A case study for how to use digital object identifiers (DOIs) to make online journals more accessible and improve their site user reports

Craigle, Valeri

Keele, Benjamin J.

Retteen, Aaron

English

Texas A&M University School of Law

Texas A&M University School of Law Texas A&M Law Scholarship Faculty Scholarship 5-2023 Creating Persistent Law Review Article Links with Digital Object Identifiers Valeri Craigle Benjamin J. Keele Aaron Retteen Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/facscholar  Part of the Law Librarianship Commons, Legal Education Commons, Legal Writing and Research Commons, Scholarly Communication Commons, and the Scholarly Publishing Commons Law reviews are an integral part of the law school com-munity, as they serve a vital function in the education and training of law students. Many law reviews are now published online and accessed via URLs, which makes access to their content unreliable because of the broken links that often occur due to changing URLs when the website is redesigned or migrated to a new web-site platform. Suppose a student-edited law jour-nal, the Exemplary Law Review (ELR), finds that its online journal archives, hosted on the law school’s servers, have been moved in the last website rede-sign and now the URLs to all its articles lead to a 404 page. This is quite irri-tating—citations to ELR’s articles that use URLs are now broken and one of the editor’s projects to measure ELR’s impact has become more complicated. Aside from asking website support to use appropriate URL redirects next time, how can the ELR’s website be built back better and more resilient to inevitable link decay? Digital object identifiers (DOIs) are a great option, and this article will demonstrate how ELR, partnering with the law library, can get started.Fortunately, as members of the law school community, the ELR enjoys access to the broader campus resources and services available to the law school. Many universities offer DOI minting services to university presses and faculty authors, often through the main campus library, which is likely a member of DOI registration agencies Crossref or DataCite via their affili-ations with library consortiums. As such, ELR realizes that it would be in its best interest to ask their law librarians about a DOI service sponsorship with the main campus library.Getting StartedIf the ELR can add DOIs to their arti-cles, it will be easier for them as a law review publisher to provide persistent and reliable online access to their con-tent. Additionally, the article metadata they deposit during the DOI minting process will be interoperable with many more scholarly communication systems (DOI Handbook: Metadata Interoperability).The first step for ELR in minting DOIs for their law review articles is to connect with a DOI registra-tion agency. This is an organization that helps maintain the DOI system (Digital Object Identifier System). In the U.S, there are two agencies that serve academic publishers: Crossref and DataCite. ELR learns through its librarians that the campus library is already a Crossref member and spon-sors several other academic journals. The librarians ask the campus library to sponsor ELR on their Crossref mem-bership so that they can have access to their minting services.The benefits of sponsorship are twofold: First, ELR will likely avoid paying membership fees. Second, the journal will not be required to undergo the technological or administrative scrutiny that is part of the member application process because the cam-pus library will have already met the necessary requirements and assumed the necessary responsibilities as part of their existing membership. If the ELR really wanted to be an individual member in Crossref, it would have to pay the fees and provide the technolog-ical and administrative infrastructure required for membership. Membership fee structures differ significantly for Crossref or DataCite. Crossref bases its fees on a journal’s yearly revenue or expenses. For a jour-nal that brings in less than one million dollars in yearly revenue, the annual membership fee with Crossref is cur-rently $293.59 per year plus a $1.07 DOI fee per journal article. DataCite’s fee structure is based on the number of DOIs a journal mints per year. Journals minting less than 2,000 DOIs per year currently pay an organization fee of approximately $533.80 per year, plus $.85 cents per DOI.In terms of metadata development and content administration, Crossref and DataCite each have their own indi-vidual agreements and best practices guidelines. Generally, the only base-line criterion for obtaining member-ship with either Crossref or DataCite is that a publisher creates content that is TALKING TECHCreating Persistent Law Review Article Links with Digital Object IdentifiersA case study for how to use DOIs to make online journals more accessible and improve their site user reports.BY VALERI CRAIGLE, BENJAMIN J. KEELE & AARON RETTEEN42  AALL SPECTRUM | WWW.AALLNET.ORGTECHNOLOGYlikely to be cited in the scholarly eco-system. The technical and administra-tive requirements, however, are a little more stringent, and must be fulfilled on both the journal and institutional side. For journals, their commitments may include, but are not limited to:	 being the sole creator of their con-tent, and producing it in a profes-sional and scholarly manner	 creating accurate metadata and clearly stating their rights to the content	 making timely metadata deposits, as soon as is reasonably possible after online publication.	 