Easiest way to use Crossmark

Crossref Services Crossmark
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Hi everyone!

Since Metadata Manager has been discontinued, I’ve been asked how is the easiest way to add Crossmark metadata from now on… On Metadata Manager it was very easy and “self-taught”/intuitive and, above all, it didn’t require any extra technical skills - so, what is the easiest way nowadays?

:sunglasses:

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Hi Bruna,

There’s no real easy way to implement Crossmark. It’s honestly just inherently complicated and difficult for non-technical members. Our Product team is re-thinking how to address this in the future in a way that will be easier for all our members, but for the time being, unfortunately, that’s the reality.

Just for context for anyone else who’s reading this, there are four basic steps involved in using Crossmark

  1. Creating a Crossmark Policy Page and registering a DOI for that page
  2. Supplying at least the minimal Crossmark Metadata for every DOI
  3. Adding the Crossmark script and DOI tag in the landing page’s html source code for every DOI
  4. Updating the metadata, as necessary, for all items that have updates, corrections, retractions, errata, etc.

I know you’re just asking about item 2. But the other three items are also technically complicated and can be out-of-reach for most of our non-technical members as well. So, it’s often irrelevant how hard step 2 is, because steps 3 and 4 are not possible. After all, there’s no point in putting up the Crossmark “check for updates” popup widget, if you can’t keep the metadata up-to-date when things are actually changed/corrected/updated. That’s much worse than having no Crossmark widget at all.

With regard to just getting the minimal metadata deposits, this can be done on the Web Deposit Form, but only as part of full metadata deposits with all the available metadata for a given item. This make that a bad option for OJS users who already have the plugin which submits the full metadata deposits for their content. For that reason, we would encourage OJS users to just wait to use Crossmark until an OJS plugin that supports Crossmark metadata is available.

If a member has some capacity to create XML, there is a resource-only deposit for just Crossmark metadata, which can be submitted without any of the other metadata. You can find an example of a Crossmark-only deposit here.

Please let me know if you have any further questions. I can add some screenshots of what the Crossmark fields look like on the Web Deposit Form, if that would be helpful.

-Shayn

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