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Journal Publishing Guide

Digital Object Identifier

The Library's DOI Minting Service

All Queen's publications (new and existing) hosted via the Library Journal Hosting Service will automatically have Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) assigned to each article as part of the Library's new DOI minting service.  

This guide provides a brief overview of this new service, what it means for your publication, as well as specific tasks to be undertaken by journal teams in order to activate this service within the OJS publishing platform.  

What is a Digital Object Identifier?

A digital object identifier (DOI) is a unique alphanumeric string assigned by a registration agency (the International DOI Foundation) to identify content and provide a persistent link to its location on the Internet.

As a journal publisher supported by Queen's Journal Hosting Service and publishing your journal via the Open Journal Systems (OJS) publishing platform, you can assign a DOIs to new articles once they are live in OJS.

A DOI can be used to cite and link to electronic documents. A DOI is guaranteed never to change even if the current live URL to its host website via OJS does, so you can use it to link permanently to the electronic version of your journal articles.

The Anatomy of a DOI Link

 

Why Assign DOIs to Journal Articles?

  • Link persistence: unlike URLs, DOI links continue to function even if content moves or changes ownership, mitigating link rot, affecting approximately one in five articles in STM disciplines [1]
  • Content visibility and accessibility:  the persistent DOI confers formal ‘published’ status to the item, as opposed to other digital web-based ephemera.
  • Impact and visibility: the persistent DOI makes content discoverable thus driving traffic to it so that it may be downloaded, cited, discussed (e.g. tweeted), linked to etc.
  • Added value: stable linking enriches the end-user experience, the scholarly research process, and the utility of published resources.
  • Indexing and abstracting for dissemination: for a journal to be indexed in many journal indices e.g. such as Compendex, editors are required to assign DOI to their published articles. 

 

[1] Klein, Martin, et al. "Scholarly context not found: One in five articles suffers from reference rot." PloS one 9.12 (2014): http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0115253

 

DOIs and Your Authors

Add DOIs to Article Reference Lists

As a requirement of CrossRef membership, journal publishers are required to add DOI links (when available) to the reference list for their journal articles.   

References to journal articles which may have a DOI available in the CrossRef registry can be retrieved using CrossRef’s free DOI lookup tool. A batch DOI Lookup Tool is also available called Simple Text Query. 

You can can enter whole bibliographies with citations in almost any bibliographic format and receive back the matching Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for these references to insert into your final bibliography.

Background to the DOI Minting Service

Scholars Portal (SP), a service of the Ontario Council of University Libraries, provides technical support and platform hosting services for Queen's instance of the Open Journal Systems publishing platform.

SP has recently become a sponsoring affiliate of CrossRef, the DOI Registration Agency for scholarly materials (journal articles, books, etc.). This means that SP will pay the annual CrossRef membership fee for small academic publishers across Canada in order to mint DOIs on their behalf via the DOI and CrossRef plugins available in the OJS platform.  Queen's University Library will pay the $1 US for each new article published.

What this Means for Your OJS Journal:

Sponsored by SP, Queen's University Library is a now 'sponsored publisher' member of CrossRef.  This means that the Library will work with all Queen's journal teams to support the automatic minting of DOIs for new journal issues / articles hosted by the Library's Journal Hosting Service.

Queen's University Library has been assigned the following CrossRef DOI prefix:10.24908.  This will be assigned to all* forthcoming article DOIs for our hosted journals that meet the CrossRef DOI requirements in the set-up pages on the OJS publishing platform:

Criterion to Activate the DOI Plugins in Your OJS Journal Site

In order to activate the DOI plugins on your journal site in the OJS publishing platform, Queen’s OJS Administrator will ensure the following in information has been accurately completed in your Journal Setup pages: 

  • Journal Title
  • Journal Initials
  • Journal Abbreviation
  • Journal ISSN (or electronic ISSN)**
  • Principal Contact (name and email)
  • Technical Support Contact (name and email)
  • Publisher (Institution and URL)

*If you currently mint DOIs for your OJS Journal as an independent CrossRef Publisher Member, you may continue your existing workflow. If you would like the Library to undertake this service at no cost to you, please contact Queen's OJS Administrator.  

**To be eligible for a unique ISSN (International Standard Serial Number your journal must meet the following requirements defined by Library and Archives Canada.   If you wish to apply for an ISSN for your journal please contact Queen's OJS Administrator.

Workflow & Tasks

There are a number of tasks which must be completed by either Queen's OJS Administrator or the Journal Manager, in order to ensure the timely minting of DOIs for journal articles in OJS.  More information about these specific tasks is outlined on this page.

Step 1: Initial Setup on Your Journal Site

Queen's OJS Administrator: 

In order to activate the DOI plugins on your journal site in the OJS publishing platform, the following set-up tasks will be completed by the Queen’s OJS Administrator:

  1. Ensure that all Journal Setup steps have been accurately completed in your Journal Setup pages, including the following information:
    1. Journal Title
    2. Journal Initials
    3. Journal Abbreviation
    4. Journal ISSN (or electronic ISSN)
    5. Principal Contact (name and email)
    6. Technical Support Contact (name and email)
    7. Publisher (Institution and URL)
  2. Enable and configure both the DOI Public Identifier plugin and the Crossref Export plugin to automatically deposit article DOIs to CrossRef as articles are publishes 
  3. Set the default syntax for the item suffix (see above).  The suffix will be made up of an acronym based on the journal’s title using ASCII characters as well as the journal volume and issue number (if used).

Step 2: Automatically Mint DOIs for New Journal Articles

Important: 

1. *DO NOT schedule your publication-ready articles to receive new DOIs via CrossRef until you have completed all of the editorial workflows and your articles are ready for publication*.

2. DOIs can only be assigned to articles and any associated supplemental files, NOT journal issues

In order to automatically mint DOIs for publication-ready articles published in your OJS journal complete the following steps: 

Journal Manager:

  1. Once you have completed all peer-review and editorial workflows in the Submission workflow, schedule the articles for publication by ensuring the issue is 'published' in OJS: Navigate to Issues -> Future Issues -> Edit Issues -> Publish Issue
    1. Note: To transfer the article metadata to Crossref, in order to return the DOI, you must publish the issue in OJS.  
  2. Next, contact Scholarly Publishing services in the Library to notify them that a new issue is ready for publication at least 24 hours before the issue launch date. Staff will then submit the article(s) metadata to Crossref and notify the journal manager.
    1. If your journal operates under a continuous publication model you will need to submit the article metadata to Crossref each time a new article is published: Tools -> Import/Export -> CrossRef XML Export Plugin -> select the 'Articles' tab -> select each article and 'submit (ensure 'Validate XML before the export and registration' remains checked).
  3. Once you have received confirmation from Scholarly Publishing services that your article metadata has been successfully sent to Crossref add the DOI to the production-ready formatted article PDF file (and upload it to the journal issue: Issues -> Back Issues -> select the issue -> navigate to each article in the Table of Contents ->) in either of the following formats:
    1. As a ShortDOI: e.g. http://doi.org/cg56 using the ShortDOI Service. To generate a ShortDOI, enter the long-form DOI into the ShortDOI Service in this form: 10.24908/eoe-ese-rse.v18i0.6841 and select Submit.  Your short DOI will be returned
    2. As a full DOI URL: https://doi.org/10.24908/eoe-ese-rse.v18i0.6841 NOT: http://doi.dx.org/10.24908/eoe-ese-rse.v18i0.6841
  4. Notify Scholarly Publishing services about any changes to the metadata for articles published in your OJS journal, which have already been assigned a DOI, so that the item records in the Crossref metadata registry can be updated.