Resolving conflicts

If you are responsible for metadata records that are in conflict, the conflicts need to be resolved in one of 3 ways:

• Update your metadata
• Create aliases between DOIs (for duplicate items)
• Accept a conflict as-is (for items that are 'legitimate' conflicts)

Update your metadata

If conflicts exist because the metadata you've deposited is sparse, you should re-register your content with the complete metadata included. The conflict status will be resolved when one (or both) items are re-registered with distinctive metadata. To ensure that the Crossref system updates the appropriate content item, be sure to supply the correct DOI in your submission.

When making an update you must supply all the metadata for the article, not just the fields that need to be changed. During the update process, the Crossref system completely overwrites the existing metadata with the information you submit, including inserting null values for any fields not supplied in the update.

If the new metadata resolves the conflict, the Crossref system returns a message such as this one (which resulted from a redeposit of the metadata for DOI 10.50505/200702271050-conflict):

<record_diagnostic status="Success">
<doi>10.50505/200702271050-conflict</doi>
<msg>Successfully updated</msg>
<resolved_conflict_ids>352052</resolved_conflict_ids>
</record_diagnostic>

Note that while submitting new metadata may resolve one or more conflicts, it might also spawn new ones. For example the following XML results indicate that submitting data for 10.5555/DOI2 resolved two existing conflicts (17 and 21) but created a new one (134).

<record_diagnostic status="Warning">
<doi>10.5555/DOI2</doi>
<msg>Added with conflict</msg>
<conflict_id>134</conflict_id>
<dois_in_conflict>
<doi>10.5555/DOI2_IN_CONFLICT</doi>
</dois_in_conflict>      
<resolved_conflict_ids>17,21</resolved_conflict_ids>
</record_diagnostic>

Create aliases between DOIs

If you have registered multiple records for your content, you can alias the duplicate items to the record you intend to maintain. Records are aliased at the identifier (DOI) level.  When DOIs are aliased, one DOI is flagged as the 'primary' DOI. The primary DOI is the DOI you intend to maintain in the future.  The remaining DOIs are aliased to the primary DOI at the DOI resolver level. This means that when someone clicks on an aliased DOI link, the user is automatically re-directed to the URL registered for the primary DOI.

You can create aliases between DOIs using our system interface or by uploading a text file to our system.  Conflicts involving DOIs owned by other members must be resolved by Crossref staff, please contact support for assistance. 

Accept conflicts as-is

If you've determined that the content flagged with conflicts are not duplicate items, you can remove the conflict status by setting the status to 'resolved'.  This has no impact on the metadata records or DOIs but will remove the conflicts from our conflict report.