Lots of exciting innovations are being made in scientific publishing, often raising fundamental questions about established publishing practices. In this guest post, Ludo Waltman and André Brasil discuss the recently launched MetaROR publish-review-curate platform and the questions it raises about good practices for Crossref DOI registration in this emerging landscape.
Thanks for the post and the interesting questions posed. Having come across some of these issues at eLife I thought I’d share some relevant thoughts/questions that came up during discussions with Crossref when determining our DOI convention for eLife’s PRC model:
Does the content you publish have a different citation to the preprint (on the preprint server)? If so, it’s a good candidate for a new DOI (for various reasons)
Do you consider your organisation as a (joint) custodian of that content? For example, if there were concerns with its validity would you issue your own withdrawal, retraction, expression of concern or update notice? If so, it’s a good candidate for a new DOI.
You cannot register DOIs for reviews without specifying what it’s a review for (which is logical and fundamental). Registering your own DOIs gives you greater control over what to attach the reviews to. We register a distinct DOI for each version, and relate the accompanying reviews to that specific version. Preprint servers follow different conventions, with some registering a DOI for each version and some opting to register one DOI per preprint. For the latter, how can you distinguish which version it relates to? This is currently only possible by linking to a specific DOI (or a versioned URL, which is not persistent).
Crossref’s relations model is really powerful (and IMO under-utilised). We make quite extensive use of it, to always link back to the preprint server, and between the versions we publish (as well as datasets, archived code and so on). In my view, increased use of the relations model enables greater transparency and is fundamentally more representative of what the work is.
For your second question on types, we determined that the only way to authentically register our Reviewed preprints was to register preprint DOIs with accompanying review DOIs. There are some features of our model that MetaROR shares and some that it does not (or it’s not clear to me if it does). Here are the features that helped us determine our path forward with types:
Under our model, following publication of an eLife Reviewed preprint authors are free to submit to another journal. Registering Reviewed preprints as journal articles would make the identification of truly ‘duplicate’ publications more difficult, and could cause further complications for authors in the existing ecosystem. Registering these as preprints still emphasises the role of preprints while not precluding us from linking to the ‘final’ version published at a different journal.
A (deliberate) consequence of our model is to undermine the importance of a single final, purportedly ‘validated’ version of record. Registering these items as journal articles serves to perpetuate this reliance.
In addition to Reviewed preprints, eLife also lets authors publish a finalised eLife VOR (because, despite my comment above, this is still meaningful for some authors, allows them to fully engage with the existing ecosystem, and represents one part of the ‘curation‘ aspect of PRC). There is therefore an obvious separation built into our model between preprint and journal article.
Finally, this is probably not going to be the last ‘new type’ of scholarly communication - we’d favour an approach that relies less on (the proliferation of new/different) types, and more on relations between objects.
At Peer Community In, we believe that articles submitted to peer-review platforms such as MetaROR should ideally retain the same DOI as the version on the preprint server, rather than being assigned a new one. Our reasoning is as follows:
-Submitting a preprint to a peer-review platform does not, by itself, involve modifications by the authors.
-While the process may generate reviews and assessments, these evaluations can be either positive or negative.
-Recognition of a “peer-reviewed” status seems most appropriate when an article has been meaningfully revised in response to reviews and when the editorial team considers it deserving of a particular mark of quality or validation (a positive curation).
-Conversely, if no substantial revisions are made, or if the editorial team issues a negative assessment, assigning a new DOI could be misleading.
-A new DOI in such cases might inadvertently suggest to readers that the article has undergone a validation step comparable to journal publication, which may not be the case.
As far as I understand, from a metadata perspective, relationships such as isReviewOf, reviews, isRelatedTo, and in some cases hasPreprint / isPreprintOf, already allow links to be expressed between preprints and their reviews. What I am still trying to better understand is how Crossref envisions representing these relationships over time, particularly when a reviewed preprint later evolves into a substantially revised version or a formally published journal article.
I am not an expert in Crossref’s underlying infrastructure, so this is very much a question rather than a proposal: could Crossmark ever play a role in signaling version awareness or continuity across related DOIs—linking preprints, reviews, and published articles—even when those DOIs are registered by different entities? Or is relying on relationship metadata considered the intended and sufficient approach within the current Crossref model? I would appreciate any clarification on how Crossref sees this evolving.
Thanks for the comment. Our current thinking is that capturing relationships between items is sufficient to represent different versions and how they have been reviewed, even when they have been published by different organisations. We have also recently added a version field, which indicates when something is likely to have different versions.
As this discussion highlights, though, it’s an evolving area and likely to become more complex in the future. We want to keep the metadata accurate and simple to interpret while making space for innovations in publication, and the current approach seems flexible enough to do that for now. We’ll keep an eye on trends in the community and see whether there are other complementary approaches to add down the line.