Top tips for pain-free title transfer

This month, we’ve noticed that Santa brought many of you new titles over the Christmas period, as we’ve had lots of requests to transfer titles. Don’t forget that, after we’ve transferred a title over to you, there are still a few things you need to do.

If your organization has gained new titles, here are three key steps in ensuring a pain-free transfer:

Step One

Contact us at member@crossref.org to request the title transfer. For the swiftest possible title transfer, make sure you quote the journal title and ISSN, and the name and DOI prefix of the disposing and acquiring publishers. We’ll need confirmation of the proposed transfer before we proceed - you may either reference the relevant transfer entry in the Enhanced Transfer Alerting Service (ETAS), or forward an email or PDF letter from the disposing publisher. We can then transfer the title, together with control of its existing DOIs, if applicable. If a title’s existing DOIs should remain under the control of the disposing publisher rather than being transferred to the acquiring publisher, be sure to specify this.

Step Two

Carefully check the existing metadata associated with your titles for any publisher-specific information - the previous (disposing) publisher may be mentioned in the text and data mining license, full text URLs, Similarity Check as-crawled URLs, or Crossmark data. If so, you’ll want to update your metadata. This is key to ensuring a smooth transition.

Step Three

If the metadata supplied is fine, you just need to update the resource resolution URLs to direct DOIs to your content. You can do this by sending us a URL update file or by re-depositing the metadata with the correct URLs.

If you need to update more than the URLs, you should re-deposit the metadata with the correct information plus the correct URLs.

A late Happy New Year from the Membership Team!

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