Ticket of the month - September 2025 - A new helper tool for registering your journal articles - the record registration form

[ifarley]

Lena on our program team and Patrick on our technical team have been working hard to get our newest helper tool - the Record Registration Form - ready for a formal launch. For this month’s ticket of the month, I am including step-by-step instructions for editing existing and/or registering new journal articles and grants using this new tool.

We’d love for you to include your reactions to this new tool in the comments below. If you’re new to the tool, what do you think of it? If you’ve used it when it was in beta, what do you think of the added features of being able to edit records and selecting from recently registered journals?

Editing existing journal articles

We have just released a new ‘edit record’ option on the landing page which takes you to a list of all records - grants and journal articles - previously registered by the same user via any of our helper tools: the record registration form (grants or journal articles), the Web Deposit Form (just journal articles), or Metadata Manager (just journal articles).

Limitation 1: For grants, the list can only display recent records or those registered going forward. Journal articles are all included.

Limitation 2: If a Web Deposit Form or Metadata Manager record has no ISSN, the user will need to enter one before being able to resubmit. As the form doesn’t support journal/issue DOIs, those won’t be included in the updated record.

Selecting a record (journal article or grant) from the list takes you to the form pre-filled with the record’s metadata (taken from the XML API), allowing you to make changes and resubmit.

Step-by-step instructions for registering your journal article(s)

Broadly speaking, assuming you have recently published a new issue of your journal and you want to register DOIs for an article(s) in the issue, the steps to take to use the Record Registration Form are:

1. Sign into the Record Registration Form using your Crossref credentials

2. After you have successfully signed in, select ‘New record’ to begin your registration

3. On the ‘New record submission’ screen choose ‘Journal Article’ (Note: funders can also register grant IDs using this tool) and click ‘Continue’

4. Enter metadata for an individual journal article (if you are registering more than one article, you’ll be prompted to add more articles later in the process):

   1. For all required article metadata fields:

      1. Your journal article’s: Article title, Article DOI, and Article landing page URL [Note: we also have guidance about generating DOI suffixes]

      2. Contributor metadata: contributor(s)’ family name and role (each contributor’s role is required if you register contributor metadata) [Note: some contributor metadata is optional]

      3. Publication date (either online, print, or both - only one of the two is required)

   2. For the optional article metadata fields of your choosing:

      1. Contributor metadata: contributor(s)’ given name, name suffixes (e.g., ‘Jr.’ or ‘III’), ORCID iD, and affiliation

      2. Abstract and language of abstract

      3. Funding metadata: funder name, Open Funder Registry identifier, and award number

      4. License URL

      5. Similarity Check full text URL

      6. References

5. Click ‘Next’

6. Enter the metadata for the journal that your article is published in:

   1. For all required journal metadata fields:

      1. Your journal’s ISSN(s) (either online ISSN, print ISSN, or both - only one is required)

         1. If your journal has been previously registered in our system, you can choose it from a list of your previous journals to autofill the journal-level metadata

            

         2. If your journal has NOT been previously registered in our system, that’s okay; this submission will establish a permanent record in our system (carefully enter your metadata into the form as we’ll use this to verify future submissions for this journal)

      2. Your journal’s full title (if you chose to autofill the metadata for your existing journal, this will be populated with the journal title previously registered in our system for the ISSN selected)

   2. For the optional journal metadata fields of your choosing:

      1. Abbreviated title of your journal

      2. If your journal is published in issues, you may include optional journal-issue-level metadata by selecting the ‘+ Add Issue Metadata’ button

7. Click ‘Next’

8. Review the metadata that you have entered thus far for your journal article into the form; if you have no corrections and are ready to submit your metadata for registration, select ‘Submit’

9. If your journal article was submitted successfully for processing, you’ll receive a record submission complete message and submission ID on this page

10. If you’d like to add another journal article in this same journal or issue, select ‘Start new submission’

What if I encounter an error during my submission?

If there is an error with your submission, a pop-up will appear after a few seconds and give you more details. Correct the error, try again later, or let us know here in the Community Forum to help you address the issue, as appropriate.

If you have any other questions about this please let us know.

Thanks for reading,

Isaac

[hliu092]

Thank you very much for sharing this instruction. That’s great!

[b.beysembaeva]

Hello! I’m a newbie. Could you please tell me if it’s possible to edit the DOI of an article whose metadata was submitted via a web form?

[lstoll]

Hello! We hope to support editing records from the Web Deposit Form very soon too, we just need to run a few tests to ensure it works well. I will keep you updated.

[lstoll]

Okay - you can now see your articles registered via the Web Deposit Form on Crossref too. You will be able to edit an article’s metadata and resubmit it, if the journal that the article was published in has an ISSN. The record registration form does not support journal DOIs.

