From time to time, we receive messages from members who have submitted their metadata to us via an XML submission or through a helper tool (e.g., Metadata Manager, web deposit form, or OJS) only to realize that they submitted the metadata in error.
These members will typically contact the technical support team shortly thereafter, asking us to cancel or delete the submission(s) in question. Unfortunately, for the vast majority of these submissions, they’ll have been processed well before (minutes) a member can construct a message asking us to cancel a deposit attempt, and long before (hours) our technical support team receives the message and can take action.
We’ve documented the registration process in other ticket of the month posts: Natali’s post from February 2026 and Paul’s from September 2023. Both tickets provide foundational information about the registration and indexing process. The short of it is: the registration process for almost all registrations is typically completed in minutes. And, even submissions that are very large in file size and include hundreds of references (the part of the process that requires the most resources and results in some brief processing lags) typically begin processing within seconds of being submitted (even if they do take us minutes or hours to process (yes, hour-long-plus processing of an XML file is quite rare)).
For illustration, let’s take a look at a typical submission:
This submission included four journal articles. The four journal articles included nearly 200 references between the four of them, and we matched 80 of those nearly 200 to records in our corpus (again, that reference matching process is the most resource-intensive portion of this process).
So, how long did it take us to process these journal articles and match those 80 of 200 references?
45 seconds total. We began processing the submission seven seconds after we received it.
If this typical submission was flagged to us for cancellation or deletion, even with our exceptional support team, with a median first reply time in 2026 of 807 minutes, we’re going to be about 806 minutes late in fulfilling a request of this nature. Because of this, we are unable to cancel or delete registrations. But don’t forget, after you have registered your DOI record with us, you can update the metadata associated with it as often as you want, free of charge. So if you’ve submitted a DOI with incorrect metadata, you don’t need to delete the record altogether - you can just update the metadata elements that you want to change. The only thing that can’t be deleted is the DOI string itself.
For members submitting XML, if you want to test your XML in order to prevent errors and mistaken registrations, please make use of our parser. It’s a no-risk option to verify your XML submissions before your upload. For members using helper tools, do take care with the metadata you enter and submit to us. Our system is designed for persistence. What you’re registering with us is meant to be around forever.
Thanks for reading!
-Isaac