Smart Scholars

Who we are

Smart Scholars helps small and mid-size scholarly journals — mostly OJS-based, in India and the Global South — meet the technical standards that indexers, funders and universities check: registered ISSN and DOIs, complete Crossref metadata, preserved content, machine-readable licences, verifiable metrics. We run three connected services: Journal Audit, GetIndexed and DOI Doctor.

All our figures come from public registries (Crossref, ISSN Portal, OpenAlex, DOAJ, Keepers Registry, Internet Archive) and every number we show links to its source. We do not sell citations, guarantee acceptance by any index, or claim impact factors. Deposits to Crossref are made only with the journal's own credentials or, for sponsored members, delivered to the journal's sponsor as Crossref XML or spreadsheets.

How we register and maintain metadata

• Journal-article deposits use the current Crossref journal schema 5.5.0 with title, contributors (given/surname, affiliations with ROR IDs, ORCID iDs — marked authenticated only when the author signed in at ORCID), publication date, volume/issue/pages, abstract (JATS), funding (Funder Registry IDs and award numbers), licence URL (AccessIndicators), Crossmark (where the member has a policy DOI), the resource URL, a Similarity Check crawler URL and text-mining links to the PDF and the JATS XML. No second resolution target is ever sent.
• Dead resource URLs after platform migrations are corrected by a metadata deposit with the address as the only difference — one DOI first, confirmed on the live record, then the rest; every address is read back from the DOI resolver before it is called repaired. Duplicate registrations of one article are listed in the DOI census and the sponsor sheet for the depositor to alias.
• Each journal can be switched to test.crossref.org for demonstrations; nothing is counted as repaired until it has been read back from Crossref.
• References (doi_citations) and licence-only deposits (lic_ref_data) travel as resource-only files in doi_resources 5.4.0; the full-text link file stays on doi_resources 4.3.6, whose block carries both the crawler and the text-mining collection. References are matched against the Crossref REST API.
• Backfile DOIs are proposed from the journal's own pattern and registered only after the publisher's approval; DOIs are displayed as full https://doi.org/… links per Crossref display guidelines.
• A journal may hold several prefixes (acquired titles keep the prefix their DOIs were registered under; new DOIs are made under the first one listed); credentials are stored per journal and used only for that journal's deposits.

Memberships & programmes

Member of ALPSP (the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers) · Internet Archive uploader · Zenodo community manager for client journals.