approach to helper tools

Have a Community focus

Follow user-centered design processes

Allow us to build content for the future

Deprecating Metadata Manager

Involving the community

Metadata Manager Update

Metadata Corrections, Updates, and Additions in Metadata Manager

Correcting Errors

For articles originally registered using Metadata Manager

For articles registered using the Web Deposit Form or any other deposit method

Adding additional metadata

Improved processes, and more via Metadata Manager

Login first, not last

Easily import journals, or add new ones

Adding a Journal DOI

Adding new articles

Save your work as you go

Other metadata fields you didn’t know you needed (but you do!)

Adding references

Edit mistakes without having to re-enter all your metadata

Find out immediately if your registration was successful

Resolutions 2019: Journal Title Transfers = Metadata Manager

Transferring your journal in five easy steps using Metadata Manager:

Data Citation: what and how for publishers

The ‘what’

1. Metadata deposits using the references section of the schema

2. Metadata deposits using the relations section of the schema

The ‘how’

I create my own XML and register it with Crossref

I’ve started using Metadata Manager for journal article deposits

I use “simple text query” to search for and deposit references

And our survey says...

1. Providing information in different languages

2. Member-to-member discussion forum

3. Registering metadata more easily using the web deposit form