If you’re a frequent user of our manual metadata entry and content registration tool, Metadata Manager, you may have noticed that it’s been expanding recently. In addition to journal and grants records which have been up and running for a while, we added support for dissertations and reports/working papers in June.
At the same time, we quietly added an option to register post-publication updates using Metadata Manager. This is not a record type per se, but rather a way to indicate that a registered publication has been updated. It is most commonly used for retractions, corrections, withdrawals, and errata.
In these instances, the best practice is always to register a new and distinct DOI for the update notice, which will resolve to its own landing page on your website or platform. The metadata for the notice’s DOI will point back to the DOI of the original work.
I’ll illustrate this with an example from our (fake) test journal, Journal of Psychoceramics.
Let’s say that the article “Toward a Unified Theory of High-Energy Metaphysics: Silly String Theory” was published in 2008 and assigned the DOI 10.5555/12345678
Then, in 2009, that article was retracted. The editors issued a retraction notice and assigned that notice the DOI 10.5555/24242424x
If Metadata Manager had existed back then, here’s how they could have registered 10.5555/24242424x and linked its metadata correctly back to 10.5555/12345678
Note that when you submit this metadata, the DOI being registered here is the DOI assigned to the retraction notice - 10.5555/24242424x in this case - not the DOI of the retracted article. The DOI of the retracted article will appear in the metadata for the retraction notice as an <update> with the ‘retraction’ type.
Implementing the Crossmark service is not a requirement to register these updates. They are valuable as records and metadata in their own right. However, if you are interested in implementing Crossmark, registering DOIs for post-publication updates will also allow you to do that. Supplying the metadata this way will enable the Crossmark dialog on the original article - 10.5555/12345678 in this example - to show the retraction and link users over to the retraction notice where they can find more details.
This addition to Metadata Manager will help enable post-publication update metadata which serves as an important trust signal and crucial component of clarity and transparency in the scholarly record. In the case of retractions, corrections, and expressions of concern, it will also allow compliance with COPE and NISO guidance.