My university has a DOI prefix that we’d like to use with the DOI plugin. However, we also plan to host more than one journal in OJS. I’m afraid that if I set the plugin to use the default pattern for all journals, we will likely have identifier collisions because the default pattern makes no mention of including an identifier for a specific journal.
Can this be avoided by setting a custom pattern that prepends some sort of identifier for the journal before all of the default patterns? So something like this for a journal with identifier “foo”:
foo.%j.v%vi%i for issues
foo.%j.v%vi%i.%a for articles
foo.%j.v%vi%i.%a.g%g for galleys
Consider create in a unique way each prefix to not conflict with future journals you may have or insert DOI.
In example above, editor picked up initials Design eTecnologia => det.
But you may choose what fits better to your journals (ISSN for example).
Regards,
Israel Cefrin
Public Knowledge Project Team
Yes, thank you, I understand the need to avoid conflicts with future publications. I am just surprised that this OJS plugin does not automatically prepend the “path” or “journal’s initials” to DOIs. Since CrossRef generally assigns one prefix per publisher, not one prefix per journal, it seems that anyone publishing more than one journal is likely to have this problem.
Looking a little deeper in OJS 3 it brought to my memory that you can set pattern with wildcard to your journal Abbreviation. To do so, you need enable the third option in DOI plugin setting:
Settings > Website > Plugins > DOI (settings option)
and prepend “%j”. So, you do not need choice which is the best initial, just enable it (manually in field but with patterns).
This initials are set in:
Settings > Journal > Journal Abbreviation field
Hope it helps.
Regards,
Israel Cefrin
Public Knowledge Project Team
You could also contact CrossRef and ask whether in your case it would be possible to get a unique prefix for each journal. To my knowledge, they can handle multiple prefixes from one client quite easily.
I am actually not sure if %j is unique, I mean I do not think that OJS prevents journals from assigning the same abbreviation?
What is unique in a multijournal OJS installation however, is the running number for article id’s that you can also add to the suffix pattern in the DOI settings.
We use just the combination of journal abbreviation and the unique article id. I have not seen much sense in adding the volume/issue info there since the DOI is not really meant for reading. Happy to hear if there is a problem there I have not thought of.
Oh wow, that’s embarrassing: I completely overlooked the “%j” that is part of the default pattern. Now everything makes sense. It seems that the default pattern is sufficient.
%j and the submission id are definitely enough to keep DOIs unique inside one installation. With separate prefixes for each journal the plus side is that you can add extra CrossRef features to just some of the journals if needed. I mean things like CrossMark etc.
Here at the University of Oklahoma Libraries, we use the ISSN as part of the DOI for our OJS journals. That gives us pretty good uniqueness as well as no future dependencies on the OJS journal abbreviation.