Ticket of the month - August 2024 - Submission logs can be log-ical...we promise

Technical Support
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Once you have managed to celebrate getting the metadata and DOI sent to us through one of the various methods, then you might be thinking your DOI is registered and ready to go.

Unfortunately there is another thing standing in your way…the submission log.

Perhaps I have made it sound more sinister than it is, although, having heard from some of you, I know that it can be misleading and hard to decipher at times.

I am going to try and give you a few pointers and explanations to help with this potential blocker to getting your DOIs registered.

After you successfully send us XML, whether that be via our deposits tools (Web Deposit Form, Metadata Manager, Grant Deposit tool), a direct XML file deposit (via HTTPS POST, upload tool, 3rd party deposit tool) or even through via your OJS setup your deposit will get what is called a submission ID.

This submission ID is assigned once the deposit has been added to the processing queue or backlog and it is then attached to that deposit forever.

Upon the deposit finishing through the processes, whether it be successful or not, a submission log will be sent to the email address in the XML here.

<head>
<doi_batch_id>unique_id</doi_batch_id>
<timestamp>20240723</timestamp>
<depositor>
<depositor_name>Crossref Forum</depositor_name>
***<email_address>support@crossref.org</email_address>***
</depositor>
<registrant>Crossref forum ticket of the month</registrant>
</head>

If you are using the Web Deposit Form it would be sent to the email entered in the email field at the end of the form (as per below).

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In the submission log it lets you know how many records were successfully registered/updated and how many records had warnings or even failed with errors.

The submission log can look intimidating for some as it is written in XML.

If we are to look at a submission log say:

Here’s the XML translated into normal language:

  • The process of submitting the deposit has been completed.

  • The submission ID for this deposit is 1523412995, and the batch ID is 20181015142652439.

  • Two records were successfully updated:

  • DOI 10.5555/1234567890 was successfully updated in the handle system.

  • DOI 10.5555/12345678 was successfully updated, and one relation was processed.

In total:

  • 2 records were processed.

  • 2 records were successfully updated.

  • There were 0 warnings.

  • There were 0 failures.

When you take away the opening and closing tags and concentrate on the values and what they represent we can see much clearer what is going on.

If you are not the recipient of the email as perhaps you didn’t make the deposit, you can still find the submission log if you have permissions against the username which the deposit was made against.

If you find that you have error messages in the submission log then you can try and decipher these yourself or there is a blog post where I try to explain the error messages:

There is also even more information on error codes here: Troubleshooting submissions - Crossref

You can always contact us in support via this forum or via email on support@crossref.org.

You can help speed up our response times to your queries by including the submission log ID in your emails to us. Once we have that, we will be able to help diagnose and resolve any issues as we will have all of the information we need to investigate this further.

I hope this has helped you with verifying those submission logs and in the future you are able to self diagnose a little better or at least have more information needed to pass over to us here so we can help.

Thanks for reading,
Paul

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