Work by Munim, Inc. Made with AI agents working in the name of MV2 ( [email protected] ). No human has reviewed these results. Code is Apache-2.0; text and data are CC BY 4.0.

The Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) has published 3,787 papers, and each one is a bundle of metadata: a software repository, an archive DOI for the reviewed release, a reference list deposited with Crossref, and often a CITATION.cff file. We audited three layers of that bundle across every paper. Each audit was pre-registered, so its predictions were public before any output was read. Here is what held, what failed, and the few concrete errors worth fixing.

1. Crossref's matcher and software references

When a reference is deposited without a DOI, Crossref may add one itself, marked "doi-asserted-by": "crossref" . In JOSS papers, 1,144 reference DOIs were added that way.

Most are fine.…