2025 on Crossref

Highlights of a very busy year: our 2025 annual report

Ginny Hendricks — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As we finish celebrating our 25th anniversary, we can look back on a truly transformational year, defined by the successful delivery of several long-planned, foundational projects—as well as updates to our teams, services, and fees—that position Crossref for success over the next quarter century as essential open scholarly infrastructure. In our update at the end of 2024, we highlighted that we had restructured our leadership team and paused some projects. The changes made in 2024 positioned us for a year of getting things done in 2025. We launched cross-functional programs, modernised our systems, strengthened connections with our growing global community, and streamlined a bunch of technical and business operations while continuing to grow our staff, members, content, relationships, and community connections.

Read on for the highlights of a very busy year, grouped around our four strategic themes.

Strategic theme 1: Contribute to an environment where the community identifies and co-creates solutions for broad benefit

Enhanced tools and services

In October, we released an enhanced Participation Reports dashboard that shows metadata coverage across all 180 million records and provides individual member organisations with actionable gap reports to guide them to improve metadata completeness. The new tool provides more complete coverage of all members and resource types, now including funders and grants, with up to 11 best-practice metadata elements publicly tracked.

We launched support for journal articles in the New Metadata Manager record registration form (initially only for grants), which includes built-in reference and relationships deposit capabilities. In the New Metadata Manager, it’s now also possible to search for previously registered DOIs to edit your metadata records. In the coming years, we are planning to expand the new Metadata Manager to support all the many different content types that you can register with Crossref DOIs.

After a long break between regular updates, we have fixed our process for and just released v.1.63 of the Open Funder registry. With the updated process, we’re now able to resume more frequent updates to the registry (while of course still working towards the transition to ROR for funders).

Throughout 2025, we conducted a website information architecture review to improve the information we provide to our members and the wider community. Based on the recommendations from this review, we will be renewing our website and documentation in 2026.

Deprecations and modernisation

‘Old’ Metadata Manager is to be retired at the end of 2025, with users transitioning to the ‘New’ version or to our other helper tools for registering and updating DOIs. All users have been contacted during 2025 and received training on how to use the New Metadata Manager.

We also announced the deprecation of Co-access, which will end in 2026, bringing an end to the service that allowed duplicate DOIs for book content. Users of co-access have been informed and are in the process of transitioning to multiple resolution.

Together with Turnitin and our members, we are working to transition all subscribers to our Similarity Check service to a new version of iThenticate 2.0. We are happy to report that all platforms with integrations with us transitioned to 2.0 during 2025, and we will continue working with our members to get everyone transitioned during 2026.

Eating our own DOI dogfood

In June this year, we were particularly pleased to finally support the registration of DOIs for our own content, this very blog, through partnering with Rogue Scholar. Blogs are a growing format for scholarly discourse and our own blog is no different as it’s the main way that we share guidelines and best practices, as well as news and stories from the scholarly community. With a Crossref DOI for all blogs going back to 2006, we’re setting ourselves up to ensure better future preservation of the discussion and information about Crossref.

Community connections

We delivered 29 metadata health-check webinars over the course of the year, in French, Indonesian, Spanish, and English, reaching 2,166 participants with practical advice on identifying gaps in journal metadata using Participation Reports.

Crossref Accra took place in March as our first in-person event in a GEM country. We also held similar events in Ecuador and Türkiye with Crossref Quito in September and Crossref Ankara in November. At these three events, we welcomed key figures from each country’s library, government, publishing, and academic communities and we learned so much about the thriving communities there, and also that even more dedicated workshops on the specifics of metadata quality improvements would be appreciated.

Our metadata sprint in Madrid in April brought together community members to tackle specific problems collaboratively, with teams exploring coding, documentation, translation, and research using our open metadata. We’re already planning our next sprint in São Paulo for March 2026, and it will be held in three languages: Portuguese, Spanish, and English.

A strategic goal for Crossref is to grow research funders’ adoption of the Grant Linking System, and we produced the first in a series of interviews with funder members this year to highlight how and why Crossref DOIs are fulfilling goals to assess the reach and return of their research support for FWF (Austria), NWO (Netherlands), FCCN|FCT (Portugal), and Wellcome. This year, we welcomed more funders including Fonds de recherche du Québec (Canada) and Independent Research Fund Denmark as part of their national research platform NORA; we look forward to reporting on their experiences and outcomes next year and others as they work towards Crossref Grant DOI adoption.

We continued working closely with PKP and renewed our partnership to help drive better experience for OJS users registering metadata with Crossref. We also delivered a proportion of the metadata health-checks together to maximise the learning opportunities for our members using OJS; and we joined PKP’s Sprint in Oslo to help make improvements to OJS and OMP.

Crossref staff members serve on almost 50 committees, boards, and other community bodies alongside our own direct work. These include in the areas of research integrity, metascience, metadata and PID standards, open science policy or monitoring, development of new models (such as Diamond OA), editorial production, library and institutional publishing, and citation and other metadata analyses. We also work with other DOI Registration Agencies and support the sustainability of the DOI Foundation with an additional annual subsidy. Many DOI RAs are also Crossref Sponsors so that their members can access our unique reference matching service. While we often might advise, we also learn a huge amount from collaborating with the numerous systems and initiatives that make up the wider research community.

Our involvement with developing the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information led us to become the fiscal host and to participate in most of the working groups on open metadata. Of particular note this year was the Funding Metadata Working Group round table about moving forward the state of funding metadata, which we co-hosted with Barcelona Declaration colleagues, and three funding bodies, NWO (Netherlands), FWF (Austria), and ANR (France) as we heard from publishers and their vendors about challenges and how to overcome them to increase the quantity and quality of available open funding metadata.

All our community engagement activities have been enthusiastically supported and enriched by our indispensable Ambassadors and our group of now 130 Sponsors, organisations that help thousands of Crossref members with local language and technical support and lower cost access to our membership.

Strategic theme 2: A sustainable source of complete, open, and global scholarly metadata and relationships

Schema developments

The grant schema version 0.2.0 was released in January, adding support for ROR identifiers to identify funders and new funding types for in our taxonomy, including APC, BPC, and infrastructure. All of these funding types can be specified in the metadata of our grant-giving members alongside the existing types such as use of facilities or salary/training awards, etc.

Version 5.4 of our publications schema was released in March, marking our first update in many years and a great opportunity to learn how to do this and make the process more efficient. This release introduced typed references to denote the type of object referenced (dataset, blog, software, etc.), preprint status indicators, and version numbering.

Just last week, we also added a dedicated field for grant DOIs to our publications schema. This means it’s now possible to indicate in an article’s metadata which grant(s) funded the research using the persistent identifier. This is an essential step toward better alignment between grant funding and research, enriching the Research Nexus.

We also launched our new Metadata Advisory Group and they have already devised sub-working groups in three focus topic areas:

Multilingual metadata
Subjects and keywords
Relationships

Public data file

We released the 2025 public data file in March, containing metadata for (at the time) over 165 million research outputs from more than 22,000 organisations.

Inaugural Metadata Awards

In May, we launched the first-ever Metadata Awards to recognise members demonstrating excellence in metadata completeness and enrichment. Winners included Noyam Publishers (Ghana), GigaScience Press (Hong Kong), eLife (UK), American Society for Microbiology (USA), Universidad La Salle Arequipa (Peru), and Instituto Geologico y Minero de España (Spain). The awards will be held biennially going forward.

Metadata Matching project

In April, we launched the metadata matching project with the aim of building a more complete picture of the research nexus over time by automatically identifying missing relationships between entities across the scholarly record. The project’s goal is to modernise Crossref’s enrichment workflows by rebuilding them using modern software development and data science practices.

We are in the throws of developing a consolidated matching workflow that will eventually replace all existing production matching processes, with results exposed through the REST API. All new matching strategies will be rigorously evaluated, and the resulting data will be accompanied by clear provenance information. This project covers six matching tasks:

bibliographic reference matching
funder name matching
preprint matching
affiliation matching
grant matching
title matching

In the meantime, while work continues on integrating matching results into the REST API, we’ve been releasing standalone matching datasets for separate download and analysis. These include relationships between preprints and journal articles, relationships involving research organisations, and relationships between grants and research outputs.

Data infrastructure and Research Nexus participation dashboard

Staying on the data science front, we’ve established an internal data environment that combines all relevant data sources (scholarly metadata, logs and usage data, and external datasets) in their raw forms into a single place. This environment is supported by a suite of modern tools and data processing techniques, enabling data science experiments and analytics pipelines to run effectively at scale.

Building on this foundation, we plan to develop a series of dashboards to monitor the state of the scholarly record over time. These dashboards will feature both work-level and member-level statistics (for example, how many works of a given type have been registered, or how many members are registering grant IDs) as well as more detailed insights at the relationship level (for example, how many bibliographic references have been automatically matched, or how many times ROR IDs are included in funder assertions). Some of these statistics are already available in a public spreadsheet for now, pending the dashboard.

Retraction Watch integration

In 2023, Crossref acquired the Retraction Watch database to make it open data. Initially, this was done through sharing simple CSV files, but this year we have set up a pipeline to feed this information into our REST API, which means that Retraction Watch data is now fully available through the REST API, integrated with Crossref member-supplied retraction and correction metadata. This is the first example of Crossref integrating third-party metadata, and we’re learning a lot about how to best incorporate other datasets in future.

Metadata API and services improvements

From 1 December 2025, we revised rate limits for the REST API to ensure system stability whilst maintaining free access to metadata for everyone. Changes were made to the rate limits for our ‘public’ and ‘polite’ APIs, while the limits for our Metadata Plus users stayed the same. We continue to make all metadata openly available to the whole community.

We also improved how information from our content system feeds into the REST API. A tool we call ‘pusher’—because it pushes information from the content system to the REST API—was rebuilt so that we now have a more reliable transfer of information between our two systems.

While adding to technical improvements, we’ve also worked to better understand the use of and streamline the service offering for paid options. We’ll share more about this year’s Metadata Plus consultation soon. And based on feedback, we have already retired the ‘Query Affiliate’ service, where a handful of organisations still paid us a fee to access our XML API, whereas no credentials have been required for some time.

Strategic theme 3: Manage Crossref openly and sustainably, modernising and making transparent all operations so that we are accountable to the communities that govern us

Infrastructure modernisation

One of our biggest projects of 2025—if not the biggest—was the move from our data centre into the cloud (AWS). For 25 years, Crossref had been running a physical data centre in Massachusetts, USA, but as part of modernising our systems, it was high time to move everything into the cloud. The move to AWS took several months, but we successfully completed this move to the cloud in July this year. We’re spending these last weeks of 2025 fully decommissioning our data centre, which means that we are removing all the equipment we had there and locking the door for the last time.

A part of the move to AWS included moving onto an open-source database solution, PostgreSQL. This reduced our reliance on closed, costly licensed solutions, while also aligning with our POSI commitment to open-source. Running our entire system in AWS provides a more stable, modern approach to our infrastructure, but it also is expensive. We expect to spend about 2 million USD on AWS fees next year, with the majority of this cost coming from REST API usage. Some of the improvements described above will help us manage those costs and better observe traffic patterns.

Our new cloud infrastructure is a bittersweet milestone: while we are happy to not have to rely on a physical presence to support a 24/7 global infrastructure, we also say a sad farewell to our much-loved and long-suffering Sys Admin, Tim Pickard, who has been with Crossref since 2002, and has contributed significantly and unwaveringly to keeping our system up and running in the data centre. Tim will be leaving Crossref at the end of the year; we’re grateful to Tim for all his years of dedication, and we will greatly miss his impressive Hawaiian shirt game on our all-staff calls.

After 25 years, it was also time to get serious about modernising our core content system, because even though it serves our community well, an older system with legacy code is a constant risk and frustration. We’ve therefore embarked on a multi-year modernisation project where we are replacing our old code piece by piece. We no longer want to have one big content system (a monolith), but are planning to identify different pieces of functionality and rebuild these as separate services (a modular, flexible, and robust approach). This year, we already managed to reconstruct some smaller pieces (for example, the ‘pusher’ mentioned above), and next year we will tackle larger projects, such as Metadata Matching and Authentication.

We continue to prioritise open, timely communication for planned or unplanned service interruptions and encourage everyone to monitor our status page at status.crossref.org. We’ll further hone our incident response processes in 2026, including openly posting incident reviews, and we’ll also centre system maintenance and documentation clarity in everything we do.

RCFS Projects

The Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability projects (RCFS) and the work of our Membership & Fees Committee resulted in deciding not to change some things (such as the basis for annual membership fees), but to change three things about our fees, as reported in July:

A new lower membership fee tier of 200 USD for members with annual revenues/expenses of under 1000 USD - so far, this includes around 3000 members. See below for more info.
A removal of volume discounts to reduce complexity in our billing code; they were little used, and those who did use these were fine with the loss of the discount.
A removal of the rule that only publishers of a title could register peer review reports (including comments and annotations) at the lower 0.25 USD fee for the first review; this lower fee is now available to any member to register any reviews of any other members’ works.

A new late-breaking addition to these fee decisions is the reduction of fees for members registering grants. As of January 1st 2026, there will be no fee for back-year (BY) grant registration, to encourage the faster adoption of older grants, which are more likely to have research outputs to be matched. This will be a two-year pilot to trial how a reduced fee incentivises adoption and boosts metadata connections, and could be extended to other record types as we monitor its success and sustainability. In addition, the 2 USD fee per current-year (CY) grant record is being reduced to 1 USD in line with the next-nearest fee, this is a permanent change for the foreseeable future.

