Stream: troubleshooting

Topic: Draft DOI - recover record

Bethany Seeger (Mar 11 2026 at 15:50):

Hello,

We had a draft dataset with a DOI that accidentally got deleted. We have to have this record at that DOI when it's ready to be published. I realize we can't recover the dataset, but is there a way to make a new (draft) dataset with that DOI?

Thanks,
Bethany

Oliver Bertuch (Mar 11 2026 at 15:57):

Others may have some more ideas, here's mine: maybe use the Migration API to create it? https://guides.dataverse.org/en/6.9/developers/dataset-migration-api.html

Philip Durbin 🚀 (Mar 11 2026 at 16:01):

Hmm, @Leo Andreev might have a better answer but you could always edit the database directly. The DOI is stored here: https://guides.dataverse.org/en/6.9/schemaspy/tables/dvobject.html

Bethany Seeger (Mar 11 2026 at 17:12):

Thanks for the ideas so far. I think we can "migrate" the a new record in.

Bethany Seeger (Mar 11 2026 at 17:13):

If we migrate one in, will I have to create the DOI myself in fabrica?

Philip Durbin 🚀 (Mar 11 2026 at 17:14):

The DOI might already be in fabrica. I'm not sure of the state though, since you deleted the dataset.

Bethany Seeger (Mar 11 2026 at 20:25):

Thanks - the migration does seem to work. I had to recreate the draft doi in datacite, then migrate the dataset, then I'll update datacite again with the actual URL. I think that Dataverse will not steward this DOI with Datacite the way it does with others (which makes sense), but I think this will be good enough to solve my issue.

Philip Durbin 🚀 (Mar 11 2026 at 20:42):

Phew! Should we have an API for this?!? :sweat_smile:

Henning Timm (Apr 27 2026 at 14:23):

We recently had the same issue. We kept the DOI registered for the deleted draft as "registered", created a new dataset and had the URL of the old DOI point to the new DOI URL.

Would it be an idea to make unintentionally deleting drafts harder? Our user was trying to delete a file and was probably in a hurry. Similar to how GitLab handles this you could have a modal/popup that asks the user to type in the full DOI of the draft dataset to delete.

Philip Durbin 🚀 (Apr 27 2026 at 14:51):

@Henning Timm interesting idea! We're trying to touch the old UI (JSF) as little as possible, but if you're up for it, please create an issue over here for the new UI (React): https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse-frontend/issues

Henning Timm (Apr 29 2026 at 09:35):

Thank you! I opened an issue: https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse-frontend/issues/976

Philip Durbin 🚀 (Apr 29 2026 at 10:32):

Looks great. Thanks!

Last updated: May 30 2026 at 09:11 UTC