Co-Access Submission: Title and Subtitle issues

[ajt_muse]

Hi All - This has been a long time issue we have dealt with, and I thought I would ask if there is a better/more efficient solution than what we currently do (and keep in mind, our submission process is entirely automated)

We frequently have cases where we are not able to submit a DOI for a Co-access book because of an exclusion/inclusion of a book subtitle.

For example, we have a book (e-isbn = 9781610758062):

title = Fishing Arkansas,
subtitle = A Year-Round Guide to Angling Adventures in the Natural State

On our site we display book titles as “title: subtitle” - in this case:

Fishing Arkansas: A Year-Round Guide to Angling Adventures in the Natural State

And this is how we submit our DOIs

In this particular case, the DOI was already submitted, but with the title of just “Fishing Arkansas” so the result is:

ISBN “9781610758062” has already been assigned, ISBN assigned to other title: Fishing Arkansas/9781610758062Relations processed: 1

It is almost a flip of the coin if subtitle is or is not included in our Co-Access partnership.

The way we handle it, is that we start by including Title: subtitle, but then if that fails we try with just title. This is done programmatically so it is a bit convoluted and not ideal from a maintenance standpoint.

Is there any better way to do this? I suppose I could look up the title before I attempt to submit it, but I was hoping to avoid this type of step.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Abba

[ifarley]

Hi @ajt_muse ,

Thanks for your message. Best practice is to include the title and subtitle in their own elements, so, in your example, this would be best practice for the title- and subtitle-level XML submitted to us:

<titles>
<title>Fishing Arkansas</title>
<subtitle>A Year-Round Guide to Angling Adventures in the Natural State</subtitle>
</titles>

We only store the <title> element in our admin tool title records, and we only use the element for matching in establishing that co-access relationship. So, if one of the members in the co-access partnership/relationship submits the above title using best practice (<title> and <subtitle>) and then another member attempts to register the title and subtitle all in the <title> element (or, vice versa), that subsequent submission will fail. So, you’re right. Our title check process is very rigid. And, not everyone follows best practice, so this is a fairly common issue with members using co-access.

You can confirm the title in our system using the Title List here: crossref.org : : Title List

I wish there were a more efficient way of dealing with this.

Unfortunately, I don’t foresee us making changes to our title check process to improve this, since a loosening for co-access would impact title checks for other content types (and, thus, other downstream metadata impacts).

Warm regards,
Isaac