Membership growth, efficiencies, and accessibility

In March, the board voted to update membership terms and bylaws to clarify processes for suspending and revoking membership, and to be more explicit about member practices that preserve the integrity of the scholarly record. A short-term Member Practices Working Group will be meeting in the first half of 2026 to draft these.

Crossref now serves 23,600 members across 164 countries, with continued growth particularly in Asia and Latin America. We’ve continued our ongoing member onboarding activities to support new members joining the community. We see around 230 new members join each month, and have welcomed 2,700 this year so far. We recently reported on how the shape of membership has evolved over our 25 years of operation.

From January 2026, we’re introducing a new lower membership fee tier of 200 USD for organisations with annual revenue or expenses of 1,000 USD or less, making membership more accessible to low-resourced organisations. Already, over 3000 members have been eligible to move into or join under that fee, and the idea is to monitor how this affects Crossref’s financial sustainability and potentially adjust the 200 USD annual fee down again in future years.

From 1 January 2026, the GEM program, which offers fee-free membership and content registration for all members from certain countries, will expand to include 18 additional countries, further reducing financial barriers to participation in the scholarly record, so we expect several hundred further members to join the existing 600 organisations in this category. More information about the GEM program expansion here.

As our membership base continues to grow, the Membership and Finance teams are constantly exploring ways to make shared processes more efficient. A key component in this work has been the efforts to automate several tasks within both teams to help us manage the additional work caused by our growth and allow our teams to focus more on providing the best quality service we can.

Our membership team continues to support our members, sponsors, service providers, metadata users and the wider community by email and through our community forum. The membership team includes staff members who focus on member support, and staff members who focus on technical support. During 2025 so far, we’ve received 36.8k member enquiries through our support system, a 17% increase from last year. This includes 22.6k inquiries related to general membership and 13k technical support enquiries. We’ve received 3.8k membership applications, and welcomed 2.7k new members.

Growth by the numbers

Crossref continues its steady revenue growth in 2025 due to the expansion of our membership base. With the addition of new members and the general growth of Crossref, comes an increase in the transaction-based tasks our Finance team handles.

So far in 2025 we have issued 14,833 invoices, which is a 9% increase since last year. We’ve seen an 11% increase in the number of payments received and applied, and a 12% increase in the amount of credit and debit memos applied over the same time last year. We have also seen a 42% increase in the number of billing-related tickets, totalling 20,723. A large segment of these tickets are related to fee updates associated with the new $200 membership tier.

Not all transactional work in Finance has increased as steadily, with increased revenue of 8% we have also seen a 14% increase in operating expenses. Through the strategic consolidation of vendors and use of financial tools, we have only seen a 1% increase in Accounts Payable invoices processed.

Organisational sustainability

Finance-wise, we’re doing well. We’re projecting to finish this year with revenue of 14,200,000 USD and expect revenue next year of 14,500,000 USD. We’re budgeting 2% growth in overall revenue, accounting for some of the changes to fees that will reduce our earnings on membership dues, but anticipating continued growth of content registration revenue.

Revenue and expenses trends

About 67% of our expenses come from personnel costs, and the other 33% include non-personnel costs like AWS, travel, legal fees, etc. As we continue to build out the team, we have ten new positions planned for the next year (recruitment for many of these is already underway or done). With additional staff roles and AWS expenses, we’re expecting expense growth of 16%. We post our financial statements and Form 990 filings on the financials page on our website.

Revenue per member size (by tier)

As the chart above shows, we still see ’the long tail’ of smaller members in the lowest fee category (275 USD) contributing more revenue than those in the largest category (50,000 USD) at 5.8 million USD versus 5 million USD.

Another aspect of sustainability is our impact on the world around us. And this year we were able to publish a second report on Crossref’s carbon footprint, having monitored and controlled for several carbon-heavy activities, primarily staff travel. Our reported emissions went up 40% from 2023 to 2024, due to more travel given our growth in staff and members, better recording our emissions (for example, with hotel stays), and including travel that we support for our partners, ambassadors and board members. In terms of travel spending, we are still well below 2019 when we were smaller, demonstrating that we are following through on not going back to the pre-pandemic norm.

We were one of the first open infrastructure organisations to adopt the POSI Principles and now have a few years’ experience in trying to meet them. Together with other adopters, we proposed updates and additions to the principles, based on real-world practice, and gathered a lot of community comment, resulting in the group publishing POSI v2 in October. We conduct a self-assessment every other year and we’ll be involving all our staff in the next self-assessment, due later in 2026.

Open governance through board election and annual meeting

We continued our commitment to being member-led and community-driven. This year’s anniversary Annual Meeting in October brought together members to discuss strategy, metadata developments, and hear the results of their voting in our board election. It comprised two half-days of online conferencing and several in-person satellite meetings spread across five continents, gathering close to 500 members of our community. It was a platform to reflect together on the past quarter of the century of building community infrastructure and connections underpinning the progress of scholarship, and to share plans for the future.

Each member has one vote, and together they elected the following organisations to serve a three-year term alongside the rest of the board:

Tier 1 candidates (electing one seat):

Rebecca Wambua, Distance, Open and e-Learning Practitioners’ Association of Kenya

Tier 2 candidates (electing four seats):

Damian Bird, CABI
Rose L’Huillier, Elsevier*
Anjalie Nawaratne, Springer Nature*
Nick Lindsay, The MIT Press*

*returning board member

Congratulations to the remaining and incoming board members as we start their new term in January 2026. Have a look at all the outputs from our Annual Meeting.

Strategic theme 4: Foster a strong team—because reliable infrastructure needs committed people who contribute to and realise the vision, and thrive doing it

Team structure

We reorganised the team heading into 2025 because we had ambitious goals that required a more structured, collaborative approach. We reorganised the work around three strategic, mission-driven areas of focus described above. This was our first full year with the cross-functional program groups in place, and the activities reported here make it evident that our team members, both existing and new, are firing on all cylinders.

New staff and new roles

We welcomed eight new team members in 2025. In February, we welcomed our new Director of Programs & Services, Helena Cousijn, and a new member of the Technical Support team, Arley Soto. In March, we welcomed our new Community Manager for funders, Rocío Gaudioso Pedraza. In April, we launched our new Data Science team by welcoming Jason Portenoy and Alex Bédard-Vallée. In November, we welcomed our new DevOps Engineer, Thelma Laryea, and our new Program Technical Lead for the OSO program, Bharath Govindarajan. In December, we welcomed another member of the Technical Support team, Natali Giorgobiani.

We also had team members step up into new roles. Dominika Tkaczyk completed the new leadership team by taking on the Director of Technology role, Paul Davis has started his new role as Product Manager, and Michelle Cancel has taken on the Head of Human Resources role. And there’s more to come! As next year begins, two team members will step into Program Technical Lead roles: Carlos del Ojo Elias for the CRN program and Patrick Vale for the CCT program. Together with the Program Technical Lead for the OSO program and the Head of Infrastructure Services, these roles will complete the new structure of the technology team. This structure is more closely aligned with how our work is organised and will enable stronger coordination both within and across cross-functional programs.

Supporting a thriving global culture

As our team grows in different aspects within our new org structure to meet the needs of the community, we remain committed to supporting a thriving culture through training, conducting regular temperature checks, and organising our annual staff retreat. This year, we continued our work on psychological safety and introduced workshops on giving and receiving feedback and on consensus building. We were able to put some of this training into practice at our in-person all-staff event in Split, Croatia, where we all came together to build our roadmap.

We are ending the year with 51 staff in 14 countries and look forward to diversifying and evolving even further as a team in 2026—we’re currently hiring in UX, Communications, and Membership—and keep an eye on our jobs page for forthcoming opportunities in Software, DevOps, Metadata, and Operations!

Thank you to our community of members, partners, board, ambassadors, sponsors, metadata users, service providers, integrators—and of course our team—for making 2025 such a productive year. Together, we’re building a richer, more connected research ecosystem for the benefit of society. We can’t wait to continue the work together in 2026.

Twenty-five years of Crossref: reflections from the 2025 annual meeting and board election

Rosa Morais Clark — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Crossref turned twenty-five this year, and our 2025 Annual Meeting became more than a celebration—it was a shared moment to reflect on how far open scholarly infrastructure has come and where we, as a community, are heading next.

Over two days in October, hundreds of participants joined online and in local satellite meetings in Madrid, Nairobi, Medan, Bogotá, Washington D.C., and London––a reminder that our community spans the globe. The meetings offered updates, community highlights, and a look at what’s ahead for our shared metadata network––including plans to connect funders, platforms, and AI tools across the global research ecosystem.

Ed Pentz opened with thanks and perspective. He reflected on how it all began: twelve members, one shared goal — to make research easier to find and verify. 25 years later, the same goal underpins 174 million open metadata records, 1.9 billion citation links, and roughly 1.3 billion DOI resolutions each month. What started as reference linking is now a global network of relationships among people, institutions, and research outputs. Ed also reaffirmed the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) as the foundation of our operations and our collaborations with other community-governed infrastructures.

“Each number represents shared effort, trust, and long-term commitment,” Ed reminded us. “Open infrastructure works because people keep showing up.”

Crossref’s purpose as per the Certificate of Incorporation.

Following up Ed’s talk, we showed a video timeline, ‘25 years of Crossref’, tracing milestones from the first DOIs to today’s connected Research Nexus.

Crossref 25th anniversary timeline

Shared perspectives from the community

We featured perspectives from organizations that have built key scholarly infrastructure alongside Crossref over the years. A shared message ran through their talks: open infrastructure only works when it’s interoperable, community-led, and practical for the people who use it.

Urooj Nizami (PKP) described PKP and Crossref as “independent and interdependent,” using the archipelago metaphor to show how open software and shared metadata services connect local publishing to a global network.

Todd Carpenter (NISO) emphasized standards being a social, and technical contract, noting how persistent identifiers and reliable metadata underpin a broader knowledge graph—and why provenance and linking matter even more as AI systems remix content.

Abel Packer (SciELO) highlighted Latin America’s strong DOI coverage while pointing out where multilingual versions and preprint–article–data links still break visibility—arguing for metadata that connects versions, not splits them. [data point]

Soichi Kubota (J-STAGE/JST) showed how Crossref services (from citation linking, Cited-by, metadata, to Similarity Check) anchor Japan’s national platform and how deeper cooperation (e.g., Crossmark) will support richer, more reliable metadata.

Leena Shah (DOAJ) outlined DOAJ’s open index, renewed POSI commitment, and hands-on collaboration with Crossref—from the MoU and PLACE to help-desk coordination, gap analyses, and plans to boost DOAJ records via Crossref’s API and open references.

Susan Murray (AJOL) spoke of capacity building: with 900+ journals across 40 countries, benefiting from AJOL’s support in registering identifiers and metadata , and of their long-standing partnership with Crossref making it possible for journals with limited resources to take part.

These voices echoed a common call: Build bridges, not silos.

Governance and election results

Leading off the formal annual meeting, Lisa Schiff, Chair of the Crossref Board, looked back on our 25th anniversary as one marked by progress and problem-solving. She talked about moving all our systems to the cloud—a big step that makes the organization’s work faster and more reliable. She also spoke about ongoing efforts to maintain the research record’s trustworthiness, including adding Retraction Watch data and updating member terms. Lisa noted new ways we are making membership more accessible, like the lower $200 tier and the expansion of the GEM program.

Lucy Ofiesh brought it back to the role of the members themselves, reminding everyone that success still rests with its members. The annual meeting is when members directly influence Crossref’s direction––when each vote helps shape how we move forward together.

We extend our thanks to the Board members whose terms have concluded, and we congratulate the newly elected members who will carry the work forward.

Five directors were elected: Rebecca Wambua (Distance, Open and e-Learning Practitioners’ Association of Kenya), Damian Bird (CABI), Rose L’Huillier (Elsevier), Anjalie Nawaratne (Springer Nature), and Nick Lindsay (MIT Press).

We also thank the 2025 Nominating Committee for their thoughtful work guiding this year’s process and slate selection.

The Board plays an important role in making sure our governance remains community-led, transparent, and accountable. The volunteer members bring experience from research funders, publishers, and libraries, giving a balance of perspectives that help steer our long-term strategy and sustainability.

Tools in practice

Then our attention turned to the tools that many members use every day. Patrick Vale walked participants through updates to Participation Reports and the Record Registration Form— designed to make working with metadata simpler.

Updated Participation Report for Universidad La Salle Arequipa (Peru), showing metadata element coverage percentages.

Participation Reports, first launched in 2018, have now been completely rebuilt as version 1.2. The refreshed interface runs on a new technology stack and supports morecontent types, and offers a new “download gap report” feature that generates a CSV list of records missing key fields—so members can identify and fix gaps directly.

Patrick then demonstrated improvements to the Record Registration Form, now streamlined for creating as well as editing records. The form includes real-time validation, auto-fill options for journals previously used, and the ability to edit existing records directly. Members can now easily add abstracts, funding data, licenses, and affiliations linked to ORCID and ROR—all within one place.

