Manuscript submission systems and metadata completeness in Crossref: Patterns and associations

The importance of open research information, particularly publication metadata, is widely recognised. Crossref is one of the most important infrastructures for registering open metadata as part of DOI record registration. It is widely known, however, that the metadata of many publications is far from complete, with many publishers making certain metadata openly available, but failing to do so for other metadata elements. Publishers’ ability to register this metadata with Crossref depends on their capacity to capture and retain this data in their production workflows. Manuscript submission systems are an important, yet largely overlooked, factor in the extent to which publishers make metadata available through Crossref. In this paper, we present the results of an analysis investigating the relation between the level of metadata that publishers deposit with Crossref and the submission systems that they deploy for their journals. We have looked at the 153 publishers with the largest amounts of publications in Crossref and concentrate on the four most commonly used systems: Editorial Manager, ScholarOne, Open Journal Systems (OJS) and eJournalPress. We show that some submission systems appear better suited to capturing certain metadata elements. However, there are always cases where publishers using the same system differ widely in the level of metadata they register, suggesting that technology is not the only prohibiting factor and other considerations are at play.