[mccurley]

I’ve been a bit confused by all of this. As far as I can tell, there are at many different ways to enter metadata into crossref:

1. direct deposit of XML through the API (which we use)

2. the “Web deposit form”

3. the OJS plugin for publishers who use OJS.

4. the old metadata manager that will soon be deprecated

5. the new record manager UI.

   I just logged into the new UI, but it didn’t show any records for our journal. That leaves me wondering if these tools are are alternative ways to manage the same underlying data, or whether these are completely separate parallel paths. We are completely comfortable to stick with XML in spite of how clunky it is, but it would be useful if the documentation for the new UI was more clear on what records can be managed that way. This page says we should maintain the metadata, but from what I can tell the way you maintain it depends on how you entered the data into the system. Maybe I’m missing something.

[lstoll]

Hi Kevin,

You’re not really missing anything, but it is a bit complicated.

The new tool currently lists only those records that have been deposited using one of our helper tool interfaces (2, 4, and 5 on your list). This is because the form can’t support all the metadata fields that may have been previously registered using other methods, especially direct XML deposit. So if you were to import a really rich record into the form and resubmit it, some of that richness would be lost upon overwriting it with the updated metadata.

We do hope to allow records from any source to be edited in this tool in future, but some more work is required for us to be able to warn users about this potential data loss.

So in summary, there aren’t technically any parallel paths here - all the records are held in the same database regardless of registration method. But the record registration form only pulls in those that came from certain methods, because we know that those are “safe” to edit in this tool.

If you’re comfortable depositing XML, then that almost certainly remains the best option for you. The helper tools are intended to be used by members who lack the technical capacity for working with XML directly, but they will always have to be more limited in how much of the depth and breadth of our input schemas they can reflect.

[thetan]

Dear Crossref team members, this tool is great and thank you for implementing it.

However, just a suggestion, could you please allow us to use ROR in the Funder ID section for Grants. I do understand that this is a rare issue, but your Grants schema starting from the Version 0.2.0 supports ROR instead of Funder ID and we’ve already used it, but had to do it manually using XML.

Thanks in advance

[hlbrown]

Thank you for this information! I do have a couple questions. These may have been addressed elsewhere. If there is a roadmap for the form implementation, could you share?

First, will you be building functionality to submit DOIs for dissertations? We currently do not have XML expertise. We are going to start assigning our ETD DOIs at the end of this semester. Additionally, what is the best practice for organizing these into one bucket? In the old form, one could start a “journal” and add DOIs from that. Will there be something similar for ETDs is that is the best practice?

Second, I see in the screenshots you’ve posted that a new journal can be added once you select the prompt to add a new article. Will this be the functionality going forward or are you still developing?

Thanks!

Heather

[lstoll]

Hello,

Thank you for raising this. It’s true that we have not been able to work much on improving the grants form since we started to develop the journal article form. However we do plan to support form submissions with ROR IDs in grant metadata in future, hopefully soon - you can follow this issue at Jira.

[lstoll]

Hi Heather,

A full version of Crossref’s roadmap can be found at Strategic agenda and roadmap - Crossref. But specifically for this tool, the major next steps include:

• Supporting relationships metadata being submitted for journal articles
• Testing and launching a new form for books and book chapters
• Creating more forms for work types with simpler schemas - this may well include dissertations. I will certainly add you to the list of people to contact once we have a prototype of a form for dissertations available for testing.

In the medium term, we do want to build out this tool to cover all commonly used work types.

On your second question: There aren’t really container “buckets” in dissertation metadata that function the same way as journals. However, you will include metadata about the institution for any dissertation you register, and you can also assign an <item_number> as explained in Dissertations markup guide - Crossref.

Lastly, the “In a new journal” functionality that you’ve seen in the screenshots just means that the form will not auto-fill the journal metadata for the next submission with the same journal’s details from the previous submission. So this is not about creating a new journal, but rather about including the correct journal metadata in an article deposit.

[hliu092]

As a small publisher, I’d like to share the experience in using the new helper tool:

I have used the new helper tool to renew the previous metadata record, and there are two obvious advantages as compared to the Web Deposit Form: firstly, both DOI metadata and Reference data can be integrated into one file, which may facilitate the citation counts by international databases, whereas Web Deposit Form divides both of them into two separate files; Secondly, there is additional function of inputting the article number in the new helper tool, so that I can specify the version NO. of journal article by renewing the record, if the article is revised after formally publishing.

That’s great improvement!

Thank you!

[lstoll]

That’s great to hear, thank you!

I just wanted to comment on your last point about article numbers. You should be aware that you will overwrite the metadata for an article record each time you edit it. So there will be no record of the previous versions of an article. You can find more guidance on how to handle post-publication updates and article versions on our website.

We will also add functionality for registering post-publication updates in this new helper tool in future.