OJS with CrossRef: How to work with references?

[sighteer]

Dear all,

I'm planning to move to OJS and also go with CrossRef. It is good to know that OJS can automatically generate DOI according to a prefix, and also provides a plugin for exporting xml files needed by CrossRef. But when I got in touch with CrossRef, I got the following information as one requirement of CrossRef.

"Members have an obligation to link references in the journal articles they deposit via CrossRef. "

I understand CrossRef provides some kind of HTML API for querying the DOI, but what about the OJS side? It seems we don't have references as one of the metadata set. How can we have the references information (after querying from CrossRef) included into a paper's abstract page?

CrossRef also says:

We also encourage our members to deposit their references as part of their metadata deposit.

I guess this concerns the same question as above.

Thanks in advance for any reply!
Br, - Sighteer

[jmacgreg]

Hi Sighteer,

There's a good thread on Crossref here: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=759&start=0. My former coworker Michael Nason has dealt with this issue a fair bit for one journal, and has posted his experiences there. If you have any further questions, please feel free to post them -- in this thread, or preferably in that one (to keep Crossref questions grouped together). I think we're starting to see more interest in Crossref across our user base, and we're interested in ways that we can provide better support in the future.

Cheers,
James

[mj]

Hi Sighteer,

Just to add to some of James' comments, and specifically your question around references within CrossRef: When they originated, CrossRef accepted deposits that only contained metadata for the item to be indexed; however, in the past few years they have been trying to build links between items, and as such have started pushing the need for reference information as well (in fact, they now charge a "non-linking fee" of $0.22/article).

Extracting and sufficiently marking up this reference information for articles was one of the primary goals behind the development of Lemon8-XML, and is something that we're working to incorporate into OJS (OJS 2.3 will contain an area for entering reference metadata, for example). Structuring this information in a way that meets CrossRef's requirements takes some effort, though we're hoping to use the technology from L8X to make it easier. You might want to have a look at this paper which describes these issues in greater detail: http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/1011

Hope this helps,
MJ

[sighteer]

Many thanks to James and MJ for the helpful comments. I look forward to seeing the next release of OJS.