In the final demonstration, Luis Montilla, shared a “short research story”. He showed how anyone can explore Crossref metadata to uncover global participation patterns—turning what might seem like a mass of disconnected records into something meaningful once you start asking questions. He also shared a workflow that automatically retrieves and enriches data with country and regional information, then visualises member contributions and metadata coverage.

Luis also demonstrated an interactive notebook that lets users explore participation trends through radar charts and other visuals—illustrating how open data can help the community understand and improve the completeness of the scholarly record.

Crossref then & now

Amanda Bartell walked through how the community has changed over 25 years.

The membership has broadened dramatically: universities and scholar-led groups now form the largest share, and more organizations in Asia and Latin America have joined (with big growth in Indonesia and Brazil). Most members are small: 98% qualify for the lowest fee tier, and 57% participate via a Sponsor. In support of including members from smaller economies, Crossref launched a GEM programme, which will be expanding to 19 new countries in 2026.

She expanded her presentation later with a blog post to share insights about the changes in the Crossref global community.

With our growing membership, the needs of the community are evolving too, including expectations about Crossref’s role in preserving the integrity of the scholarly record.

“Our role in preserving the integrity of the scholarly record is focused on enriching the metadata to provide fuller and better trust signals while keeping barriers to participation low.” —Amanda Bartell, Crossref

In response to the growing membership across the globe, we launched our Ambassadors program in 2018. Johanssen Obanda highlighted the activities of what is now 50 volunteers across 38 countries. Ambassadors act as local contacts—running training sessions, organizing events, translating materials, and providing feedback from their regions. Over the past year, they’ve led 41 activities reaching around 1,200 people. Many also contribute to GEM outreach, metadata health checks, and regional events—often in local languages.

Roadmap highlights

Helena Cousijn outlined progress across three programs—Co-creation and Community Trends, Contributing to the Research Nexus, and Open and Sustainable Operations. Along with already showcased progress with Participation Reports and the new Record Registration Form, the Community Trends program involves working in partnership with others on DSpace integration and OJS plug-ins consolidation. In the near future there’s also a consideration for piloting AI detection tools. The Contributing to Research Nexus program carried out a consultation with Metadata Plus subscribers, and develops a new data citations endpoint for the Crossref REST API. This team is also developing further matching services, in the first instance looking to match funder metadata to ROR IDs.

Finally, Helena discussed the recent accomplishment of the Open and Sustainable Operations program, the migration of our database from the data centre to the cloud with Amazon Web Services. Other projects in this program involve ravamping resolution reports, rebuilding the Crossref authentication system, and launching new metadata schema.

Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability (RCFS)

RCFS program is focused on equity, simplicity, and revenue balance. Kora shared recent developments and next steps: : A new $200 membership tier (for organizations with ≤$1,000 in publishing revenue/expenses) takes effect on January 1, 2026; more than 3,000 members have already moved into it. We will keep “publishing revenue/expenses” as the sizing basis for publishers while funder sizing is still under review. Volume discounts for content registration end on January 1, 2026. Backfile discounts for theses/dissertations and conference proceedings are under review. Peer-review fees are normalized at $0.25 for the first review of a work, with subsequent reviews (same member, same work) for free

Behind the scenes: metadata, data science

Patricia Feeney reviewed recent and upcoming changes to our metadata schemas. Earlier this year, we began accepting ROR IDs as funder identifiers and released schema 5.4, which added versioning across all record types, a new status field for preprints, and a way to label citation types (like data sets, software, or blog posts).

Coming soon, Crossref will add grant DOIs to funding metadata and release schema 5.5, which supports the CRediT contributor vocabulary and allows multiple contributor roles. A new grant schema will follow, including support for beneficiaries, project identifiers (like RAiD), and repeatable roles. Looking ahead to 2026, our plans to overhaul how names and organizations are modeled, add richer funding and data-availability statements, and expand abstract and multilingual metadata support. A new Metadata Advisory Group has also been formed to guide work on multilingual fields, subjects, keywords, and relationship modeling.

Finally, Patricia announced plans to deprecate older schemas—a gradual, multi-year process—to simplify and modernize our metadata structure. She highlighted the importance of stronger relationships, richer records, and practical improvements that make metadata more useful across the community. That focus on connection carried directly into the next session about building through data science.

Data science at Crossref

Dominika Tkaczyk introduced the new data science team, formed a few months ago as part of the technology group. The team was created because of the growing scale and complexity of the data Crossref manages, driven by the expanding scholarly community. Their role is to use data science to assess, improve, and enrich scholarly metadata.

Their work falls into two areas: data analysis and insights—to help Crossref understand the scholarly record and guide decisions—and data services and workflows—to apply data science in building and maintaining production systems. Examples include studying overlap between scholarly databases and improving metadata quality. The session then focused on two projects: creating an internal data processing environment and developing metadata matching services.

Alex Bédard-Vallée described the team’s first project: building a data lake to bring together fragmented data from different systems. Previously, data were split across silos like the REST API, internal logs, and production databases. It enables tracking of reference deposits, closing 718M citation gaps. The system already enables analyses that were previously impractical, such as tracking how many members include reference metadata in deposits. It will also power new dashboards, monitoring tools, and other data-driven initiatives that support the integrity of the scholarly record.

Jason Portenoy then outlined the metadata matching project, which links pieces of information (like citations, funder names, or affiliations) to their identifiers such as DOIs or ROR IDs. He gave examples including reference-to-DOI, funder-to-ROR ID, affiliation-to-ROR ID, grant-to-DOI, and preprint-to-published-article matching.

He explained that much metadata is already deposited by members but large gaps remain. For example, among more than a billion citation links, about 843 million already include DOIs, while another 718 million references can’t yet be matched. The goal is to close these gaps to build a more complete and connected scholarly record—the “research nexus.”

Community highlights

Martyn Rittman, Program Lead, and Kora each opened the community highlights over the two days by noting that everyone presenting is sharing how they use metadata and contribute to the broader ecosystem.

Crossref does not exist without our members and the broader community—people who provide metadata and people who use the metadata. That’s why we’re here.” ~ Martyn Rittman

Antoine Drouin (Fonds de Recherche du Québec) shared that FRQ joined Crossref earlier this year and created 22,000+ grant and scholarship DOIs, linking grants to outputs and improving interoperability with ORCID, ROR, and Crossref grant IDs.

Agon Memeti (University of Tetova) shared findings of his analysis of abstract metadata coverage across 2024 articles from 13 university journals.

Charlie Rapple (Kudos) presented a Crossref-supported study on how researchers engage with the UN SDGs and described Kudos’ work explaining research for wider audiences. A survey of ~4,500 researchers showed strong awareness, regional differences in SDG priorities, and some targeted budgets for promotion, alongside challenges in publishing SDG-focused local research in prestige venues.

Pia Kretschmar (SCOAP3) outlined integrating Crossref metadata into new SCOAP³ open science elements in Phase 4; SCOAP³ funds OA publishing in high-energy physics and has covered 78,000+ articles. Publishers are scored on elements such as metadata provision to Crossref, identifiers, and links to datasets/software; completeness was checked via the Crossref API, results varied, and evaluation continues next year.

Barbara Rivera (Barcelona Declaration) introduced the Declaration, its four commitments, and its community of 125 signatories and 52 supporters, including Crossref. Working groups are executing a joint roadmap, with recent actions such as a funding-metadata roundtable and upcoming surveys on metadata frameworks and repository workflows.

Hans de Jonge (Dutch Research Council, NWO) presented his and Bianca Kramer’s recent study (as of 10/23/25 Preprint, not yet reviewed) of metadata completeness in Crossref among publishers using different manuscript submission systems. They compared six metadata types across major publishers and found that differences had more to do with workflow choices, customization, and policy than with the system itself.

Audrey Kenni (Pan African Medical Journal) shared PAMJ’s journey with Crossref to increased visibility.

Nurul Ain Mohd Noor (UMT Press, Malaysia) described UMT Press’s evolution since 2003, rebranding in 2007 and joining Crossref in 2020. Nurul explained how registering their metadata with Crossref increased citation visibility and indexing across databases.

Achal Agrawal (PostPub) introduced PostPub’s dashboard providing retraction statistics by country and institution, supported by a Catalyst Grant from Digital Science, and shared their journey through disambiguation challenges.

Ratna Galuh Manika Trisista (Universitas Islam Jakarta) presented how enabling reference linking transformed her law journal’s citation visibility.

Closing reflections

We closed the meeting with a panel discussion on the Research Nexus in the real world: What is the impact and potential of open scholarly metadata. Ginny Hendricks, Crossref; Dominika Tkaczyk, Crossref; Bianca Kramer, Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information; David Oliva Uribe, UNESCO; Amber Osman, XploreOpen; Mariángela Nápoli, CONICET-IICE UBA-FFYL; Crossref; Kazuhiro Hayashi, National Institute of Science and Technology Policy; Science Council of Japan, shared a diversity of perspectives, which we’ll share in an upcoming blog.

You can also learn more about the in-person satellite events across the world from their organisers on our Community Forum.

You will find outputs from #Crossref2025 on our website, which you can cite as `#Crossref2025 Annual Meeting and Board Election, 22-23 October 2025 retrieved [date], https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.13003/431937misogo ‘.

Wellcome and Europe PMC: supporting Open Research through open metadata

Rocío Gaudioso Pedraza — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In my latest conversations with research funders, I talked with Hannah Hope, Open Research Lead at Wellcome, and Melissa Harrison, Team Leader of Literature Services at Europe PMC. Wellcome and Europe PMC are working together to realise the potential of funding metadata and the Crossref Grant Linking System for, among other things, programmatic grantee reporting. In this blog, we explore how this partnership works and how the Crossref Grant Linking System is supporting Wellcome in realising their Open Science vision.

What motivated you to join Crossref?

Hannah: The motivation for Crossref Grant IDs is to be able to disaggregate research outputs between funders. Funders’ grant identifiers come in a range of formats, funders might change them over time, and there are also similarities between funders’ names, which is a challenge. Permanent identifiers, in this case, Crossref Grant IDs, are an opportunity to avoid some of the confusion if we were able to implement them throughout the research ecosystem.

This is also being discussed in different contexts, for example, within the Barcelona Declaration working groups, funders and other stakeholders are exploring the diverse motivations that exist to implement changes into our workflows, as well as the challenges that funding metadata and persistent grant IDs can help solve.

The way Wellcome implemented the Grant Linking System is a bit unique, given that it partnered with Europe PMC for the technical implementation and metadata registration with Crossref. Can you tell us more about how it works?

Hannah: The collaboration between Wellcome and Europe PMC in the implementation of Crossref’s Grant Linking System started because they already had the grants landing page feature ready and available to us.

There was an initial hope that other funders of Europe PMC, which also have these grant landing pages, could then leverage that same system to make Crossref grant IDs more broadly available to the research community, but I am not sure if that has materialised yet.

Melissa: Currently we are supporting Wellcome’s implementation of Crossref grant IDs, but the infrastructure remains available to other Europe PMC funders should they decide to take advantage of it. We already have funding metadata for Europe PMC funders because it is a requirement for grantees to select their grant identifier when submitting their accepted manuscripts for indexing and archiving. As we already have that metadata, naturally we can pull it together and send it to Crossref, along with the link to the Europe PMC grant landing pages!

An additional benefit of partnering with Europe PMC is the comprehensive metadata we deliver to Crossref with the grant IDs. For example, we have invested in supplementing affiliation data with ROR iDs and we deliver to Crossref all the data we have that matches their schema for grant data.

How is Wellcome leveraging the funding metadata and Crossref grants IDs that are being shared and registered with Crossref?

Hannah: We are discussing internally how we can better socialise the Crossref grant DOIs among the grantees, either via our grant management system or through Europe PMC. One place where the Crossref grant DOIs are being used and shared is through our publishing platform, Wellcome Open Research. The Crossref grant DOI is included in the publication metadata, ensuring that the research output is linked to the funding via the open metadata registered.

However, as we use Europe PMC as our repository for funded written research outputs, these outputs are aggregated alongside the grant records which includes the Crossref grant DOI, facilitated by Europe PMC APIs. So we have the means to link the two things together.

Melissa: There are some UX and technical blockers to fully integrate Crossref grant IDs within the Europe PMC grant system currently that are detrimental to the utility of these IDs, for example, you can’t search for a specific grant in Europe PMC grant finder using a Crossref grant ID. We are partnering with Crossref to solve these challenges and offer users more functionality in this space next year.

Hannah: Beyond eLife and Wellcome Open Research, I am not sure which publishers use Crossref grants DOIs in their workflows.

Rocio: That’s an interesting question, as we aren’t seeing a massive flow of Crossref grant IDs in the works metadata records just yet. We are exploring with publishers and their service providers how to make this business-as-usual, and in the meantime, we are running a series of matching projects to ensure that, when possible, we make those connections ourselves to enrich the metadata with funding information. We already insert reciprocal relationships where one record asserts a link with another (in this case, where either a grant Finances a work or a work isFinancedBy a grant record, Crossref adds in the reverse). Improving and enriching these relationships directly in the metadata makes sure that metadata provided by funders can make their way to the research outputs that originate from the grant.

Wellcome is streamlining the way of asking grantees to report on their publications, facilitated by Europe PMC. Can you tell us a bit more about how this will work and what role metadata will play?

