Welcome back to our series of case studies of research funders using the Grant Linking System. In this interview, I talk with CĂĄtia Laranjeira, PTCRIS Program Manager at FCCN|FCT, Portugalâs main public funding agency, about the agencyâs approach to metadata, persistent identifiers, Open Science and Open Infrastructure.
With a holistic approach to the management, production and access to information on science, FCCN|FCT’s decision to implement the Grant Linking System within their processes was not simply a technical upgrade, but a coordinated effort to continue building a strong culture of openness. With the mantra âregister once, reuse alwaysâ, FCCN|FCT efforts to embrace open funding metadata was only logical.
Repositories are home to a wide range of scholarly content; they often archive theses, dissertations, preprints, datasets, and other valuable outputs. These records are an important part of the research ecosystem and should be connected to the broader scholarly record. But to truly serve their purpose, repository records need to be connected to each other, to the broader research ecosystem, and to the people behind the research. Metadata is what makes that possible. Enhancing metadata is a way to tell a fuller, more accurate story of research. It helps surface relationships between works, people, funders, and institutions, and allows us as a community to build and use a more connected, more useful network of knowledge - what Crossref calls the âResearch Nexusâ.
The Crossref Grant Linking System (GLS) has been facilitating the registration, sharing and re-use of open funding metadata for six years now, and we have reached some important milestones recently! What started as an interest in identifying funders through the Open Funder Registry evolved to a more nuanced and comprehensive way to share and re-use open funding data systematically. Thatâs how, in collaboration with the funding community, the Crossref Grant Linking System was developed. Open funding metadata is fundamental for the transparency and integrity of the research endeavour, so we are happy to see them included in the Research Nexus.
Registering your DOI records using OJS version 3.4
You can register your DOI records with us using the OJS (Open Journal Systems) platform by enabling the Crossref Manager plugin. We highly recommend including your references in the metadata you send to us, too - you can do this by adding the OJS references plugin. The instructions below are for configuring OJS version 3.4 (more in Public Knowledge Project’s (PKP) documentation).
As Journal Manager, under Settings, click Website > Plugins.
Under Installed Plugins, scroll down to the section labelled Generic Plugins.
Click the checkbox next to the plugin description to enable the plugin.
Step 2: Setting up automatic DOI registrations in OJS 3.4
Go to the Distribution menu
Select the DOI tab
Click on the Setup option
Check the box to allow DOIs to be assigned to your published works
Check the box to determine which items DOI will be assigned
Enter your Crossref assigned DOI prefix. Your prefix will start with 10. and is in the format 10.xxxx (e.g., 10.5555).
Select your preferred stage for automatic DOI assignment to your articles (can be upon the article reaching copyediting stage or upon article publication).
Select your preferred method of DOI suffix generation (can be Default, None for manual entry of suffixes, or Custom pattern)
Next, switch to the ‘Registration’ tab menu
Select Crossref your ‘Registration Agency’ from the drop down options. If you don’t see “Crossref” in the list, navigate to Website > Plugins > Plugin Gallery to enable the ‘Crossref Manager Plugin’.
Check the box under âAutomatic Depositâ to enable automatic DOI deposits from your OJS instance.
Enter your name here as the depositor.
Enter your email here as the depositor (all deposit emails will be sent to this email).
Enter your assigned Crossref username. For example support@crossref.org/abcd
Note: if the combination of username and password is incorrect, OJS will return a â401 unauthorized status codeâ error at the time of registration. This error indicates that the username and password are incorrectly entered. That is, they do not match the username and/or password set with Crossref.
If you are using organisation-wide, shared role credentials (i.e. your username is a collection of letters), you can simply add in your shared username and password.
If you are using personal user credentials that are unique to you (i.e. your username is your email address), youâll need to add your email address and your role into the username field, and your personal password into the password field. Hereâs an example of what this will look like:
Enter your set personal password into the password field.
IMPORTANT: Leave the test checkbox unchecked.
Step 3: Activate the OJS references plugin
The OJS references plugin is available from OJS 3.1.2 onwards. The plugin will use the Crossref API to check against plain text references and locate possible DOIs for articles. The plugin will also allow the display of reference lists on the article landing page in OJS and deposit them as part of your metadata deposit. Linking references is a requirement of Crossref membership.
Workflow Settings
Click âSettingsâ and then âWorkflowâ from your dashboard
Under the âSubmissionâ tab, choose âMetadataâ!
Scroll down to the bottom and find the âReferencesâ section
Make sure you enable references metadata by clicking the checkbox âEnable references metadataâ. You also need to select the option âAsk the author to provide references during submissionâ.
Click save!
Website Settings
Then you need to activate the references plugin on the website, too, by following the instructions here:
Click âSettingsâ and then âWebsiteâ from your dashboard
Choose the âPluginsâ tab.
Search âCrossref reference linkingâ
Click the âCrossref reference linkingâ checkbox
This plugin will deposit the references that you enter into the XML deposit.
Additional OJS plugins for Crossref
In addition to the Crossref XML plugin for OJS, there are also other important plugins that can be enabled in OJS to enrich your metadata records:
Funding Metadata plugin - as of OJS 3.1.2, it is possible to enable a funder registry plugin for submitting funding information to Crossref. The plugin will use the Open Funder Registry to check against existing funding agencies. The plugin will include funding information in your Crossref DOI deposits.
Similarity Check plugin - if you are using OJS 3.1.2 or above, you are able to use the Similarity Check plugin. This will enable you to automatically send manuscripts to your iThenticate account to check their similarity to already published content. You will need to be subscribed to Crossrefâs Similarity Check service for this to work.
ROR plugin - the ROR Plugin for OJS enables authors to add the ROR ID for the organization they are affiliated with.
Getting help with OJS plugins
The team at Crossref didnât create these plugins - they were either created by the team at PKP, or by third-party developers. Because of this, we arenât able to give in-depth help or troubleshooting on problems with these plugins.
