We can now fix article metadata ourselves

As part of our continued strategy to enhance our metadata offering, and looking forward to 2021 when our strategic focus will be on DOAJ’s place in the discovery chain, we are constantly looking for ways to improve the quality and recency of the DOAJ article metadata.

Errors in article metadata are usually reported to us by users of discovery services at libraries or by the discovery services themselves. The errors are often a broken URL or a missing article.

Since 2013, DOAJ’s stance on correcting metadata has been to contact the journal’s publishers and ask them to send an update to us. However, this approach is of limited success:

• some publishers don’t respond,
• some don’t know how to make the correction and,
• since we do matching on the URL, the process often leads to duplicated articles.

As of yesterday, DOAJ can edit article metadata itself, including the URL, directly in the database. This makes changes immediate and goes a long way to improve the reliability of the DOAJ metadata. Importantly, it allows us to act quickly on queries sent to us by our discovery service colleagues.

The crux of the matter, when it comes to the accuracy of DOAJ metadata, remains unchanged however: all 3rd party services should update their copy of the DOAJ metadata regularly. DOAJ metadata updates every 30 minutes. Some 3rd party services only update their copy of our metadata every 6 months.