Issues with Google Scholar: OSF claims to be a journal?

[wetneb]

From a dissemin user:

I recently deposited the author proof versions of my published papers into the repositories Zendoo, Hal, and OSF. But it looks like that OSF changes the paper citation in a way like that it published in a journal named OSF. I even received some updates in my google scholar account that it suggests changing the name of journals to OSF. THIS IS A HUGE MESS. This does not happen with other repositories.

[wetneb]

This is the email they have received:

This really does not send out the right message! Dissemin provided OSF with the Springer DOI for this paper, so OSF has all the information it needs to generate the correct citation.

[nicipfeiffer]

@wetneb Is this the OSF preprint you are referring to, https://osf.io/srjpy/? I am working on understanding the issue.

[wetneb]

@nicipfeiffer yes exactly! Thank you for looking into that!

[nicipfeiffer]

@wetneb it appears that the DOI for the peer-reviewed publication is not entered, in fact. Here is screenshot comparison with another OSF Preprint that does have the publication DOI.

Additionally, you can go to the links of each (https://osf.io/qtj6s/ and https://osf.io/khbvy/) and see that the citation on the preprint does update with the publication DOI if it is provided.

[wetneb]

@nicipfeiffer good catch! I was wrong to claim that we had provided the DOI for all four projects. I will check with the user to know if they also got notifications for other papers, or just this one.

However, notice that while the citation does contain the publisher DOI when provided, it still displays "Open Science Framework" as the publisher, while I would expect to read the publisher's name instead (granted, OSF is much more of a "publisher" than the paywall-manufacturing industry, but users still expect to see the journal names in citations).

This is true for both the citation displayed in the UI and the citation exposed via the meta tags: <meta class="ember-view" name="citation_publisher" content="Open Science Framework" id="ember1074">

That's why I expect that Google Scholar might still propose the publisher update even when the publisher DOI is provided. But I hope to be wrong.

[wetneb]

Quoting the user:

I have received such notification just for this paper. But the citations in OSF website are wrong for all papers and I suppose the Google robot will catch them sooner or later.

So I am probably wrong. Google Scholar seems to be clever enough in this case! However, the user agrees that "citations in OSF website are wrong", so our point about that still holds.

[wetneb]

@nicipfeiffer The user also mentions that the paper does not actually have any DOI, so we could not have provided any.

[BRosenblatt]

@wetneb, we're in the process of updating postprint citations to be more reflective of the original publication. I'll add your feedback to our internal tracker and will let you know when citation improvements go out. If you do not have a DOI to share, you could add the journal publication in the abstract as a temporary workaround.

[wetneb]

@BRosenblatt that's awesome, thank you so much!

[BRosenblatt]

@wetneb I wanted to reach out to let you know that you can now include the original publication date for you work! Simply edit your preprint, and open the "Basics" section. Then enter the date in the "Original publication date" field. The date will be included the citations.

Enjoy!

[wetneb]

@BRosenblatt fantastic! thanks again!