embedding the DOI in the metadata record, and to the best extent possi-ble, linking to other identifiers asso-ciated with the content	 ensuring that DOIs resolve to a pub-licly available landing page	 following the DOI display guidelines	 providing a response page for users, sometimes referred to as a “tomb-stone” page, should content become unavailableThe journal’s sponsoring institution (the law school) must:	 make a commitment to data persistence	 provide the infrastructure for main-taining and updating metadata records	 use best efforts to provide a backup archive for the journal’s content In the event that ELR’s journal content migrates or disappears altogether, both Crossref and DataCite require certain updates to the metadata records that will provide continuity of access, or additional information about the journal’s content and why it was removed. Most importantly, the landing page URL must be updated, as it will certainly change as the result of a migration or system failure. If there is no new landing page URL to update, a response page, sometimes referred to as a “tombstone” page, must be cre-ated that clearly explains why the con-tent is no longer available. DataCite prefers that tombstone pages display the citation and the DOI, and a state-ment that “details the circumstances that led to the current situation.”Looking AheadOnce ELR has established its sponsor-ship and is ready to publish articles, assigning DOIs is easy and straightfor-ward. ELR worked with the library to figure out a reusable, formulaic pattern to create and assign a DOI to an article (like this Indiana Law Review article). All the library needs is the URL for the website landing page for each article and descriptive information such as the title, authors, and abstract. The library then deposits this metadata with the registration agency, which creates a DOI that is ultimately displayed with the article on the journal’s website. If the original URL for an article changes for whatever reason, the DOI record must be updated to ensure continuous access. Placing the hyper-linked DOI on the first page of the article PDF is something that ELR edi-tors will add to their layout workflows. Going forward, all articles published by ELR now have DOIs assigned to them automatically, but adding DOIs retrospectively includes two parts: registering and activating the DOIs and adding DOIs to the first page of the article’s PDF file. Getting DOIs onto the first page of a PDF for each individual article can be labor intensive if done manually, and it can present challenges if not done in coordination with the print publisher used by the law review. To make it eas-ier, an alternative solution using auto-matically generated cover pages upon downloading the article can be used.Once their workflow is established, ELR editors develop an instructional handbook that is shared with subse-quent law review boards, ideally as part of each year’s orientation sessions in which the library is introduced to journal students as a resource and partner in the publishing process. VALERI CRAIGLEASSOCIATE LIBRARIAN AND HEAD OF TECHNICAL SERVICESJames E. Faust Law LibraryS.J. Quinney College of LawUniversity of UtahSalt Lake City, Utahcraiglev@law.utah.edu© 2023 BY VALERIE CRAIGLEBENJAMIN J. KEELEASSOCIATE DIRECTOR & LECTURER IN LAWRuth Lilly Law Library Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of LawIndianapolis, Indianabkeele@indiana.edu© 2023 BY BENJAMIN J. KEELEAARON RETTEENHEAD OF SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATIONS & INSTITUTIONAL REPORTINGINSTRUCTIONAL ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF LAWTexas A&M University School of LawDee J. Kelly Law LibraryFort Worth, Texasaretteen@law.tamu.edu© 2023 BY AARON RETTEENWith DOIs minted for all their articles, and an efficient and effective workflow in place, the Exemplary Law Review can be confident in their readers’ ability to access the journal’s content, and in their own ability to measure their journal’s impact by studying the event data associated with each DOI. Through the use of DOI, the ELR has become a truly modern and professional law journal for our times.   Research + Analytics  Management + Business AcumenMAY/JUNE 2023 | AALL SPECTRUM  43

Creating Persistent Law Review Article Links with Digital Object Identifiers

https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2773&context=facscholar

Creating Persistent Law Review Article Links with Digital Object Identifiers

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