Hannah: We will stop asking researchers to report their publications directly to us as part of progress and end-of-grant reporting. We believe there is sufficient open metadata with high-quality tagging in the ecosystem for us to collect written research outputs programmatically from this public data. Under our new system, we will be directing researchers to look at their grant record within Europe PMC and make sure that their written research outputs are properly linked there; otherwise, we won’t see them. We are trying to leverage open data, existing infrastructure, and a route that enables us to improve the completeness of open metadata.

There aren’t many mechanisms that enable our researchers to add assertions to funding and research output records retrospectively, and Europe PMC offers us that opportunity, and that is really critical for us. Rather than collecting information in our own system, we can contribute to enhancing the global corpus of knowledge and the quality of open metadata more broadly. Since correcting metadata at source isn’t easy, Europe PMC presents us with an opportunity to contribute to that system.

Melissa: We are thinking broadly about this problem; many institutions curate their research information in spreadsheets or closed CRIS systems and struggle to make it publicly available. We are thinking about how Europe PMC can be leveraged to be a public home for that data. EMBL-EBI hosts Europe PMC and utilises it as the institutional repository, so we have started a pilot project to add ROR IDs for affiliations to EMBL-authored publications within Europe PMC. This is manually curated, high-quality metadata that would otherwise be lost from the public ecosystem.

If you look into the future, what would your hopes be for the GLS and greater transparency in funding metadata in general? What do you think that we could achieve collectively as a community?

Melissa: It would be amazing (!) if everybody, from funders to publishers, to institutions and authors, would coalesce around the Crossref Grant Linking System, and add to metadata exchange workflows – you would potentially have a very clean and clear picture of where the money is going, what the outputs are, and how they relate.

Currently, even with the Open Funder Registry, there is ambiguity around funder names - for example, different geographical national funders sharing the same exact name as their counterpart in another country - so even with the best will in the world, funder institutions could be misidentified in systems and assigned the wrong identifier. The Crossref Grant Linking System facilitates complete disambiguation because grants are associated with the issuing funder’s correct identifier, ensuring traceability of outputs and funding and enabling more precise, cleaner metadata.

Hannah: I think that is a bit of the Holy Grail and in reality, its a bit messy, there isn’t just one system! We need to be able to move past the chicken and egg discussion, where we talk about the use of different identifiers, with sometimes competing priorities. For me, the real challenge for the metadata community is how do we enrich metadata, correct errors, and develop greater interoperability between PID systems. So that multiple parties can contribute towards the creation of a greater whole record, rather than relying on a single owner of the record to provide all the information. If we could all, funders included, connect information from individual partners to create a unified record at the end of it, we could have better records and probably save time by distributing the workload.

What would you say to colleagues in other funders about investing in open metadata?

We all need information from other partners in the ecosystem and investing in our own internal system will not give us the same return as collectively investing in opening up that information wherever possible.

——-

We are very grateful to Hannah Hope and Melissa Harrison for their perspectives on open funding metadata and the role of the community in ensuring a complete and comprehensive Research Nexus.

Some things are big because they are small – the new fee tier for Crossref members takes effect

Kornelia Korzec — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Haz clic aquí para ver la versión en español

In January 2026, our new annual membership fee tier takes effect. The new tier is US$200 for member organisations that operate on publishing revenue or expenses (whichever is higher) of up to US$1,000 annually. We announced the Board’s decision, making it possible in July, and––as you can infer from Amanda’s latest blog––this is the first such change to the annual membership fee tiers in close to 20 years!

The new fee tier resulted from the consultation process and fees review undertaken as part of the Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability program, carried out with the help of our Membership and Fees Committee (made up of representatives from member organisations and community partners). The program is ongoing, and the new fee tier, intended to make Crossref membership more accessible, is one of the first changes it helped us determine.

When our membership renewal invoices are sent out in January 2026, the new fee tier will apply to 3,194 of our existing members, who will receive annual membership invoices 27% lower than previously. Surveys preceding the introduction of the new fee tier have shown that it might be applicable to between 30-60% of the organisations in what used to be our lowest fee tier (US$275 fee for organisations with publishing revenue or expenses of up to US$1 million).

We received positive feedback from members affected by the change.

We are very grateful for the new lowest membership fee tier. The Crossref fee is indeed a significant expense for our organisation, but we accept it given its importance. This new fee structure will make it easier for us to cover the cost.” – said Marina Pérez, Análisis Filosófico.

This initiative by Crossref to reduce membership fees is a welcome step toward achieving a truly global and connected research ecosystem. This will undoubtedly help our journal’s mission in fostering inclusive, open, and accessible publishing.” – said Dev Roychowdhury, Journal of Psychological Experience.

Following the feedback provided in the consultations and a number of prompts over the months after the original announcement, our Membership Team gathered information necessary to transition 3,194 members into the new fee tier. That’s 14.5% of all Crossref members (please note that in the graph below the number of members in $200 tier is higher due to recent influx of new members who didn’t need to transition, further – “$0” denotes all our sponsored members, who don’t pay membership fees to us, and those included in the GEM program).

Any members out there who think their organisation should be moved to the new lowest membership fee tier and haven’t already informed us – please contact us as soon as possible, before the end of the year, so we can make the change before invoices are raised in January.

We know – from speaking with our community (and thank you SO MUCH, for everyone’s feedback in surveys and discussions!) that this change makes participation in Crossref more accessible to smaller organisations communicating research. This will result in a continued flow of new records and associated metadata into the research nexus, helping us to make it easier to find and assess research, achieve greater transparency in the scientific process, and continue building trust in its outputs.

We’re not done reviewing our fees, and we don’t think the new fee tier addresses all the needs of the growing and evolving scholarly community. We continue working with Sponsors and Ambassadors, and we have upcoming changes to the Global Equitable Membership program to facilitate participation by all types and sizes of organisations sharing research.

Version in Español

Algunas cosas son grandes porque son pequeñas: la nueva tarifa para los miembros de Crossref entra en vigencia

En enero de 2026 entrará en vigencia nuestra nueva tarifa anual. Será de 200 dólares americanos (US$) para las organizaciones miembro que operen con ingresos o gastos editoriales de hasta 1000 US$ al año. Tras anunciar esta decisión de la Junta Directiva, se hizo realidad en julio y, como se puede inferir del último blog de Amanda, este es el primer cambio en las tarifas anuales de membresía en casi 20 años.

Esta nueva tarifa fue resultado de consultas y revisiones de tarifas que hicimos y que hacen parte del programa de financiación para la sostenibilidad a futuro de Crossref y que fue elaborada con la ayuda del comité de membresía y tarifas (compuesto por miembros representantes y aliados de la comunidad). El programa sigue en curso y la nueva tarifa, pensada para hacer más accesible la membresía de Crossref, es uno de los primeros cambios que nos ayudó a definir.

Cuando se envíen las facturas de renovación de membresía en enero de 2026, la nueva tarifa se aplicará a 3.194 de nuestros miembros actuales, quienes notarán que esta será un 27 % más económica que en otros años. Por otro lado, queremos que tengan en cuenta que las encuestas realizadas antes de la introducción de la nueva tarifa demostraron que esta podría ser aplicable a entre el 30 y el 60 % de las organizaciones que anteriormente se encontraban en nuestro nivel de tarifa más bajo (275 US$ para organizaciones con ingresos o gastos de publicación de hasta 1 millón de US$). Ya hemos recibido retroalimentación positiva de miembros que han sido beneficiados con el cambio:

Estamos agradecidos por la nueva tarifa más baja. El costo de Crossref es, sin duda, un gasto significativo para nuestra organización, pero lo aceptamos dada su importancia. Esta nueva estructura de tarifa hará que cubrir el costo sea más fácil.”, dijo Mariana Pérez, de Análisis Filosófico.

La iniciativa de Crossref de reducir las tarifas de membresía es la bienvenida a lograr un verdadero ecosistema de investigación global y conectado. Sin duda, esto va a ayudar en la misión de nuestra revista de fomentar una publicación inclusiva, abierta y accesible.”, dijo Dev Roychowdhury, del Journal of Psychological Experience.

Siguiendo los comentarios proporcionados en las consultas y una serie de indicaciones a lo largo de los meses posteriores al anuncio original, nuestro equipo de membresías recopiló la información necesaria para trasladar a 3.194 miembros al nuevo nivel de tarifas, lo que representa el 14,5 % de todos los miembros de Crossref (el gráfico a continuación muestra que el número de miembros en el nivel de $200 es mayor debido a la reciente afluencia de nuevos miembros que no necesitaron hacer la transición; además, “$0” denota a todos nuestros miembros patrocinados, que no pagan cuotas de membresía, y a aquellos incluidos en el programa Global Equitable Membership (GEM)).

Nota: los miembros que consideren que su organización debería pasar a esta nueva tarifa de cuota de membresía y que aún no nos lo hayan comunicado, por favor, contáctenos antes de que termine el año para que podamos hacer el cambio antes de que se emitan las facturas en enero.

Dicho lo anterior, por medio de las conversaciones que tenemos con nuestra comunidad (y GRACIAS por todos sus comentarios en encuestas y debates), sabemos que este cambio hace que la participación en Crossref sea más accesible para organizaciones pequeñas que comunican investigación. Estamos seguros de que esto promoverá un flujo continuo de nuevos registros y metadatos asociados que sumarán al nexo de la investigación, lo que nos ayudará a facilitar la búsqueda y evaluación de la investigación, lograr una mayor transparencia en el proceso científico y seguir construyendo confianza en sus resultados.

Aún no terminamos de revisar nuestras tarifas y no creemos que este nuevo nivel de tarifas considere todas las necesidades de la comunidad académica, que está en crecimiento y evolución. Seguimos trabajando con nuestros patrocinadores y embajadores y tenemos próximos cambios en el programa GEM para facilitar la participación de organizaciones, de todo tipo y tamaño, que comparten investigación.

Traducido por: Nicolás Mejía Torres

It's Time: Planning for Metadata Schema Deprecation

Patricia Feeney — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It has been 18 (!) years since Crossref last deprecated a metadata schema. In that time, we’ve released numerous schema versions, some major updates, and some interim releases that never saw wide adoption. Now, with 27 different schemas to support, we believe it’s time to streamline and move forward.

Starting next year, we plan to begin the process of deprecating lightly-used schemas, with the understanding that this will be a multi-year effort involving careful planning and plenty of communication.

Which schema will be deprecated?

There are two types of schema used to register content metadata records: a full metadata input schema, which follows the pattern crossrefX.X.X.xsd, and resource schema, which follows the pattern doi_resourcesX.X.X.xsd. The resource schema are used to append metadata, such as references or funding data, to an existing metadata record.

I’ve categorized our schemas by usage levels to help prioritize the deprecation process:

Light usage (planned for initial deprecation):

crossref4.3.1.xsd
crossref4.3.2.xsd
crossref4.8.1.xsd
doi_resources4.3.2.xsd
doi_resources4.3.4.xsd
doi_resources4.3.5.xsd
doi_resources4.4.2.xsd

Moderate usage:

crossref4.3.3.xsd
crossref4.3.4.xsd
crossref4.3.5.xsd

High usage:

crossref4.3.0.xsd
crossref4.3.6.xsd
crossref4.3.7.xsd
crossref4.4.0.xsd
crossref4.4.1.xsd
crossref4.4.2.xsd
doi_resources4.3.0.xsd
doi_resources4.3.6.xsd

We currently support 5 versions of our grants-specific schema and will be working with our funder members to move to new versions of that schema over time - this will follow a different timeline and process as there are fewer schemas to navigate.

If you don’t know which version you’re currently using, now would be a good time to check. Many of our members are still using 4.3.0, the earliest supported version.

Why deprecate now?

Supporting 27 schema is unsustainable: Each schema version we maintain adds complexity to our systems and makes it harder to implement improvements that benefit everyone.
Existing schema need modernization. Some fundamental elements, like names and titles, need to be modeled differently to fully capture variations in language and usage patterns across different cultures and contexts. We also have too many bespoke record types. Consolidating these will create a simpler, more coherent structure. We may retain certain specialized structures for journal articles and books, but overall, simplification will benefit everyone.

Most importantly:

Our current requirements are too minimal. For most record types, we only require a title and publication year. While this low barrier has made registration accessible, it hasn’t served metadata quality well. We know you can do better, and we’d like to ask for more to improve the richness and utility of Crossref metadata.

What happens next?

This won’t be an abrupt change. We would like to deprecate the schema flagged ‘light usage’ by the end of 2026 and will be reaching out to impacted members early next year. For other schema, we’re planning a multi-year effort with clear communication at every stage. We’ll provide ample notice before any schema is deprecated, along with migration guidance and support.

With the exception of recent changes to affiliation metadata, we’ve primarily been building on existing schema structures. This means upgrading should be straightforward for most users. As mentioned, we’ll judiciously making some breaking changes to names, titles, and requirements, and would like to consolidate schema as we move forward.

Our goal is to create a more robust, modern metadata framework that better serves the scholarly community while reducing the maintenance burden that comes with supporting decades of schema versions. Stay tuned for more details on timelines and migration paths. In the meantime, if you’re unsure which schema version you’re using, we encourage you to check your current implementation.

Metadata in editorial workflows

Madhura Amdekar — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Background

Scholarly metadata, deposited by thousands of our members and made openly available can act as “trust signals” for the publications. It provides information that helps others in the community to verify and assess the integrity of the work. Despite having a central responsibility in ensuring the integrity of the work that they publish, editorial teams tend not be fully aware of the value of metadata for integrity of the scholarly record. How can we change that?

