Picture this: You’re floating along, happily registering your DOI records with Crossref when…uh oh. You are faced with an error message that seems very unhelpful. The system says you don’t have permissions! The DOI you thought you just registered doesn’t seem to be appearing anywhere. The thing you thought was supposed to happen didn’t happen.
Now what?
Crossref Support to the rescue!
Luckily, we can usually figure out what has happened, get you sorted, and send you on your way fairly quickly. However, we can get you on your way even faster if you provide us with some helpful information right from the start.
I asked my fellow Technical Support Specialists what they wished our members would provide in their initial tickets to make our jobs easier AND get you your answers quicker. I know that the holiday season has passed, but here’s our wish list of things we would love to see in a message from you:
DOI Prefix
Most of us begin our investigation by looking up your organisation in our system. The best, and most accurate, way for us to do this is by using your DOI prefix. If you’re not sure what your prefix is, you can simply look at one of your DOIs. Your prefix will be the number beginning with 10.xxxx, before the /. For example, if one of your DOIs looks like this: 10.5555/asdf123, your prefix is 10.5555. (One caveat: if you have had DOIs transferred to you, those transferred DOIs will still have the previous owner’s prefix. Choose a DOI that you know you have registered yourself.)
Submission ID (or multiple IDs)
You can find your Submission ID in two different ways.
The easiest is to take a look at the email message you receive from us after you submit a record. It will show in the subject line of the email, as well as in the text of the body.
You can also view it by logging into the admin tool with your Crossref credentials, no matter which method you used to register your records.
Go to the Submissions tab. Then click on the Administration tab.
Then, leave all the fields blank and click the Search button at the bottom. You will then see a list of all your submissions that have made it to our system. The Submission IDs are listed on the left-hand side of the screen.
Screenshot of your error message
A screenshot (or multiple screenshots!) is a great way for us to see what you’re seeing and help you solve the problem at hand. This helps us get a view into what you’re encountering. This is also helpful for those times when you’re faced with an error message that is particularly abstruse. Send a picture of that to us, and we can help translate and unpick it for you.
Which tool were you using to register your records
This is also really helpful for us to figure out where to begin. Were you uploading an XML file? Were you using Metadata Manager? Were you in the Web Deposit Form? What about OJS? Which brings me to the next one…
OJS version
If you’re using OJS, it’s also very helpful to know which version you’re using. Since there are some differences between the versions and how they behave, this helps us get going on the right path to help you.
Not sure which version you’re using?
If you want to check which OJS version are you using, go to your public-facing OJS site, right click on any of the OJS pages and select the option “View Page Source”:
Then you will see some code lines and you will find the OJS version in front of the HTML tag called <meta name=“generator”:
But wait a minute, you say!
What if you’re retrieving metadata, not registering it?? Fear not, we have a few items on this wish list just for you:
API
If you’re querying an API, which one are you using? REST API? XML API? The more information you provide, the better we’ll be able to help.
Search Interface
Are you searching using Crossref’s Metadata search on our website? Are you somewhere out on the world wide web? Are you using our Simple Text Query form? Are you searching through Zotero? Let us know where you’re searching so we can know the limitations of those searches and see how they connect to our metadata. Take us on a tour of your search - we’d love to see how you got to where you are and what you found.
While we know these are wishes, we do hope you’ll take a read through them and think of these things next time you send us a message. We love to help, and if you provide us with some (or all!) of these items in your initial message, we’ll be able to get you sorted even faster. Thank you!