Metadata coverage and completeness of OJS journals in Crossref
Kramer, Bianca; Neylon, Cameron
- Publisher
- Zenodo
- Language
- en
Abstract
Public availability of good quality metadata (including persistent identifiers) for diamond journals is important for increasing journal visibility, especially in bibliographic databases beyond Scopus and Web of Science. In turn, visibility facilitates inclusion of articles in diamond journals in research assessment and evaluation processes. Journals registering DOIs with Crossref can deposit metadata for articles, including authors, affiliations, abstracts, funding, licenses and references. These metadata are then made publicly available in machine-readable form, and are used by aggregators and bibliographic databases like OpenAlex, OpenAIRE and GoTRIPLE. We evaluated the coverage and completeness of various metadata types for current OJS journals that use Crossref, leveraging open metadata from Crossref and the dataset provided by PKP on publications using OJS software There generally is good coverage of abstracts and licenses for OJS journals in Crossref, but metadata on authors (including ORCIDs), affiliations, funding and references are only deposited by a minority of journals. These data can be further broken down by journal and publisher size and by OJS version, providing empirical evidence for factors correlated with deposition of metadata. Together with concrete examples of good practices at journal and publisher level, this information can help in capacity building of diamond journal publishing, supporting publishers to deposit more complete metadata. In addition, this analysis provides a concrete use case for research using and combining open data sources, and how this can contribute to community-led publishing and other developments in scholarly communication. The datasets used in this analysis are made available through Google Big Query allowing both verification and further analysis, including longitudinal monitoring of metadata coverage and completeness of OJS journals.
Full text
Bianca Kramer (Sesame Open Science, 0000-0002-5965-6560) Cameron Neylon ( 0000-0002-0068-716X) The importance of open metadata for diamond journals Public availability of good quality metadata (including persistent identifiers) for diamond journals is important for increasing journal visibility, especially in bibliographic databases beyond Scopus and Web of Science. In turn, visibility facilitates inclusion of articles in diamond journals in research assessment and evaluation processes. Metadata coverage and completeness of OJS journals in Crossref Conclusions and outlook There generally is good coverage of abstracts and licenses for OJS journals in Crossref, but metadata on authors (including ORCIDs), affiliations, funding and references are only deposited by a minority of journals. These data can be further broken down by publisher size and by OJS version, providing empirical evidence for factors correlated with deposition of metadata. Together with concrete examples of good practices at journal and publisher level, such information can help in capacity building of diamond journal publishing, supporting publishers to deposit more complete metadata. Dutch diamond journal are Journals registering DOIs with Crossref can deposit metadata for articles, including authors, affiliations, abstracts, funding, licenses and references. These metadata are then made publicly available in machine-readable form, and are used by aggregators and bibliographic databases like OpenAlex, OpenAIRE and GoTRIPLE. We evaluated the coverage and completeness of various metadata types for current OJS journals that use Crossref, leveraging open metadata from Crossref (May 2025) and the dataset provided by PKP on publications using OJS software (Dec 2024). Open metadata via Crossref Assessing metadata of OJS journals This analysis provides a concrete use case for research using and combining open data sources, and how this can contribute to community-led publishing and other developments in scholarly communication. The datasets used in this analysis are made available through Google Big Query allowing both verification and further analysis, including longitudinal monitoring of metadata coverage and completeness of OJS journals. Metadata coverage for OJS journals using Crossref DOIs Metadata coverage by OJS version Affiliations Abstracts References Funding ORCIDs Licenses Distribution of metadata coverage in Crossref by OJS journal, for selected metadata types Histograms showing proportions of journals with specific metadata coverage, for selected metadata types. Full histograms (top) and histograms excluding 0% and 100% coverage (bottom). Metadata coverage by publisher size Distribution of metadata coverage in Crossref by publisher, for different publisher sizes by number of articles 2023-2025 Using open research information Forn-Cuní, G. (2018). Raincloud-shiny [software]. Github. https://github.com/gabrifc/raincloud-shiny Khanna et al. (2024) Details of publications using software by the Public Knowledge Project (Version V5) [dataset]. Harvard Dataverse. https://doi.org/doi:10.7910/DVN/OCZNVY Kramer, B. & Neylon, C. (2025). Metadata coverage and completeness of OJS journals in Crossref [software]. Codeberg. https://codeberg.org/TwoBirds/craft-oa-2025 Sesame Open Science (2025) Datasets on Google Big Query https://console.cloud.google.com/bigquery?project=sos-datasources References & data sources https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17260473