Thousands of publishers and institutions from all over the world, big and small, are Crossref members, providing us rich metadata for their publications. During our discussion with the community on this topic, it has surfaced that it is usually the technical or production teams, which interact closely with Crossref, where the appreciation of benefits and value of metadata remain confined.

Although editors may interact with some aspects of metadata when they screen manuscripts that come their way, it is not evident whether they see metadata as useful for signalling trust. In the last couple of years, we have been specifically engaging with editors, meeting them, speaking to them, and writing for them on this topic. As next steps in this effort, we are now keen to engage with the diverse editorial community to understand where metadata fits in their workflows, and to identify opportunities for providing visibility to the importance of rich metadata.

To get a better grasp on this subject, I reached out to Christine Ferguson, to share her rich experience across many editorial roles with me, and to try and paint a better picture of the mutual gaps in understanding when it comes to publication metadata. Here’s what we discovered about the different editorial roles and some ideas for how Crossref might better engage with editors.

We know that

Our members come in all shapes and sizes, and that is also reflected in the diversity of editorial functions that may exist within their organisations. Some of our publishing members have editorial staff whose role is to screen submissions, which includes checking them to make sure that the manuscripts are formatted correctly, and have all the required information e.g. on ethics approvals, or ORCIDs (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) of authors. They then pass these manuscripts on to an external or an academic editor, who is usually a subject matter expert and is responsible for the editorial oversight of the content, to manage the rest of the peer review process, such as assessing the novelty and scope of the work, inviting and securing reviewers, and making a final decision on the manuscript. The academic editors make up a vast majority of the editorial community, variously serving as the editor-in-chief, section editors, and members of the editorial board. They usually volunteer their time as an editor, while having another primary job function.

Other publishers may have in-house editors who are subject matter experts themselves and manage the peer review process. Manuscripts can come to these editors after initial checks have been performed on them or the editors may also perform these checks, following which selected manuscripts undergo the peer review process.

Production editors assume responsibility for the manuscripts that are accepted. Their role is to make the manuscript production and publication ready, often liaising with the authors to finalise the formatting, and finally assigning it to an issue.

Then there are editorial roles that may be a combination of one or more of the above. The size and operational structure of an organisation may determine how editorial and other responsibilities are delegated within the organisation. For some of our medium or smaller members, it may be that the same individual or team is responsible for one or more tasks related to assessing the scientific content of the manuscript, managing the peer review process, as well as being in charge of the post-production workflows such as registering metadata with Crossref.

There are also emerging publishing workflows involving solicited peer-reviews of preprints or other types of works, which sometimes retain a form of editorial oversight.

In summary, editorial roles and responsibilities may vary quite a lot within our member organisations and we have less clarity about editorial roles and responsibilities within member organisations.

All of these different flavors of editors also interact with metadata at various stages in their workflows. For example, the title of the manuscripts, names of authors, whether they have ORCIDs and what is reflected in their ORCID records, and the abstracts may be used to assess the novelty and integrity of the work under consideration. The names of authors, especially if they are not known personally to the editor, can be verified in part by an ORCID check, ensuring the individuals exist, are affiliated to the organisations as claimed, that they have the relevant expertise to write or contribute to the manuscript, and to be able to find what they have written previously on the subject. Making sure that whether all or some of the authors (e.g. the corresponding author) have provided their ORCIDs, or if the link to where the dataset has been deposited in a repository resolves correctly, is usually a part of the pre-screening or post-acceptance checklists. As our recent metadata awardee, ASM has highlighted that having this metadata can be hugely beneficial during the peer-review management process, such as for identifying conflicts of interest, to ensure data policy compliance, and even for carrying out systematic analyses.

We’d like to know more about…

whether all editors interact with metadata in their workflows, and whether they are sufficiently informed about the power of rich metadata. It is evident that there is a lot of diversity in editorial roles and functions. Editors, whether they are mostly concerned with scientific content or with the manuscript peer-review process, are closely connected to the researcher community and the latest research topics and trends. By virtue of this, they are in an excellent position to ascertain the important metadata elements most relevant in their scholarly community. If we have a better understanding of how editors are using metadata in their workflows, we’d be able to identify specific opportunities for engaging with this key community to create greater recognition of the role of metadata in preserving the integrity of the scholarly record.

What we have in mind is to engage systematically with editorial community members and understand from them how, where, and which metadata are they using in their workflows. We’d like to do so by talking to editors who represent different Crossref members, perhaps in small groups, where participants will be able to share which metadata elements they interact with. We’d also like to share with them information about the use of metadata for research integrity. We’d like to understand whether they have been leveraging metadata in this context and the relevance of this information for them. Via this exercise, we hope to pick out some commonalities about the use of metadata in editorial workflows. Ultimately, we’d like to use this information to create resources that can be used for educating editors (and ultimately the researchers who submit their work for publication) about the importance of metadata, especially in signalling trust and preserving the integrity of the scholarly record.

Crossref members over the years: a journey through space and time

Amanda Bartell — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Crossref was created back in 2000 by 12 forward-thinking scholarly publishers from North America and Europe, and by 2002, these members had registered 4 million DOI records. At the time of writing, we have over 23,600 members in 164 different countries. Half of our members are based in Asia, and 35% are universities or scholar-led. These members have registered over 176 million open metadata records with DOIs (as of today). What a difference 25 years makes!

In our 25th anniversary year, I thought it would be time to take a look at how we got here. And so—hold tight—we’re going to go on an adventure through space and time¹, stopping every 5 years through Crossref history to check in on our members. And we’re going to see some really interesting changes over the years.

2005

Let’s go back twenty years to 2005. Crossref has been running for five years, and at this point, we have just 318 members from 31 countries, with 18 million DOI records already registered. These members and the Crossref infrastructure are supported by five Crossref employees based in just two countries—the US and the UK.

In 2005, the majority of our members are based in North America, Northern Europe and Western Europe, and they are mostly publishers or societies. Our sponsor program doesn’t yet exist, so all members pay a membership fee directly to Crossref. Our membership fee structure is the same as it is today—we have tiered membership fees so our members can contribute to our infrastructure based on their capacity to pay. At this point, half of our members are eligible for our lowest fee tier.

2005 at a glance

318 members from 31 countries.
18 million DOI records registered.
Supported by five Crossref employees based in two countries - the US and the UK.
The majority (89%) are based in North America or Northern & Western Europe.
Half are eligible for our lowest fee tier.
Mostly societies (40%) and publishers (33%).

2010

Let’s move on by five years to 2010. By this stage, Crossref membership had grown to 1101 members from 69 countries, and these members have now registered 44 million DOI records. They are now supported by 14 Crossref employees, still all located in either the US or the UK.

We’re starting to see some changes in where our members are based. You’ll remember that back in 2005, 89% of Crossref members were based in North America, Northern Europe or Western Europe. By 2010, that percentage has dropped to 63%, and we’re seeing the number of members based in Asia starting to grow. In 2005, only 4% of our members were based in Asia, but by 2010, 18% of our members are based there, with 93 members in the Republic of Korea alone.

By 2010, the percentage of members who are eligible for our lowest fee tier has grown to 78%, so we are seeing smaller and less well-funded organisations starting to join. The types of organisations joining hasn’t changed significantly—members are still mostly societies and publishers. However, we are starting to see universities and scholar-led organisations beginning to join.

2010 at a glance

1,101 members from 69 countries.
44 million DOI records registered.
Supported by 14 Crossref employees based in two countries - the US and the UK.
Growth of members based in Asia (18%).
Smaller, less well-funded organisations starting to join - 78% eligible for our lowest fee tier.
Still mostly societies (37%) and publishers (28%), but universities and scholar-led members starting to emerge (23%).

2015

Jumping ahead another five years to 2015, we see Crossref membership has grown to over 3,000 members from 93 countries, with registered DOI records exceeding 77 million. These members and the Crossref infrastructure are supported by 28 employees, still all based in the US and UK.

Membership in Asia has now really taken off, and Asian organisations now account for 38% of all Crossref members. We also see membership in Latin America emerging, representing 12% of our membership. We have members from 12 different countries in Latin America in 2015, but the most significant number are from Brazil, with 274 members.

Our formal Sponsor program started to emerge from 2012 onwards. Our Sponsor program supports members who are otherwise eligible for our lowest fee tier and provides financial, technical and language support to organisations that would otherwise face barriers to membership. By 2015, we have 26 sponsors in 14 countries, and 20% of all members are working with us through a Sponsor. This is one of the drivers behind smaller, less well-funded members joining Crossref. We really see a leap here in 2015 with over 90% of members now eligible for our lowest fee tier.

Around 2015, we also begin to see an interesting shift in the types of organisations that are becoming members. Increasingly, our new members are university-based, and that type of member organisation has overtaken the publisher group in number for the first time. However, societies still make up the largest number of members.

2015 at a glance

3,134 members from 93 countries.
77 million DOI records.
Supported by 28 Crossref employees based in two countries - US and UK.
Growth in Asia (38%) and members in Latin America (12%) starting to emerge.
Leap in smaller, less well-funded members - 92% eligible for the lowest fee tier.
Sponsor program emerges - 26 sponsors in 14 countries.
Rise of university and scholar-led members (29%) - overtaking publishers (21%). Societies (31%) are still the largest group.

2020

Can you believe we’re already in 2020? Crossref now has almost 12,000 members in 133 countries, with registered DOI records totalling over 120 million! These members and the Crossref infrastructure are now supported by 43 employees across five countries, with Ireland, Germany, and France added to our staff locations.

Almost half of our members are based in Asia at this time, driven by growth from Indonesia, where we have 1681 members in 2020. Our sponsor program now contains 77 sponsors across 32 countries, including our first sponsor in North Africa.

We can now really see how membership is weighted towards smaller, less well-funded organisations: 97% of members are eligible for the lowest fee tier, and 57% choose to work with a sponsor.

By 2020, we also see a fundamental change in the types of organisations that are Crossref members. Societies no longer account for the largest share of our members, with both universities and publishers overtaking them. In 2016, we updated our schema to enable members to register records for preprints (and connect them to an article where relevant). By 2020, 65 members are registering preprints, and many preprint repositories have already become members.

2020 at a glance

11,976 members from 133 countries.
120 million DOI records.
Supported by 43 Crossref employees in five countries - France, Germany, Ireland, the UK, and the US.
46% of members based in Asia.
77 sponsors in 32 countries, first sponsor in N Africa.
Membership heavily weighted to smaller, less well-funded organisations - 97% eligible for the lowest fee tier and 57% working through a sponsor.
Universities and scholar-led are now the largest group (37%), followed by publishers (29%) and societies (24%).

2025

And so we find ourselves back in the present day.

With such steady growth, it’s pretty easy to predict almost exactly how many members we will have by 31st December 2025. By year-end, we would expect to have 23,800 members in 164 countries, with registered DOI records totalling around 177 million. With recent hiring, these members and our infrastructure will be supported by 52 Crossref employees in 14 different countries.

Member organisations are now a real mix, with museums, hospitals, botanic gardens, banks, and many more joining. The largest proportion remains those at a university or scholar-led (35%), but interestingly, we see the percentage who consider themselves to be societies starting to fall (19%) and publishers starting to grow again (29%).

And we see the arrival of a new type of member - since the launch of the Grant Linking System in 2019, we now see Research Funders joining Crossref in order to register identifiers for individual grants. These grant identifiers can then be included in the metadata for published content to uniquely identify the funding source, providing context and trust signals for the content, and fleshing out the Research Nexus. We currently have 45 funders who have registered over 175,000 grant records.

By 2025 we have 129 sponsors in 51 countries - including our first sponsors in East and West Africa who joined in 2024 and 2025 respectively. Half of all members are now based in Asia. 98% of members are now eligible for our lowest fee tier and 57% are working with us through a sponsor.

In 2023, we launched our Global Equitable Membership (GEM) program, which offers relief from any membership and content registration fees for organisations in the least economically advantaged countries in the world. We use the World Bank’s International Development Association (IDA) list as our data source for countries to include in the program. When we launched the program, 187 existing members moved under the program. Since the program’s focus is to enable participation for those who would otherwise find Crossref unaffordable, we are happy that we now have 583 organisational members in the GEM Program, showing the growth in participation from lower-income nations. Most members in the GEM Program are based in Southern Asia (48%) and Sub-Saharan Africa (33%).

November 2025 at a glance

23,622 members in 164 countries.
175 million DOI records.
Supported by 52 Crossref employees from 14 countries - Armenia, Austria, Canada, Ecuador, Germany, Ghana, Hong Kong, Ireland, Kenya, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Spain, the UK, and the US.
51% of members are based in Asia.
129 sponsors in 51 countries - first sponsors in East and West Africa.
98% of members are eligible for the lowest fee tier, and 57% working through a sponsor.
Real mix of organisation types - universities and scholar-led (35%), publishers (29%), societies (19%), but also research funders, museums, pharmaceutical companies, news agencies, and more!

Changes over the years

Here are some of that data over time, depicted in charts.

2026 and beyond

As you can see from our adventure through space and time, the types of organisations that work with Crossref have changed significantly over the years as the scholarly communications world has evolved. Our members now tend to be university-based research-performing organisations or scholar-led journals, based in Asia, and with low or zero publishing revenues (and volumes).

