Ticket of the month - October 2024 - Registering your previously unregistered DOIs

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A couple months ago, a few of my colleagues hosted a series of events in Indonesia with many of our members. During several of those in-person exchanges, the topic of registering previously unregistered DOIs - these were works that had DOIs assigned/published/distributed, but for which metadata were never registered, and thus the DOIs were inactive (i.e., unregistered) - was raised. As a result, @robbykharosalien on our membership team posed a seemingly straightforward question to our support team:

How can members register unregistered DOIs; do we have specific steps members can follow to solve this problem?

As you might have anticipated - either if you know Crossref well or if you follow these ticket of the month posts (we like the nuanced topics ) - the answer to this question isn’t always simple. Rather, it can be complicated. Like most things with Crossref, the details are important.

The most straightforward example

Let’s start with the most straightforward example and build from there. If you are looking to register previously unregistered DOIs on your own prefix, this is as simple as registering new DOIs on that same prefix. We’ll even give you a discount for those legacy DOIs whose publication dates are older than the current calendar year + the previous two calendar years (so, for the rest of 2024, that will mean that anything with a publication date of 2021 and earlier will result in a discounted registration fee for each DOI). For example, a journal article DOI registered with an article-level publication date of 2021 will incur a $0.15 USD fee. We want you to register these DOIs!

If you’re in this position and ready to register your previously unregistered DOIs, here’s your reminder to be careful when sending us the article-level publication date, since that is what we’ll use to determine your content registration fees.

When things get more complicated

Ownership/stewardship of content changes over time. For example, we’ve already transferred hundreds of journals and thousands of individual journal articles this year from one member to another. It’s a common practice. Our standard procedure for journal title transfers is to transfer the journal and all its existing DOIs from the disposing to the acquiring member. This means that the acquiring member takes responsibility for all existing DOI records - even if the DOIs themselves are on the disposing member’s prefix. The acquiring member can’t register any new DOI records on the disposing member’s prefix, but they can update the metadata on any existing DOI records on the disposing member’s prefix.

When we say that we transfer all the existing DOIs, we mean DOIs that have been registered with us. Herein lies the complexity. If a DOI has never been registered with us, we can’t transfer its ownership/stewardship from the disposing to the acquiring member (because we don’t have a record of it).

But, mistakes happen. For instance, we have some journals that get transferred between members each year that are quite old. Those journals may have published and registered thousands of journal articles. It wouldn’t be surprising if the disposing member of a journal with thousands of journal articles had a DOI or three that they had published and distributed into the world, but failed to register that DOI(s) with Crossref. So, what then happens to those three previously unregistered DOIs at the point of transfer? Nothing. They’ve never been registered so we don’t have them in our system and therefore cannot transfer them between the members involved. This is why - if you are ever involved in transfer of a journal or other content - our membership team will remind you that: ‘before the transfer, it’s important to check that all displayed DOIs using the disposing publisher’s prefix have definitely been successfully registered with us.’ That’s because, all too often, the member acquiring the journal and journal articles will return to us in a week or a month after the transfer: ‘I thought all of the existing journal articles were transferred to us. We’re getting errors when we submit our metadata. Why can’t we update these DOIs?’

So, what do we do in these situations? Fortunately, our technical support team can intervene when this happens. Our system is rigid and has a number of checks in place to ensure that members can only register new (new, to us, that is: never-before-registered) DOIs on their own prefix(es). We don’t want different members to have the ability to register DOIs on your prefix. And, neither do you (think about that tangly invoicing).

If you are involved in a title acquisition, we want you to ask about existing DOIs before we complete the title transfer. But, if you find that there are legacy DOIs on a prefix(es) other than yours that were not registered, get in touch with us. Once the DOIs are registered - we’ll need a full XML file formatted to the Crossref schema (again, get in touch, there are a couple ways to create these XML files and we can guide you) - we will then transfer the ownership/stewardship of those DOIs to you as the acquiring member. We have to execute these registrations for you because we’ll have to make some temporary changes to our system to circumvent those rigid settings I talked about above. During our exchanges about registering these unregistered DOIs, we will also discuss which member receives the content registration fees (typically that’s the disposing member, but we can make alternative arrangements if necessary/preferable).

How do I know if a DOI has never been registered?

The answer to this question will serve you well here and in many other cases. Let’s look at an example journal that has recently transferred owners/stewards:

Journal name: Дидактика

ISSN: 2786-6386

Transferred: June 2024 from T.N. Shevchenko National University “Chernihiv Colehium” (DOI prefix 10.58407) to Hryshchenko & “Desna Polygraph Publishing House” (FOP Hryshchenko S.V.) (DOI prefix 10.69842)

Disposing member: T.N. Shevchenko National University “Chernihiv Colehium” (DOI prefix 10.58407)

Acquiring member: Hryshchenko & “Desna Polygraph Publishing House” (FOP Hryshchenko S.V.) (DOI prefix 10.69842)

Journal’s depositor report: https://data.crossref.org/depositorreport?pubid=J555717

Let’s compare registered DOIs with unregistered: DOIs 10.58407/DIDACTICS.24.1.1 and 10.69842/DIDACTICS.24.2.7 have both been registered. You can see that by resolving one of these DOIs with a link: https://doi.org/10.69842/DIDACTICS.24.2.7

Let’s say for argument that the journal had another DOI on prefix 10.58407 that had been published but never registered. Let’s call this hypothetical article DOI 10.58407/DIDACTICS.unregistered. Here’s what that DOI looks like if I resolve it:

If you are greeted with this DOI NOT FOUND error page on doi.org when you resolve a DOI, it means that DOI has never been registered.

Now, if the acquiring member Hryshchenko & “Desna Polygraph Publishing House” (FOP Hryshchenko S.V.) wants to register this DOI for the article, which they should do since the DOI has been published and is being shared and cited out in the world, they will need our support team to assist in the registration since they do not have privileges to register content on prefix 10.58407. That prefix belongs to a different member. Our support team will need properly formatted journal article XML, like this example, in order to register DOI 10.58407/DIDACTICS.unregistered.

Other caveats

I don’t want to spend too much time addressing the most complicated scenario, because it is quite rare, but if you are transferring content from a different registration agency (e.g., mEDRA, DataCite, etc.) do get in touch with our membership team to discuss the process. We have ample experience navigating these transfers, but it will require careful collaboration.

Thanks for reading,
Isaac

[ifarley]

For more information on our work to ensure our fees going into the future are more equitable, please take a look at this blog.