I am very new to research publications, registering DOIs, and Crossref so please bear with me. I recently figured out how to register a DOI through the Web Deposit Form and think I have the process down well except for this one article.
In registering a DOI, the article is from an organization’s 2021 journal issue of which I have the journal’s ISSN. However, its the same ISSN as the journal from it’s 2020 issue and when I try to link a DOI to the 2021 issue I get an error that the ISSN already exists. My understanding is each journal is an independent publication therefore each issue should have its own unique ISSN number, correct? Or is that number linked to the Organization or it’s journal series? If the organization can share ISSNs across it’s journals how can I link a DIO to two different articles from two different journal issues with the same ISSN?
It sounds like you accidentally registered the 2020 issue as if the issue were the whole journal. I can’t be totally sure, unless I see the submission itself. Could you email support@crossref.org with the submission ID number or copy of the submission log where you see that “ISSN…has already been assigned” error? We’ll be happy to take a look at the details and advise next steps.
I’m also just going to leave some basic web deposit form advice here, for context. You may already know all this.
Broadly speaking, to register DOIs for all articles in a given issue, the steps to take to use the web deposit form are as follows:
Select the Journal data type
Enter the Journal and Issue level metadata on the first page of the form. At minimum this includes: Journal title, abbreviated journal title, ISSN(s), and at least one publication year (print or online). If applicable, also enter issue number, volume number, and full publication dates.
[Please note, Journal DOI and Issue DOI are optional. If you don’t wish to deposit Journal-level and Issue-level DOIs, simply leave these fields as well as Journal URL and Issue URL empty. Keep in mind that, if you do deposit a Journal DOI, it refers to the journal as a whole, and therefore cannot change in future deposits]
Select ‘Add Articles’
On the second page of the form, enter the metadata for your first article (article title, authors, page numbers if available), the article DOI, and article URL
Click ‘Add Another Article’
Continue to enter article metadata, DOIs, and URLs until you’ve entered all articles for the given issue.
Click ‘Finish’
Enter your username and password and click Login
Enter your email address and click ‘Deposit’
My guess is that, when you registered the first DOIs from the 2020 issue, you put an issue-level DOI in the Journal DOI field in step 2. But there could be a few other things going on.
If you have an ISSN, Journal DOIs aren’t really useful, and Issue DOIs are never particularly useful. It’s really the DOIs for articles (and other content that’s likely to be cited) that are important here. So, just omitting the Journal DOI (and Journal URL) and Issue DOI (and Issue URL) from the deposits entirely is always a good option.
I have a few questions regarding your advice above:
Where do I find a journals abbreviated title? For my first DOI I searched the journal and their website but was unable to find any sort of abbreviation, so I made one up that seemed reasonable.If that is not acceptable please advise.
Some of the fields on the web form have a + (plus) on them and I assumed that those were required fields, including the journal DOI and the ISSN, either print or electronic. In fact it says Journal DOI and/or ISSN required.
5 & 6. Am I to enter all the articles in the journal regardless of author or just the articles I’m interested in submitting a DIO for?
Incidentally, all of the issues for this journal have the same ISSN. I do appreciate your guidance through this.
If you don’t use a conventional abbreviation for your journal, you can just make one up. It’s mostly used for citation matching, since some citation formats require a journal abbreviation rather than full journal title.
Either a Journal DOI or ISSN is required. In practical terms, if you have an ISSN, then you should consider it as if ISSN is required, and the Journal DOI is optional.
In the rare cases where a journal doesn’t have an ISSN, then a Journal DOI can be used in lieu of an ISSN.
You should be registering DOIs for all the articles in a given issue.
ISSN is a journal identifier, so that’s what we would expect to be true. There are rare exceptions, but it definitely makes things simpler if the ISSN stays consistent.
I took a look at your deposit, from the submission ID you emailed to us, and the problem is not quite what I was suspecting, but it is similar.
When you first deposit metadata for a given journal, the journal-level metadata (journal title, ISSN(s), journal-level DOI if you choose to include one, and the publisher/DOI prefix) are used to form a title record for that journal in our system. All future deposits for that journal must match that title record exactly.
In your case, when you submitted your first metadata deposit to register an article from ORTESOL Journal, you submitted the journal title as:
ORTESOL Journal 2020
From what I can clean the journal title is “ORTESOL Journal” and the "2020’ refers to the volume or issue that the one article belongs to.
And then later, when you tried to register another article from a different issue, you supplied an even more granular issue-specific title as the journal title:
ORTESOL Journal, v38 2021
So, in technical terms, the second deposit failed, because you had already told us (in your first deposit) that the single, definitive title for the whole journal was “ORTESOL Journal 2020” and then title in the second deposit didn’t match that.
But, the broader problem is that you’re suppling what is essentially an issue title as the journal title in each deposit.
The ISSN Portal shows the journal’s title as
The ORTESOL Journal
You’re not strictly required to use that exact title in the metadata you submit to Crossef (i.e. “ORTESOL Journal” instead of “The ORTESOL Journal” would be fine) but whatever journal title you use has to be consistent in every single metadata deposit you submit for content in that journal, and with that ISSN.
So, to move forward, can you confirm the journal title you plan to use? I’ll modify the title record in our system for ISSN 0192401X accordingly. And then you can proceed to submit metadata deposits to register new DOIs as needed.