PublisherRecordID meaning

It may sound obvious but I don’t get the meaning and use of the publisherRecordId that is exposed in OJS XML export to DOAJ – or maybe I encountered a bug.

the only doc I found is in DOAJ website and says that the publisherRecordId is:

An ID assigned to this article by its publisher and supplied to DOAJ via metadata upload. Not guaranteed to be unique or otherwise useful in any context, simply a way for the publisher to refer to this article.

In my platform (actually OJS 2.4.8-2) the publisherRecordId is always different from the actual article ID that is used for URL, backend and so on (and that we are using to refer to articles).

Am I missing something here? :slight_smile:
Maybe some previous customization is breaking something?

Hi @piero_tasso,

That’s the published_articles.published_article_id column, not the articles.article_id column. Both are valid IDs, but the published_article_id is very rarely used.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

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Thanks, than we didn’t make a mess!

On a side note I find it rather confusing to expose it in DOAJ xml because I don’t know how to use it:

in my workflow the articles.article_id is used for DOIs, URIs, submission tracking (I also inserted it in the object of each prepared email – when appropriate) and could be used to reproduce the history of each article.
If someone uses the published_articles.published_article_id and asks me to reconstruct its peer review I wouldn’t know what to do and how to use that ID (as an editor, journal manager or even site admin)

Best,
Piero

Hi @piero_tasso,

You’d need to check the database to find out what article ID that published article ID maps to. We haven’t heard of a use case for this field yet – we’ve simply provided it so that some kind of audit trail is possible – so more information on what you’d like to accomplish might be useful.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

Sorry, we don’t really want to accomplish anything with that ID, I just wondered why it was included in DOAJ XML (and if it is exported elsewhere). If one day DOAJ started using it as a reference for specific articles there would be confusion, imho.

Thanks,
Piero

Hi @piero_tasso,

If I were starting from scratch, you’re right, it would have been a better idea to use the more common article_id. However, changing now to that ID would lead to confusion over which ID was being used. Until there’s a compelling reason to change, I’d like to stick with the current ID, even though it might cause a little confusion – at least it’s unambiguous.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

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