Hello there,
As a Crossref member who is actively registering your content, you do receive several important reports from us. One of the reports is the monthly resolution reports.
In this forum post, I will try to address some of the common questions we do receive from our members regarding this report.
What is a resolution report, and why do I receive it on a monthly basis?
Resolution reports are automatically generated monthly statistics that are intended to show the number of successful and failed DOI resolutions run through the DOI proxy server.
The main intent of sharing with you (the publisher) these reports is to inform you of your overall DOI resolution performance, as well as assist you identify any DOI(s) that had not been registered in that timeframe using the failed DOI’s csv link within the report (see attached screenshot).
When should I expect to receive the monthly resolution reports?
These reports are usually shared to the primary contact on your account (or, anyone else affiliated with your account who has been added as a recipient), and they are for the previous month. They are usually shared to our members anytime between the 5th and 14th day of each month.
I have high failure rates in my report, what should I do?
The ideal failure rate is 0%, but 2-4% is the norm. If you are new to Crossref, or have only deposited metadata for a small number of content items, you may have a high failure percentage (for example, 1 failure and 9 successes = 10% failure rate). Ultimately though, it is almost inevitable to avoid such arising issues with your DOIs because the access and usage of the DOI metadata by humans and machines are prone to error at some point.
If your overall resolution failure rate is higher than 2-4%, look closely at the .csv file of failed DOIs for your account, and determine if the DOIs listed should be registered.
A correctly registered DOI is showing up in the failure report, why?
We send you all failed resolutions from the preceding month, even if the content has subsequently been registered. If an unregistered DOI is clicked on 1st August but not registered until 6th August, we count that as a resolution failure.
If you find a lot of registered DOIs in your failed DOI list, you should make sure you aren’t distributing your DOIs before they have been registered.
I have established that some of the failed DOIs in the report are correctly registered. What should I do?
Frankly speaking, if you have investigated a DOI present in the report, and you have determined that it is incorrect (one that was not assigned to any article in your journal), then it can be ignored. Sometimes these errors are simply user mistakes (for example, typos made by users while attempting to resolve a DOI).
However, if the report contains legitimate DOIs that are yet to be registered, then they should be registered.
Here is some additional information about the resolution report: https://www.crossref.org/documentation/reports/resolution-report/