Updating your metadata

To update your metadata records you may re-submit your complete metadata record with the changes included. Most metadata may be changed by resubmitting a metadata record. We may need to make some changes on our end if you need to update titles for a book, journal, or other content associated with an ISSN or ISBN.

Updating titles

When a new journal, book, conference proceeding, standard, report, or dissertation is registered with Crossref, we create a title record in our database from the metadata provided in the content registration submission. We require that titles associated with an ISSN or ISBN be consistent from registration to registration. This means that if you've submitted an incorrect journal or book title we will need to modify the title record in our system before you can update your metadata for that title. Updating a system title record does not update the metadata submitted for a title, so you must also re-register the content with the correct title included.

Changes to journal titles should be consistent with our journal title management recommendations.  You may update journal article, conference paper, and book chapter titles by re-submitting your metadata as described below.

Updating bibliographic metadata

Bibliographic metadata and abstracts may only be updated via a metadata deposit.  When making an update to bibliographic metadata you must supply all the bibliographic metadata for the article, not just the fields that need to be changed. During the update process we overwrite the existing metadata with the new information you submit, and will insert null values for any fields not supplied in the update. This means, for example, that if you've supplied an online publication date in your initial deposit, you'll need to include that date in subsequent deposits if you wish to retain it.

When updating, be sure to supply the correct DOI in your submission to ensure the correct record is updated.  Note that the value included in the timestamp element must be incremented each time a DOI is updated.  You may update your metadata records as often as needed. No fees are charged for updating existing metadata records.

Updating non-bibliographic metadata

Some non-bibliographic metadata may be updated added to, or removed from a metadata record independently using a resource-only deposit. .  

If, for example, you need to update the author information for a metadata record that also includes a citation list, funding data, and as-crawled URLs, you only need to include bibliographic metadata when submitting the update. The citation list, funding data, and as-crawled URLs will remain as-is unless you include them in a future update or explicitly remove them.

Metadata and update type