Record Registration Form: adding a corporate/organizational author

[MilvaEC]

Hello,

I am registering a DOI for a conference proceedings supplement. The work has a corporate/group author (the conference itself), not individual authors.

Crossref documentation indicates that organizational authors can be registered using the element. However, in the Record Registration Form, the Contributors section only shows fields for Given name(s), Family name(s), ORCID and Affiliation.

How can I register an organizational author in the Record Registration Form?

Thank you.

[Shayn]

Hello, and thanks for your question.

The short answer is: you can’t.

In designing the new Metadata Manager tool, we worked hard to strike a balance between simplicity and ease of use (meaning, supporting only the most commonly used metadata fields) and allowing for rich metadata (meaning, supporting a wider array of optional metadata fields). If we add too many rarely-used fields, less-knowledgable users are apt to supply inaccurate and/or nonsensical metadata just to put something in an empty text box. If we don’t add enough of the lesser-used fields, then we’re hampering users’ efforts to supply enriched metadata. It’s a very tricky balance.

Corporate authors are not especially common among members who register their metadata manually. And, that field, in particular, was very frequently misused and misunderstood by users on our older manual metadata entry tool, the Web Deposit Form. So, we opted not to add it to Metadata Manager.

If you have an article that has a corporate author, you’ll either need to omit that author or submit metadata for that article in some other way: either using the Web Deposit Form or constructing xml directly.

-Shayn

[barbar]

This is one of the limitations of the Record Registration Form and not a DOI or Crossref metadata limitation.

Note: The Contributors section does not support organisational authors. You cannot enter the name of the conference as a corporate author in the Contributors section.

If the preservation of corporate author metadata is important, the practical choices are to use the Web Deposit Form or to deposit XML directly, as those methods support the organisation element. “If you want the metadata to be complete and represent authorship correctly, I’d recommend XML for conference proceedings.”

[MilvaEC]

@Shayn

Hello, and thanks for your question.

The short answer is: you can’t.

In designing the new Metadata Manager tool, we worked hard to strike a balance between simplicity and ease of use (meaning, supporting only the most commonly used metadata fields) and allowing for rich metadata (meaning, supporting a wider array of optional metadata fields). If we add too many rarely-used fields, less-knowledgable users are apt to supply inaccurate and/or nonsensical metadata just to put something in an empty text box. If we don’t add enough of the lesser-used fields, then we’re hampering users’ efforts to supply enriched metadata. It’s a very tricky balance.

Corporate authors are not especially common among members who register their metadata manually. And, that field, in particular, was very frequently misused and misunderstood by users on our older manual metadata entry tool, the Web Deposit Form. So, we opted not to add it to Metadata Manager.

If you have an article that has a corporate author, you’ll either need to omit that author or submit metadata for that article in some other way: either using the Web Deposit Form or constructing xml directly.

-Shayn

Hi Shayn,

Thank you very much for your detailed explanation. I really appreciate it.

I understand the reasoning behind the decision. In our case, I’ll register those articles by creating the XML files directly.

Thanks again for your help!

Best regards,
Milva

[MilvaEC]

Thank you very much for your recommendation!

I agree that using XML directly is the best option to preserve the complete metadata, including the corporate author. I’ll deposit these records by creating the XML files directly.

Thanks again for your help!