We are trying to add reuse license information when we register DOIs for our publications, but I’m seeing conflicting guidance about how to do this. The documentation about adding license information indicates that we can just reference the AccessIndicators.xsd schema. However the example XML for a journal article has the license element embedded in a Crossmark element, which we are not yet using. How should we proceed?
Thanks in advance!
Hi, and thanks for your question.
Licenses, along with funding data and linked clinical trials, can either go inside the Crossmark element or not. It just happens that, because the example file also illustrates the formatting of Crossmark metadata, it’s included within that. The trouble with having those example files is that we can’t create one for every possible combination of metadata elements.
If you don’t use Crossmark metadata, then the license data can be situated directly in the <journal_article> element, in the same spot. You can see a snippet of license data, without Crossmark, on our documentation page for licenses/access indicators.
Please let me know if you have any other questions. If you’re having trouble and you’d like us to take a look at one of your xml files, you can send it to support@crossref.org and we’ll be happy to do that. Also, you can always run it through the xml parser here to check whether the xml validates.
-Shayn
This is really helpful—thank you!!