Many of our members use the web deposit form to register content with us. Perhaps you’ve wondered about how you can see what you’ve registered in the past, but aren’t quite sure how to do this. Or, perhaps you’re interested in how to access the xml file that is created from your deposit. This can be particularly useful if you’ve had a deposit fail, and you’ve received the error message but would find looking at the actual xml file useful.
This month, we’re going to look at how to use the admin tool to answer all of these questions.
For past deposits (no matter how you registered them - Metadata Manager, web deposit form, OJS, etc.), you can access these directly through the admin tool by following the below instructions:
First, log into the admin tool with your Crossref credentials, no matter which method you used to deposit your content.
Go to the Submissions tab. Then click on the Administration tab.
Then, leave all the fields blank and click the Search button at the bottom. You will then see a list of all your submissions that have made it to our system.
Click on any one of the submission IDs, on the far left-hand side, and you will see the details of that submission:
Under Content, go to Click to View, and this will take you to the xml of the deposit. You can then either view it in your browser (you may need to download a json view plugin/add-on for your browser if it’s difficult to read) or you can right click and save it as an xml file to your computer:
An additional tip when dealing with errors in submissions: If something has really gone sideways with a deposit, when you click on the Click to View button you may see something like this:
By using Firefox, you can still right click and choose Save Page As…
And, this will save an XML file for you, which you can then open in an XML editor/viewer, and you will be able to see exactly where the error in your submission is located.
And one last tip before I leave you: If you decide to use your XML file to edit an error in your metadata and reload it, be sure to increment that timestamp! (For more information about this, please take a look at this very helpful forum post.)