Hi everyone!
Our LibraryPress@UF is hoping you can help us with a DOI challenge we are facing. We are a small library press at the University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries, and we register DOIs for all of the publications that we publish (primarily journals on OJS). We also create DOIs for many of the publications submitted to our institutional repository, such as the Cooperative Extension publications that are published through our UF IFAS (Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences) unit and then archived with the Libraries.
The challenge that we are experiencing is that recently, when we pulled citations from the Dimensions database, which pulls its information from CrossRef, the Cooperative Extension publications are listed as being published by George A. Smathers Libraries instead of by IFAS. Weâre aware that this is due to the Libraries being the institution listed on our Crossref account. Would folks recommend breaking up the larger institutional account (UF Libraries) into smaller accounts? Do folks use separate DOI accounts for IR content, library press content, etc.? Is it possible to have multiple publishers listed in the metadata instead of only our institution?
We are unsure what our options are for ensuring that IFAS is listed as the publisher in the indexing databases, but thought perhaps someone else has already found a solution to this same issue?
Any help and thoughts are appreciated!
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Hi @knguyen, welcome to the forum!
The data that Dimensions is pulling comes from Crossrefâs API, specifically from the <publisher> field. The <publisher> field is always automatically populated with the name of the Crossref membership that âownsâ the DOI in question. This is true even for memberships with multiple DOI prefixes, and itâs why youâre seeing University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries as the publisher in the Dimensions data for all of your DOIs, even those that werenât actually published by George A. Smathers Libraries. You can take a look at this in the JSON for any of your DOIs, e.g., https://api.crossref.org/works/10.32473/jfmca.72.1.139355:
We generally donât recommend breaking up Crossref memberships, as memberships are really intended to be maintained at the highest possible organizational level (a university > a faculty > a facultyâs journal). This saves organizations from having to pay more than one annual membership fee and centralizes account management, ideally spurring greater persistence for linked items if their online preservation and access is being stewarded under one roof.
However, it is also true that the only way for anything other than âUniversity of Florida George A. Smathers Librariesâ to appear within the Crossref metadata of your DOIs (and thus also within the Dimensions data) as the publisher would be for the other relevant parties to join Crossref separately under their own organizational names. If it is necessary that the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences appear within the metadata as the publisher of its reports, then IFAS should consider joining Crossref independently. Were they to do so, they would pay their own annual membership and content registration fees, be assigned their own DOI prefix, and manage their own metadata submissions. With your permission, we could transfer ownership of any existing IFAS DOIs already registered on prefix 10.32473 to their new membership which would update the <publisher> field within the metadata to âInstitute of Food and Agricultural Sciencesâ within a few weeks. Alternatively, if you wished to maintain responsibility for those DOIs, IFAS could also designate the relevant folks at George A. Smathers Libraries as Technical/Metadata Quality/Billing contacts on the IFAS membership, allowing your team to continue managing DOIs/payments for the IFAS account on their behalf.
Iâm not sure if we have other folks who have encountered this issue lurking here on the forum, but weâd love to hear about how youâve dealt with this situation if anyone else has run into something like this with a repository before.
Let me know if you have any other questions for us!
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