To meet our mission of a truly global and connected research ecosystem, it is essential to ensure that participation in Crossref and all our services and metadata is accessible to everyone involved in documenting scholarly progress.

We want to ensure that access to the Crossref infrastructure is equitable, so we are making two key changes in 2026: we’re extending eligibility for the GEM Program (more to follow), and we are introducing a new, lower-fee tier as an outcome of the RCFS projects more here.

We’re excited to see how our members will change as we head into our next 25 years—we hope you’ll continue with us on our journey and welcome all kinds of new members to the expansive and vibrant Crossref community.

Technically, this is only an adventure through time. At the time of writing, we have no members based in space. Unless you count the European Space Agency, NASA, et al. ↩︎

Crossref at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2025

Helena Cousijn — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Frankfurt Book Fair is the largest book fair in the world, and therefore a key event on our calendar. Held annually in Frankfurt, Germany, the 77th Frankfurt Book Fair (October 15–19, 2025) saw 118,000 trade visitors and 120,000 private visitors from 131 countries. The Crossref booth was located, as usual, in Hall 4.0 where all the stands with information about academic publishing can be found. Four Crossref colleagues attended the Book Fair this year, and in this blog post, you can read more about their meetings, experiences, and plans.

First timer fun at the Frankfurt Fair - Helena

Even though I’ve been working in scholarly comms for over 10 years, I’d never had a chance to visit the Frankfurt Book Fair. I was therefore really excited to have an opportunity to attend this year, and it didn’t disappoint! I arrived on Monday, October 13, in time for the STM dinner, which proved a great opportunity to meet with Crossref members and collaborators. On Tuesday, I attended the STM conference with the exciting theme of ‘The role of publishers in science diplomacy’. I think my favorite part of the day was the last panel, where the panelists realised that even though they represent different groups, in the end, they all have the same goals and are all working towards better science and dissemination.

On Wednesday, it was time to head over to our booth, where we prepared for the interesting conversations ahead. My meetings were mainly focused on collaborations in the area of research integrity, as Crossref plans to run pilots with potential partners next year. In-person meetings at the fair were a good opportunity to discuss in more detail which kinds of integrity checks could be useful to our members. I also had several meetings with organizations functioning as Service Providers –– depositing content on behalf of members –– who are eagerly awaiting the launch of our renewed Service Providers program next year. In these conversations, we shared our thinking about requirements for Crossref Service Providers and got input from organizations with experience serving our member community. Overall, it was a great opportunity to see members and collaborators in person, and I’ve already put the 2026 Frankfurt Book Fair in my calendar!

An exciting comeback - Maryna

If last year, I was a debutante at the Frankfurt Book Fair, 2025 marked an exciting comeback. It’s always a pleasure to spend time chatting with people you usually only meet through email or Zoom. Working remotely as part of a global team is something I truly value about Crossref, but it also makes those in-person moments even more special. You get to solve issues that have been sitting on your to-do list over lunch, brainstorm ideas while walking to the venue, get immediate advice in a meeting—and, of course, talk about dogs over dinner.

Frankfurt was busy but well organised. Our booth was lively with a mix of planned and spontaneous meetings. It was nice to reconnect with members and sponsors I’ve worked with over the years. We even gave an early look at the new Participation Reports before the official release (what a thrill!). There were good conversations about deprecating co-access, the importance of title transfers, and how we can keep improving the member experience. One highlight: I spoke with a prospective member about our membership model and fee structure, and they joined the following week! Their account is already active, with a prefix assigned, which was great to see.

Another key topic was the importance of ROR IDs. I talked with several publishers about how they could be implemented across other systems. At one point, I spotted an issue with unregistered DOIs and was able to fix it on the spot by finalising a title transfer—we’d had permission but never received the formal request—so it was satisfying to close that loop in real time.

Being a relatively small team serving a global membership of more than 23,000 and growing, it’s not possible to meet with every member face-to-face to respond to every question. Our team works hard to respond to all queries by email, but it’s undeniably faster and more productive in person. That’s why we keep returning to the Frankfurt Book Fair year after year—you can definitely count on seeing us again next year!

Third time at bat - Luis

The Frankfurt Book Fair is always an incredible opportunity to connect with our community. We come prepared with highlights of the year, plans for developments and upcoming releases, and remind the members we meet to participate and vote in the annual elections. But most of what we learn happens during the informal moments––meetings, drop-ins, and chats over coffee and tea––where people discuss what they’re working on, trends, and interests of the scholarly and publishing community.

This year, some of those conversations included meeting someone working with groups from Egypt and the UAE who are developing tools around our metadata. They wanted to talk through REST API use, recent Crossref updates, and how retraction metadata could fit into their systems. Another person opened their participation report with us and were surprised to see their metadata showing 0% despite the team believing they were sending complete metadata, which led to a discussion about getting their internal workflows running again.

Booth days always fly by, but they’re deeply informative and insightful for teams that participate in person, as we can “cross-check” (pun intended) how our different support mechanisms help the community and how well we’re delivering our communications. There is a good mix of problem-solving and catching-up; often, we see members who prepare a list of questions because they find it easier to sit and navigate through them with our support or membership colleagues. Sometimes it’s about refreshing their understanding of what Crossref is and what we do, especially during team changes. We also spoke with a publisher preparing to adopt Crossmark. They wanted to check they were handling updates and relationships correctly, and mentioned that increasing transparency is becoming a priority for them. Someone else, working closely with a repository, asked about using the REST API or Metadata Plus to enrich their records.

A few visitors simply needed clarity––one was pleased to learn they could register reports and datasets after being told otherwise. Another visitor who registers a small number of book DOIs each year asked whether the Web Deposit Form was still the best fit. We walked through the Record Registration Form together, and its new editing features helped them plan for upcoming changes.

Personally, I enjoy seeing the cultural and organisational diversity of existing and potential Crossref members, ambassadors, sponsors, allies and colleagues from all over the world at our booth. If you have the opportunity to attend the Book Fair next year, please visit our booth and say hello!

This year’s Frankfurt Veteran - Paul

I think this is my 5th (?) Frankfurt book fair, and each year I come away thinking how much I appreciate the opportunity to speak with our members face to face, and I get to see and hear the impact that Crossref has, which is always such a pleasure.

This year, there were only four of us in attendance, and it felt busier than ever. We had a lot of pre-booked meetings at our wonderfully designed booth again (thanks to the amazing work of our colleague Rosa) but we also had lots of ad-hoc meetings, where members came up to say “hello”, “thank you” or ask about that really knotty, niche problem that they have, which they are not sure how to explain over email. From a technical support perspective, this is great, as we can go through these issues and get a resolution––or a solid background––without the delay and confusion of long email threads. I also worked with a member who got their IT department to send over a file there and then for us to work through and try to navigate a difficult question regarding reference matching and whether the simple text query form worked using an API, which others could use. These were just two examples of many in which it was much easier to sit down and work through issues directly at the fair.

So I would always say that if you are at the Frankfurt book fair, and you have one of these issues then it is a great opportunity to come by, say hello and work through it with us. We will send out a reminder before the fair in 2026 to get any meetings booked, or just come find us at the fair.

A highlight for me this year was also showing some of our members our new Participation Report. It’s had a visual update as well as some new functionality: you can download a gap report that lists DOI numbers of records that are missing the metadata element you choose, making it easier to identify and update missing metadata. I always like attending the Frankfurt Book Fair and so might be there next year. It’s an important opportunity for all Crossref colleagues to engage and meet our members––many for the first time.

Next year

Feeling inspired after all the great meetings and conversations we had this year, we immediately started planning for next year! We’ll definitely be in Frankfurt in 2026, where you can find our team at the Crossref booth. We’re also planning to organize another roundtable on the Monday before the fair, so put October 5-9, 2026, in your calendars and stay tuned for more details.

The sunset is on the horizon for Metadata Manager. What's next?

Lena Stoll — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR. Metadata Manager will be retired at the end of 2025. Over the past four years, we have been developing a new helper tool to replace it, and that tool has now reached a stage of maturity that means we will be able to switch off Metadata Manager by the end of the year.

How did we get here?

In 2021, we said that we would be retiring the deprecated Metadata Manager as soon as we can offer members a suitable replacement for registering their journal content. So this news has been a long time coming - Metadata Manager has been very challenging for us to support, and we have found it impossible to develop additional features. However, we did not want to take the final step of switching off the interface until we were able to offer a suitable replacement for members who rely on manual helper tools to register their journal content.

That replacement, our new record registration form, has now been used by many members for over a year to register their journal content. The feedback so far has been positive, and we have been able to add functionality to the tool at a pace that we are happy with.

In July 2025, we contacted those members who are still using Metadata Manager to let them know that the tool will no longer be available after December 2025. So if you are affected by this news, you were probably already aware of it. But we wanted to go into a little more detail on the sunsetting of Metadata Manager, why we are doing it, and what’s next for Crossref’s content registration helper tools.

What has happened since 2021?

We have been developing the record registration form ever since that announcement in 2021. It began its life as a helper tool for registering grant records, but we knew we wanted to expand it to cover journal articles and other record types as soon as we could.

To see whether the concept behind the grants form could be applied to journal content, we first built an initial prototype and tested it with a number of Crossref ambassadors and volunteers. We wanted to ensure that the tool was intuitive to use, and to understand what functionality it would need to support for it to be truly useful to our members. Following some iteration on the invaluable feedback we received from our testers, we finally released the tool to production in September 2024 and began encouraging members to use it for their real-life article deposits.

We have been continuously adding new functionality since then, from additional fields for registering richer metadata to a feature that allows members to edit their articles’ metadata without having to re-enter everything into the form.

Now, about two months from the target date for retiring Metadata Manager, the record registration form is used by members to register about 200 articles per day, while Metadata Manager still sees about double that volume of submissions. So we have some way left to go.

Why is now the right time to retire Metadata Manager?

2025 has been a year of addressing technical debt for Crossref. My colleague Sara wrote about this co-ordinated push towards modernising our system in her post about our cloud migration in the summer.

Having the long-awaited replacement for Metadata Manager in place will allow us to free up the resources that have been tied up for years by troubleshooting Metadata Manager, in terms of both technology and user support, so that we can focus on projects and initiatives that align with our longer-term strategy.

How will we avoid the new tool developing the same problems as Metadata Manager?

As stated above, Metadata Manager has caused us many issues and headaches in different ways - but we have also learned a lot from dealing with these problems. As Bryan Vickery wrote in 2020, Metadata Manager is “not flexible enough to easily add other record types, like books/book chapters, or to include any changes we may make to our input schema.” To address this, we built the record registration form in a schema-driven way, which makes it adaptable to any future schema changes. It also means that we can spin up prototypes of new forms for additional record types quite quickly.

So while Metadata Manager was custom-built in a way that could only ever work for journal content, the record registration form already supports two record types and will support more in future. This is key for our goal of building a complete research nexus, which extends far beyond journal content, and even beyond “content” as such (did someone say grants?).

What happens next?

Metadata Manager will no longer be available from January 2026.
Starting next year, if you attempt to access Metadata Manager at https://www-crossref-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/metadatamanager/, you will be redirected to a deprecation note on https://www-crossref-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/deprecated/ which will link out to the new tool.

What options do I have for registering my journal content going forward?

If your organisation still uses Metadata Manager to register metadata for your journal articles, now is a good time to begin familiarising yourself with the alternatives available to you from 2026 forward - these include, but are not limited to, the new record registration form.

If your journal has an ISSN

We recommend you begin using the record registration form as soon as possible. Simply go to https://manage-crossref-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/records and sign in with your Crossref account credentials to register a journal article. You can also see a list of all the journal article records you have previously registered using our manual helper tools at https://manage-crossref-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/records/edit and edit their metadata using the form.

To help you make the switch from Metadata Manager, we will be hosting an interactive webinar on 13 November about how to transition to the new tool. Register here or look out for the recording, which will be shared in our events archive.

If your journal does not have an ISSN

The record registration form currently only supports ISSNs as journal identifiers. Title-level and volume/issue-level DOIs, which are at the core of how Metadata Manager handles journal metadata, have been the cause for some of the problems we have had over the years with that particular tool. Also, Crossref DOIs have always been intended primarily as citation identifiers, and entire journals/volumes/issues are very rarely cited. For that reason, we built the Record Registration Form such that it doesn’t support registering or using journal-level DOIs.

With that being said, if you do not (yet) have an ISSN for your journal for whatever reason, you can use our web deposit form to register your articles with journal DOI. If you do obtain an ISSN for your title later on, you can then simply begin using the record registration form from that point onward.

How will the new tool continue to be developed?

We will continue to work with our members and community to develop additional functionalities for the journal article form. Currently we are working on allowing relationships metadata to be registered using the form.

Ultimately, the goal is for the record registration form to become the one-stop shop for members who manually register and update their metadata. To this end, we are working on expanding the tool to cover additional record types - we have recently developed a prototype for registering books and chapters, and we will be looking to test this in the coming months with volunteers who are currently registering their book metadata via other avenues such as the web deposit form.

If you would like to support these efforts, or you have begun using the new tool and would like to share your feedback, come join the discussion in our community forum.

