This post was originally an email to Crossref’s sponsors in late March. I’m reposting it to the Community Forum in case it can be useful for anyone else. The post assumes the reader is a representative of a Crossref sponsoring organization, though the information here should be useful for any Crossref member.
Title ownership transfers are often confusing to new sponsored members, who may not understand what they need in order to transfer a journal or book’s DOIs to their account’s ownership and may not be certain what to do with those DOIs once we have transferred them to their membership’s ownership.
Our first in a new series of occasional newsletters for sponsors offers you practical advice for helping your sponsored members with their title transfers. Poorly handled title transfers can slow down new membership applications and cost members and their sponsors extra money. This guide will help you avoid these slowdowns and prevent unnecessary extra content registration fees.
Let’s begin with the basics: Crossref is a membership organization. Each member has their own DOI prefix, and that member may use their DOI prefix to register DOI records for any materials they publish. We will speak specifically about journals in this guide, but the principles discussed here apply to any materials a member can register DOIs for: books, reports, datasets, and so on.
The first time a member deposits a DOI record for an article in a journal, our system creates a “title record” for that journal. This title record does several things: it collects all the DOI records for that journal together in one central place, it defines the canonical title for that journal, and it prevents any other member from registering DOI records for that journal.
Imagine that Example Publishing begins a new journal, Interesting Studies (eISSN 0123-4567). Example Publishing registers DOIs for the first articles in Interesting Studies on their DOI prefix, 10.1234. As shown in the image below, this creates a title record in our system for Interesting Studies (eISSN 0123-4567). Now, only Example Publishing may register DOIs against the ISSN 0123-4567 and they must use the exact title in their title record, Interesting Studies, or the DOI deposit will fail (our system would not accept, for example, a deposit with the title Interesting Studies Journal). Also, please remember that members must not register DOI records without the associated ISSNs when journals have ISSNs assigned to them; doing this violates our membership terms.
After five years of publishing Interesting Studies, Example Publishing sells the journal to your new sponsored member, the Society of Examples. Now, we will need to conduct a title ownership transfer in the Crossref system. The title ownership transfer will do two things:
- Allow the Society of Examples to register DOIs on their own DOI prefix for new articles published in Interesting Studies that don’t yet have a DOI.
- Allow the Society of Examples to assume control of the DOIs previously registered by Example Publishing.
This second part is often overlooked by new Crossref members who may not understand that after a title ownership transfer in the Crossref system, they have full ownership of and responsibility for the journal’s existing DOIs, even though these DOIs were registered on the previous member’s prefix!
Before the transfer - getting permission
We need one of three forms of authorization in order to complete a title ownership transfer in the Crossref system. You can help your sponsored members by sorting this permission out before they apply for Crossref membership.
The first form of authorization we accept is a TAS notice, which is a standardised form of transfer reporting administered by the International ISSN Centre. A TAS notice looks like this https://journaltransfer.issn.org/TID/2583, and it mentions both the transferring and receiving organizations. Note that we can only accept a TAS notice that shows the journal being transferred from the Crossref member who currently owns it to the new sponsored member. If a TAS notice for Interesting Studies showed the transferring organization as “Interesting Studies Group”, we would not be able to accept this, as in our system, the journal’s title record is owned by Example Publishing.
The second option may be more straightforward for new members than using TAS notices: we will also accept an email from a contact on the transferring member’s Crossref account. The email should be unambiguous, and if it is forwarded to us (member@crossref.org) it must include the original sender’s details. We can’t accept letters/PDFs that have not been forwarded, even if they are signed, because we need to see the email address details of the sender. Emails from the journal’s editor-in-chief are also unfortunately not acceptable proof of transfer permission unless the editor-in-chief is also a contact on the transferring Crossref member account.
The third option is a notice on the transferring member’s website. A suitable notice will include the name of the receiving Crossref member; a notice simply saying “Interesting Studies has moved to a new publisher” with no other information would not be enough. Be aware that this notice should be on the domain to which the journal’s existing DOIs direct readers. For example, if the DOIs that Example Publishing registered send readers to interestingstudies.org, the notice would need to appear on interestingstudies.org, not interestingstudies.com or some other site.
Applicants may submit this transfer permission to us directly via our title transfer request form.
