We have transferred the ownership DOIs of several journals to other organizations (as they requested). But when checking those DOIs’ metadata, the member field still holds the ID of our organization. Is this field ever updated without re-depositing the DOIs’ metadata?
Of course, 10.7202/1077971ar has “4194” for member in its metadata, which is our (Érudit) member number. But when we tried to update its metadata with an XML deposit, it failed with this error: “User not allowed to add or modify records for prefix: 10.26443”. 10.26443 is the prefix for the new owner whose member id is 10976.
Thanks for that example. I can confirm that the DOI was transferred from 10.7202 to 10.26443 in February of 2024.
You can see the new owner prefix, member ID, and publisher name in our XML API record here. That shows as:
<crm-item name="publisher-name" type="string">McGill University Library and Archives</crm-item>
<crm-item name="prefix-name" type="string">McGill University Library and Archives</crm-item>
<crm-item name="member-id" type="number">10976</crm-item>
<crm-item name="citation-id" type="number">127832605</crm-item>
<crm-item name="journal-id" type="number">169386</crm-item>
<crm-item name="deposit-timestamp" type="number">202201201107570500</crm-item>
<crm-item name="owner-prefix" type="string">10.26443</crm-item>
<crm-item name="last-update" type="date">2024-02-07T14:49:36Z</crm-item>
Unfortunately, that change wasn’t reflected in the REST API record for that same item, which has "publisher": "Consortium Erudit",
… "member": "4194",
… "prefix": "10.7202",
I’m not sure why the ownership change wasn’t reflected in the REST API, but suspect it was just a indexing glitch.
I’m going to try to manually update 10.7202/1077971ar and the other ~500 DOIs from the same journal that were also transferred to McGill Library at that same time, just by doing a timestamp reset (so it doesn’t actually impact the metadata). It can take up to 24 hours before those DOIs are reindexed in the REST API, so I’ll follow up again tomorrow.
Also, I was able to confirm with my colleagues that, unfortunately, our API indexing process currently doesn’t reflect ownership transfers on their own.
The general expectation is that acquiring publishers will update the metadata records of transferred DOIs (at minimum, at least the landing page URLs) soon after a transfer, and that metadata update will cause the reindex in the API, so the correct prefix and member ID will be reflected in the API record at that point. It’s relatively rare that DOIs are transfered and then don’t have any reason to be updated soon after.
That said, we are looking into ways to automate that reindexing process so that ownership changes can be reflected in the API even in situations when transferred DOIs aren’t updated by their new publisher.
Thanks so much for your help and for having the data re-indexed.
Si if I understand well, we would have much more reliable results if we used the XML records at doi.crossref .org / search / doi ? It shouldn’t be too hard for us to switch to that API instead of the REST API.