References

Bowman, S. (2021). Next steps for Content Registration. Crossref. https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.64000/30vzx-r5x16
Bowman, S. (2025). We’ve migrated to the cloud; we hope you didn’t notice (but maybe you did). Crossref. https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.64000/wd6rx-vpq73
Vale, P. (2022). Forming new relationships: Contributing to Open source. Crossref. https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.64000/cvq2e-q8t24

Announcing changes to REST API rate limits

Martyn Rittman — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Our REST API makes all of the metadata we hold publicly available. It receives the majority of our API traffic, with around 1 billion hits per month. It’s one of the key ways that we fulfil our mission to make research objects easy to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse. From 1 December 2025, we will be revising the rate limits for the public and polite pools of the REST API to ensure that we can maintain a stable and reliable system, and that metadata is freely available to everyone.

We haven’t changed the rate limits since the REST API was launched in 2013. In the past five years, the number of requests to the REST API has tripled and the number of metadata records has increased by a third, from 120 million to around 180 million. This means an increase in the resources needed to run it, and we’ve seen periods of instability where we haven’t been able to keep the API available for all users. We have decided that it is the right time to revisit rate limits to check that they’re in line with what our technology can provide and what our community needs. As a result, we will apply the following for the public and polite pools:

Public pool:

Request type	Rate limit	Concurrency limit
Single record	5	1
List of records (queries, filters, etc.)	1	1

Polite pool:

Request type	Rate limit	Concurrency limit
Single DOI record	10	3
List of records (queries, filters, etc.)	3	3

The rate limit is the number of total requests that can be made per second. The concurrency limit is how many requests can be running at the same time. This means that for longer-running requests you may need to wait for previous requests to finish before you can make a new one.

Here are some examples of single records requests:

The second case here will be directed to the polite pool because an email is included using the ‘mailto’ parameter. And here are examples of requests that return lists of records:

The second and third examples here will use the polite pool.

Our guiding principle in making these changes is to keep all of the metadata available to everyone, all of the time. These changes to rate limits won’t restrict current users from accessing the metadata they want to retrieve, but it will make it easier for us to maintain the system now and in the future.

Which use cases do we support?

Our metadata has a broad range of applications. If you’re someone who uses the REST API, we’re glad that you are part of our community! Our mission includes making it easier to find, reuse, and assess scholarly research outputs. By using metadata, you’re helping us to fulfil that goal.

The main uses of the REST API fit into several categories. The new rate limits will continue to support these, among many others:

I have some metadata, what is the DOI?
I have a DOI, what is its metadata?
I want all of the metadata, just give me everything.
Research on a specific topic or subset of metadata, often refreshing the results every few weeks or months.

Rate limits can encourage responsible usage. The majority of API users make requests at a low rate and will not need to make any changes, however a few send spikes of large numbers of requests in a short space of time, sometimes making it difficult for others to access the service. These can be smoothed out by lower rate limits. Complex requests that search across large numbers of items put more pressure on our systems than requests for a single content item, so we have decided to set different rate limits for different types of request.

Who will be affected?

We estimate that the changes might affect around 40 users per week across the public and polite pools, and this is only for some of their requests. In all of the cases we’ve seen, the rate of requests could be slowed down and users would still be able to get the same results. In other words, the aim of these changes is to make the load on the API more predictable, not to reduce the total number of requests or amount of metadata transferred. No changes are being made to the Metadata Plus service or other APIs, such as the XML API and OAI-PMH endpoint.

Do I need to change how I use the API?

If you’re reading this, thank you! It’s clear that you want to be a considerate user of our services. Almost all users can continue to use the REST API in exactly the same way, you won’t need to change anything. Here is some general advice that will help you make the most of the service and ensure that you won’t encounter issues.

Use a mailto parameter. This gives you access to the polite pool meaning higher rate limits and meaning we can get in touch with you if needed. We’ll only use your address to contact you about your API requests.
Check the HTTP response status for your requests. This is always good practice and can help you identify malformed requests and where you reach rate limits.
Cache results to avoid repeatedly making the same requests. Most records don’t change on a regular basis. How often you update the cache will depend on what you are interested in, but most metadata fields rarely change.
If you are making a very high volume of requests or have very complex analysis to carry out, consider downloading the public data file which is made available once a year and contains all of our metadata. You can update it with recent additions using the REST API.
If you are relying on our metadata in a production service, Metadata Plus can provide more stability, support, and access to monthly snapshots of our entire database.

We have more tips and tricks for the REST API in our documentation. If you have questions, please join the conversation on our Community Forum.

Celebrating Noyam Journals’ Metadata Award

Johanssen Obanda — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Noyam Journals, based in Accra, Ghana, was recently recognised for the completeness of its metadata through the Crossref Metadata Award, part of our 25th anniversary celebrations. Noyam was one of six publishers worldwide to receive the award and stood out as a leader among members of our Global Equitable Membership (GEM) Program.

The GEM Program supports publishers and organisations in low- and middle-income countries to participate in the global scholarly community by reducing barriers to membership and services.

Earlier this year, at our Crossref Accra event, representatives from Noyam spoke about how registering metadata with Crossref has expanded their readership worldwide. They also encouraged other publishers and institutions in Africa to utilise Crossref’s infrastructure to enhance the visibility and impact of their work.

Following their award, we spoke with Naa Kai Amanor-Mfoafo from Noyam Journals about their approach to metadata quality. She shares her reflections in the Q&A below.

What motivates your team to work towards high-quality metadata?

Our commitment towards high-quality metadata stems from our organisational goal to promote the dissemination of usable knowledge by publishing innovative and high-quality research content. Over the last five years, registering our metadata with Crossref has strengtheed authors’ trust as their institutions can verify quality through tools like Crossmark. For instance, many institutions use the Crossmark feature on our published articles to access the latest information about a scholarly article, including updates, corrections, or retractions.

Do you have a strategy for complete metadata?

We prioritise inclusion of ORCID IDs, Abstracts, and References as these increase visibility of our articles. We also include Affiliations, Licenses, and Crossmark, and we use Similarity Check to help ensure research integrity.

As part of our team structure, we have a dedicated staff member responsible for ensuring that every article is assigned a Crossref DOI on the same day it is published online. Our in-house system supports this process, allowing us to capture and register all the key metadata efficiently.

What impact of good metadata can you see on your organisation?

Good metadata has made a real difference for our organisation. It has helped increase the visibility and discoverability of our journal articles, making it easier for researchers and readers around the world to find and cite our work. We’ve noticed more engagement with our publications since improving our metadata, which encourages us to keep strengthening the quality of the information we register.

Have you encountered any challenges in curating or improving your metadata, and how did you address those?

One major challenge we’ve faced is discovering errors in previously uploaded metadata, and we haven’t yet established a systematic process for correcting them. We’re currently working to improve our workflow to help ensure the correctness of our metadata to follow Crossref’s recommended best practices.

Have your efforts around metadata led to real benefits for your community?

Our authors appreciate the fact that their ORCID profiles are automatically updated with their published articles once they are assigned DOIs from Crossref. They are, of course, also enjoying increased visibility of our published articles globally.

Looking ahead, how are you planning to build on your metadata quality?

We need to stay informed about developments at Crossref. Once in a while, we visit the Crossref website or participate in a webinar to stay informed. For example, a few months ago, we got to know that a new record registration form had been initiated for metadata uploads through the documentation section on the Crossref website.

We advise others who are new to Crossref to focus on consistency. Ensure your organisational system includes staff dedicated to keeping your metadata up to date. Secondly, feel free to seek technical support from the Crossref team when the need arises.

New tool to report on completeness of open research information globally

Kornelia Korzec — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Wednesday 22nd October 2025—Crossref, the open scholarly infrastructure nonprofit, today releases an enhanced dashboard showing metadata coverage and individual organisations’ contributions to documenting the process and outputs of scientific research in the open. The tool helps research-performing, funding, and publishing organisations identify gaps in open research information, and provides supporting evidence for movements like the Barcelona Declaration for Open Research Information, which encourages more substantial commitment to stewarding and enriching the scholarly record through open metadata.

Crossref’s Participation Reports now offer expanded features and provide full coverage of all members and all resource types registered with Crossref DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers)—over 175 million records representing a significant share of global research production from organisations in 164 countries. Each of Crossref’s 23,000 members has a dashboard to visualise their metadata contributions, display coverage of key information for scholarly works, and get actionable feedback via a gap report that specifies records that need enrichment, all helping to make more transparent the work that goes into creating and curating the scholarly record.

For any Crossref member—whether journal publisher, research funder, university, or museum—coverage of up to 11 key elements is public and visible to everyone, including: references, abstracts, ORCID iDs, affiliation strings, ROR IDs, Open Funder Registry IDs, funding award numbers, text-mining URLs, licence URLs, Similarity Check URLs (for text-based plagiarism checking) and the presence of a Crossmark policy, indicating the organisation’s commitment to declare corrections and retractions. These metadata elements provide greater context and visibility for research objects such as journal articles and preprints, grants and awards, books and book chapters, standards, datasets, conference papers and various ‘other’ content such as scholarly blogs, images, and even physical museum artefacts.

Mochammad Tanzil Multazam, Library Director of Universitas Muhammadiyah Sidoarjo, and Secretary of the Supervisory Board of Relawan Jurnals, says, “As a sponsoring organisation for several thousand small publishers across Indonesia, we support Crossref members to register complete metadata for their works. Despite time and resource constraints, this new actionable open report on key metadata elements will help drive improvements in the information they share for their publications. This has wide-reaching implications for the visibility of that research and trust among the community, and therefore has the potential to support Indonesian scholarship in the global context.”

Lena Stoll, Program Lead at Crossref, explains, “We are happy to have extended participation reports to cover more diverse record types, including grants, datasets, dissertations, and more, and to make it easier for our members to act on their ongoing improvements to enrich their records and build towards the vision of an open and more complete Research Nexus.”

Ludo Waltman, Scientific Director and Professor of Quantitative Science Studies at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University, comments, “As a representative of the researcher and metascience communities, this data is of great importance for us to analyse the trends and effects of global research activity. Crossref is one of the main driving forces in open infrastructure, and its commitment to supporting metadata completeness through this open reporting dashboard is a significant step for the open research information movement.”

Access Crossref Participation Reports and search for any Crossref member organisation.

Participation report for a typical Crossref member, Universidad La Salle Arequipa in Peru

About Crossref

Crossref runs an open infrastructure to link research objects, entities, and actions, creating a lasting and reusable scholarly record that underpins open science. Together with their 23,000 members in 164 countries, Crossref drives metadata exchange and supports nearly 2 billion monthly API queries, facilitating global research communication, for the benefit of society.

Integrating grant metadata for seamless research interconnectivity at FCCN|FCT

Rocío Gaudioso Pedraza — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Click here for the version in Portuguese

Welcome back to our series of case studies of research funders using the Grant Linking System. In this interview, I talk with Cátia Laranjeira, PTCRIS Program Manager at FCCN|FCT, Portugal’s main public funding agency, about the agency’s approach to metadata, persistent identifiers, Open Science and Open Infrastructure. With a holistic approach to the management, production and access to information on science, FCCN|FCT’s decision to implement the Grant Linking System within their processes was not simply a technical upgrade, but a coordinated effort to continue building a strong culture of openness. With the mantra “register once, reuse always”, FCCN|FCT efforts to embrace open funding metadata was only logical.

Could you introduce your organisation?

We are FCCN, the digital services of the FCT, the Foundation for Science and Technology, which is the main public funding agency in Portugal. FCT supports research and innovation in Portugal through multiple funding instruments targeting researchers, projects, institutions and international partnerships. FCCN is focused on providing digital services to the scientific and academic community in Portugal.

I am the manager of a program called PTCRIS, part of the FCCN, within the ‘Scientific Knowledge’ pillar of the unit. PTCRIS is a broad program, whose main goal is to fulfill the mantra ‘register once, reuse always’. We aim to develop an integrated ecosystem of scientific information, so all the projects we run have this main goal and that’s what we work towards. We develop infrastructure and added-value services, such as the scientific curriculum vitae management platform and an indicator system that exposes information of all the funding that supports research and innovation in Portugal.

What motivated you to join Crossref?

We had already adopted ORCID and we also developed a national PID, connected to the citizen card additional to ORCIDs. In 2015 we adopted the ISNI and we also had DOIs for research outputs. So we were clearly missing one piece, which was metadata for funding. At the same time we started developing a national infrastructure on science and technology funding, to have an aggregated and holistic view of the funding that is distributed in Portugal.

Before that the information was scattered across different databases and websites from many different funders, so we organised and aggregated this information into a platform called SciPROJ, which brings together all the information on scientific funding in one place, with quick and flexible access. But we didn’t have persistent identifiers for grants, and this was at the same time that Crossref started to build the Grant Linking System, so we were actually one of the first organisations to join, and in 2023 we had a pilot, where we registered 6000 grants, and we have been registering funding metadata ever since.

Can you tell us about your experience using the Grant Linking System?

The beginning of the pilot was the most critical stage of the process; some effort was needed to map our data models to the Crossref grant metadata schema. FCCN wasn’t in a bad position to do this since we already had all that information in a registry and it was well organised, we just had to map them to make sure that the information we had could be shared following the Crossref metadata schema and best practices. It has been two years since the pilot, which puts us in phase 2 of the implementation of the system. During the pilot we concentrated on registering both historical and current grants’ metadata, in the current phase, we are focusing on current grants’ metadata.

What do you find useful about registering grant metadata with Crossref?