As a sponsor, you should help your sponsored members understand and navigate these three different options for permission. When new members apply to work under your sponsorship, ensure that you ask them whether they will be registering DOIs for any journals that have already received DOIs via another Crossref member.
After the transfer - managing existing DOIs
When we complete a title ownership transfer for a member, we will send a standard confirmation email.
Within this email will be a link to a list of all of the transferred journal’s existing DOIs, like this. You will see that the OWNER column reflects the receiving member’s prefix, even though the DOIs themselves show the transferring member’s prefix. Your sponsored member is now the owner of these DOIs!
Your sponsored member may be keen to register DOIs for their newly published articles as soon as they can. It’s important that you help them first integrate all the existing DOIs into their own system so that they don’t accidentally register a duplicate DOI for an article that was previously assigned a DOI by the transferring member. For example, if your member hosts their journal via OJS, my colleague Kathleen has a helpful guide for importing existing DOIs into OJS.
If you are not sure which article a particular DOI corresponds to, you can manually check by searching the DOI in our search tool.
Or, if you have a lot of DOIs, we will be happy to send you a list of the title/date/authors for each of those DOIs. Please just contact our Support team and mention the ISSN(s) of the journal(s) that you need these lists for.
Members need to avoid registering new DOIs on their prefix for works which already have DOIs associated with them for three reasons: 1) doing so contravenes our membership terms, 2) it stops the existing DOIs from being a persistent, permanent identifiers, and 3) it costs the member unnecessary extra money. Remember, there is never a fee to update metadata for an existing DOI but there is a fee to register new DOIs! Ensuring that your members are properly displaying and integrating their existing DOIs into their journal platforms is a critical first step.
Next, you will want to help your member update the landing page URLs for the transferred journal’s DOIs. Let’s return to our example: articles in Interesting Studies used to be hosted on interestingstudies.org by Example Publishing. However, now they are being hosted at the societyofexamples.com domain. You may need to assist your members in submitting updates for their URLs so the DOIs properly resolve to their new landing pages on the Society of Examples website.
There are two different ways to do this. First, if the member is hosting their journal via OJS we recommend that they simply resubmit the metadata for those DOIs via the built-in OJS depositor tools. The member will first need to import all of the existing DOIs previously registered by the transferring member (Example Publishing) into their OJS platform. Detailed guidance on how to do this can be found here.
If the member is not using OJS, they (or you) can submit a “bulk resolution URL update”. This is simply a tab-separated TXT list of each DOI and its new landing page URL with a special header:
H: depositor@societyofexamples.com;fromPrefix=10.5555
10.1234/DOI1 https://societyofexamples.com/1
10.1234/DOI2 https://societyofexamples.com/2
There are three things to note about this:
- The email address in the first line is the email address to which the depositor report will be sent. If you are submitting this bulk URL update on your member’s behalf, you may use your own email address.
- The prefix in the first line (10.5555 in this example) is the prefix that Crossref assigned to your sponsored member, not the prefix that the DOIs were originally registered on (10.1234).
- The DOIs and the URLs must be separated by a tab, not a space.
Once this file is complete, save it as a TXT file and log into the admin tool. Navigate to Submission > Upload, select the TXT file, select Bulk URL Update, and upload (see example below). Within a minute or two you should receive a confirmation email (sent to the email address you listed in the header of the TXT you submitted) if the update was successful. Now, you can try resolving one of the DOIs - it should now send you to the new landing page URL! If the update was unsuccessful, please contact us and we can help you diagnose the issue.
Once this is complete and all existing DOIs are integrated and updated, the sponsored member may use their new DOI prefix to register DOIs for any materials that do not already have DOIs. Of course, this includes any newly published articles, but it may also include any older articles that the previous member never assigned DOIs to.
In short: we encourage you to be proactive with your members in determining whether their journals or other materials already have DOIs assigned to them. We will need one of three forms of permission to proceed with a title transfer, so we encourage you and your members to reach out sooner rather than later to help quicken the joining process. After a title transfer, you and the member will need to do a little work to make sure all the DOIs continue to resolve properly and to make sure that you are not accidentally registering new DOIs for any articles that already have them.
We want to ensure that you know everything there is to know about title transfers so that you can serve your members better. If you have any questions about title transfers, authorizations, or URL updates, please let us know or leave a public question here at our Community Forum.