The American Society for Microbiology (ASM) has earned recognition in Crossref’s Participation Reports for its exceptional metadata coverage among large publishing members––an achievement built on intentional change, technical investment, and collaborative work. In this Q&A, the ASM team shares what that journey looked like, the challenges they’ve tackled, and how centering metadata has helped them better connect research with the global scientific community.
The Crossref Board recently approved three recommendations for changes to our fees: introduction of a new lowest membership fee tier, removal of volume discounts for record registration, and normalisation of registration fees for peer reviews. The changes will be applied from January 2026.
This is the first outcome of the Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability (RCFS) program, launched in 2023, as a comprehensive effort to review all aspects of Crossref revenue and how we’re adapting to growth and the diversification of our membership. The program aims to make fees more equitable, simplify our complex fee schedule, and rebalance revenue sources.
This June, we presented at the Beijing International Book Fair (BIBF) and connected directly with our growing community in China. With a surge of interest from Chinese publishers and partners, it was clear: there’s a strong and rising curiosity around how metadata plays a vital role in maintaining the integrity of the scholarly record.
The Metadata Manager tool is in beta and contains many bugs. It has been deprecated since 2021 and will be sunset at the end of 2025. We recommend using an alternative such as the web deposit form, our new record registration form for journal articles and grants, or the OJS plugin if your content is hosted on the OJS platform from PKP.
Once you click Deposit, we immediately process the deposit and display the results for accepted and rejected deposits. All deposit records accepted by the system have a live DOI.
All deposit results are archived and available for reference on the Deposit history tab on the top menu bar.
You can also see your deposit history in the admin tool - go to the Administration tab, then the Submissions tab. Metadata Manager deposit filenames begin with MDT. You can even review the XML that Metadata Manager has created your behalf.
Updating existing records and failed deposits
Metadata Manager also makes it easy to update existing records, even if you didn’t use Metadata Manager to make the deposit in the first place. You must add the journal to your workspace before you can update the records associated with it - learn more about setting up a new journal in your workspace.
Accepted and Failed submissions can be updated using the respective tabs in the workspace. Click into the journal, and then click into the article. Add or make changes to the information, and then deposit.
What does the status “warning” in my submission result mean?
When similar metadata is registered for more than one DOI, it’s possible that the additional DOIs are duplicates. Because DOIs are intended to be unique, the potentially duplicated DOI is called a conflict. Learn more about the conflict report.
In Metadata Manager, if you register bibliographic metadata that is very similar to that for an existing DOI, you will see a status “warning” with your submission result. This is accurate.
When you return to your journal workspace in Metadata Manager to review your list of DOIs, the DOI that returned the “warning” will display as “failed”. This is inaccurate, as you can see if you try to resolve the DOI in question. We are working on improving the wording in this part of the process to make it less confusing.
Page maintainer: Sara Bowman Last updated: 2022-July-22