Although this is the very beginning of this journey, we envision a world where we have the ability to link grants to any other object and entity that comprises the ecosystem: people that execute that funding, projects, institutions, outputs. Outputs are something particularly important to us, like for many other funders, because we want to be able to monitor the impact of our funding and that is something that is always at the back of our mind.

We are actually developing more and more services that aim to show how these links can be very useful to retrieve information from the system. For example, we are developing an indicator system that is focusing on the funding but also on the outputs and the links between the two. We are also monitoring OA trends, to see how FCT funding is contributing to Open Science initiatives.

Additionally, our OA policy was recently launched but we currently don’t have any system that allows us to track policy compliance. We are working towards that, but to achieve this it is absolutely fundamental that grants are linked to the outputs through metadata.

What are your hopes for the GLS and greater transparency in funding metadata in general?

The interconnectivity and interoperability of entities and objects, which is something that the field of scientific information management has always wanted to do, but that it’s very difficult to do. There have been attempts in the past to achieve this using information from the acknowledgement sections of publications, but this is fairly inefficient and there needs to be more structure to it. A critical piece of this puzzle would be to influence publishers, manuscript submission platforms to facilitate the systematic sharing of grant IDs and grant metadata by design. I think this is something that is still missing and that I would like to see happening soon.

Has anything surprised you while implementing the Grant Linking System?

Something that we have seen that was surprising was that researchers, who in general are not that concerned about PIDs, when it came to grant IDs, they would ask us proactively what the Crossref grant ID for their award was! It was very refreshing to see that we didn’t need to do any advertising to socialize Crossref grant IDs among our grant holders. I think that tells you about the high level of awareness there is within our community of the importance of the Crossref grant ID, using it and putting it in the acknowledgment section of their publications.

Based on your experience, what would be your advice for colleagues from other research funders?

I would say go for it! The more the merrier! This is like any other similar information system – it only works if there are enough people using it, registering grants metadata that facilitate the links between objects.

It is a very easy process to get into. Once you map the metadata schema to your own data it’s not a technically difficult thing to do. For us it’s an automated process that runs very smoothly, from grant registration to communicating this information to grant holders. We can see this in action in this example: the grantee published an article that acknowledges their funding through Crossref’s grants IDs or funding received being acknowledged in the website of a Research Center.

If you could change something about the GLS or how the grant metadata you register is used, what would it be?

I would love to have access to a visualization of grants’ metadata, how many outputs are linked to, and how they relate to other objects and entities. That would really give us a clearer understanding of the impact that our funding is having. We’d also love to see better integration between Crossref and ORCID for grants—just like it works for publications. Ideally, when a grant is registered and linked to a researcher, they’d be notified and could easily add it to their ORCID record. This would allow the information to flow seamlessly into their national CV via PTCRISsync, ensuring consistency and reducing manual work.

We are grateful to Cátia Laranjeira and FCT|FCCN for sharing their perspective and long-standing experience in this space. Their experience highlights the role that funding metadata plays in an interconnected and complete research and funding ecosystem.

Version in Portuguese

Translation by Edilson Damasio

Integração de metadados de financiamento pela FCCN|FCT para reforçar a interoperabilidade da informação sobre a atividade científica

Bem-vindo(a) de volta à nossa série de estudos de caso sobre instituições financiadoras de investigação que utilizam o Grant Linking System. Nesta entrevista, conversamos com Cátia Laranjeira, gestora do programa PTCRIS na FCCN|FCT, a principal agência pública de financiamento à ciência em Portugal, sobre a abordagem da instituição aos metadados, identificadores persistentes, Ciência Aberta e Infraestruturas Abertas.

Com uma abordagem holística à gestão, produção e acesso à informação científica, a decisão da FCCN|FCT de integrar o Grant Linking System nos seus processos não representou apenas uma evolução técnica, mas sim um esforço coordenado para consolidar uma forte cultura de abertura. Sob o lema “registar uma vez, reutilizar sempre”, a adoção de metadados abertos de financiamento pela FCCN|FCT foi um passo natural e coerente com essa visão.

Poderia apresentar a sua organização?

A FCCN é a unidade de serviços digitais da FCT — Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, a principal agência pública de financiamento à ciência em Portugal. A FCT apoia a investigação e a inovação através de diversos instrumentos de financiamento dirigidos a investigadores, projetos, instituições e parcerias internacionais. A FCCN dedica-se a disponibilizar serviços digitais à comunidade científica e académica portuguesa.

Na FCCN|FCT, sou gestora do PTCRIS, um programa integrado no pilar do Conhecimento Científico. O PTCRIS é um programa abrangente que tem como objetivo central concretizar o princípio “registar uma vez, reutilizar sempre”. Trabalhamos para desenvolver um ecossistema integrado de informação científica, e todos os projetos que conduzimos convergem nesse propósito. Desenvolvemos infraestruturas e serviços de valor acrescentado, como a plataforma de gestão do currículo científico CIÊNCIAVITAE e um sistema de indicadores que disponibiliza informação sobre todos os financiamentos que apoiam a investigação e a inovação em Portugal.

O que motivou a adesão à Crossref?

A FCCN tinha já adotado o ORCID e desenvolvido um identificador nacional persistente (PID), ligado ao cartão de cidadão, como complemento aos ORCIDs. Em 2015, adotámos o ISNI e também tínhamos DOIs para a produção científica. Ficava claramente em falta um elemento: os metadados de financiamento.

Ao mesmo tempo, iniciámos o desenvolvimento de uma infraestrutura nacional de financiamentos de ciência e tecnologia, com o objetivo de ter uma visão agregada e holística do financiamento que suporta a investigação e inovação em Portugal.

Antes disso, a informação estava dispersa por diferentes bases de dados e websites de múltiplos financiadores. Organizámos e agregámos esta informação numa plataforma chamada SciPROJ, que reúne toda a informação sobre financiamentos científicos num único local, com acesso rápido e flexível. No entanto, ainda não existiam identificadores persistentes para os financiamentos, coincidindo com o momento em que a Crossref começou a desenvolver o Grant Linking System. Fomos, assim, uma das primeiras organizações a aderir. Em 2023, realizámos um piloto com 6.000 financiamentos registados, e desde então temos vindo a registar continuamente os metadados de financiamento.

Pode falar-nos sobre a sua experiência com o Grant Linking System?

A FCCN iniciou a utilização do Grant Linking System com um piloto, que constituiu a fase mais crítica do processo. Foi necessário algum esforço para mapear os nossos modelos de dados para o esquema de metadados de financiamentos da Crossref. A FCCN estava, no entanto, bem posicionada para isso, uma vez que já dispunha de toda a informação num registo organizado; o passo necessário foi apenas assegurar que esta informação pudesse ser partilhada de acordo com o esquema de metadados da Crossref e as melhores práticas.

Já passaram dois anos desde o piloto, o que nos coloca na fase 2 de implementação do sistema. Durante o piloto, focámo-nos no registo de metadados de financiamentos históricos e atuais; na fase atual, estamos focados no registo de metadados de financiamentos atuais.

O que considera útil no registo de metadados de financiamento na Crossref?

Embora este seja ainda o início deste percurso, a FCCN idealiza um ecossistema em que seja possível ligar financiamentos a qualquer outro objeto ou entidade do sistema científico — projetos, pessoas que executam esses financiamentos, instituições onde são executados e produções científicas que dele resultam. Estes últimos são particularmente importantes para nós, como para muitos outros financiadores, pois queremos monitorizar o impacto do financiamento — uma preocupação que está sempre presente no nosso trabalho.

Estamos, de facto, a desenvolver serviços que demonstram o valor dessas ligações para a recuperação de informação no sistema. Um exemplo é o sistema de indicadores em desenvolvimento, que se centra nos financiamentos, nas produções científicas e nas relações entre ambos. Estamos também a acompanhar as tendências de Ciência Aberta, para perceber de que forma o financiamento da FCT está a contribuir para as iniciativas de Open Science.

Além disso, a política de Acesso Aberto da FCT foi recentemente lançada, mas ainda não dispomos de um sistema que permita monitorizar a conformidade com essa política. Estamos a trabalhar nesse sentido, mas para o concretizar é absolutamente essencial que consigamos associar inequivocamente os financiamentos às produções científicas através de metadados.

Quais são as suas expectativas para o GLS e para uma maior transparência dos metadados de financiamento em geral?

A interconectividade e interoperabilidade entre entidades e objetos é algo que a área da gestão de informação científica sempre procurou alcançar — embora seja um objetivo difícil de concretizar. No passado, houve várias tentativas nesse sentido, recorrendo à informação presente nas secções de agradecimentos das publicações, mas esse método revelou-se pouco eficiente e carece de uma estrutura mais sistemática.

Uma peça essencial deste puzzle seria influenciar as editoras e as plataformas de submissão de manuscritos a facilitarem a partilha sistemática de identificadores e metadados de financiamento. Este é um elemento que ainda falta concretizar, mas que gostaríamos de ver implementado em breve.

Algo o surpreendeu durante a implementação do Grant Linking System?

Algo que nos surpreendeu durante a implementação do Grant Linking System foi a reação dos investigadores. Normalmente, os investigadores não demonstram grande preocupação com identificadores persistentes (PIDs), mas, neste caso, começaram a procurar ativamente o identificador Crossref do seu financiamento! Foi muito positivo perceber que não foi necessário fazer qualquer esforço de divulgação para promover o uso dos Grant IDs da Crossref entre os beneficiários dos financiamentos. Isso mostra o nível de consciência existente na comunidade científica sobre a importância destes identificadores — usá-los e incluí-los na secção de agradecimentos das publicações.

Com base na sua experiência, qual seria o seu conselho para colegas de outros financiadores de investigação?

Com base na nossa experiência, o conselho para outros financiadores seria simples: avancem! Quanto mais, melhor! Este tipo de sistema de informação só é verdadeiramente eficaz quando há muitas entidades a utilizá-lo, a registar metadados de financiamento e a criar ligações entre objetos.

É também um processo simples de implementar. Uma vez feito o mapeamento entre o esquema de metadados e os dados internos da instituição, não há grandes desafios técnicos. No nosso caso, o processo é totalmente automatizado e flui de forma eficiente, desde o registo do financiamento até à comunicação dessa informação aos beneficiários. É possível ver isso em prática em vários exemplos — desde artigos que reconhecem o financiamento através dos Grant IDs da Crossref até ao reconhecimento do apoio financeiro nos sites dos centros de investigação.

Se pudesse alterar algo no GLS ou na forma como os metadados dos subsídios que regista são utilizados, o que seria?

Se pudéssemos mudar algo no Grant Linking System ou na forma como os metadados de financiamento são utilizados, gostaríamos de ter acesso a uma visualização interativa que mostrasse quantas produções científicas estão ligadas a cada financiamento e como esses se relacionam com outras entidades e objetos. Isso permitiria compreender de forma muito mais clara o impacto real dos financiamentos.

Gostaríamos também de ver uma melhor integração entre a Crossref e o ORCID no que respeita aos financiamentos — tal como já acontece com as publicações. Idealmente, quando um financiamento fosse registado e associado a um investigador, este seria notificado e poderia adicioná-lo facilmente ao seu registo ORCID. Assim, a informação fluiria automaticamente para o currículo nacional via PTCRISsync, garantindo consistência e reduzindo o trabalho manual.

Agradecemos à Cátia Laranjeira e à FCT|FCCN por partilharem a sua perspetiva e longa experiência neste domínio. A sua experiência destaca o papel que os metadados de financiamento desempenham num ecossistema de investigação e financiamento interligado e completo.

Enhancing repository integration with Crossref

Johanssen Obanda — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Repositories are home to a wide range of scholarly content; they often archive theses, dissertations, preprints, datasets, and other valuable outputs. These records are an important part of the research ecosystem and should be connected to the broader scholarly record. But to truly serve their purpose, repository records need to be connected to each other, to the broader research ecosystem, and to the people behind the research. Metadata is what makes that possible. Enhancing metadata is a way to tell a fuller, more accurate story of research. It helps surface relationships between works, people, funders, and institutions, and allows us as a community to build and use a more connected, more useful network of knowledge - what Crossref calls the ‘Research Nexus’.

The challenge many repositories face is that metadata can be incomplete, inconsistent, or disconnected. Think of references without DOIs, authors without ORCID iDs, or research outputs that aren’t linked to funding. To address this, Crossref provides a range of services that repositories can use to improve the quality and interoperability of their metadata. Our REST API, which is openly and publicly accessible, allows repositories to retrieve structured metadata, such as DOIs, references, abstracts, contributors, ORCID iDs, and funder information, that can be used to enrich and update their local records. For repository members, with the Cited-by service and reference linking, repositories can also show how works are being cited and interconnect related content. The Grant Linking System (GLS) enables the clear indication of which research outputs are linked to specific grants, and funding bodies themselves are connected using Open Funder Registry and ROR, adding another layer of context. With Crossmark, repositories can flag updates, corrections, or retractions to ensure transparency and trust in the scholarly content they host.

Enriching repository metadata using Crossref is a practical and empowering step toward making your records more discoverable, complete, and connected. The process is simple, and you don’t need to be a developer to get started. Repositories can query the Crossref REST API using a DOI or basic metadata like a title or author name, and receive structured, reliable information. This can include full author lists, ORCID iDs, reference lists, funding data, and licensing terms. You can then match and merge this data into your repository records. Adding Crossref DOIs to your metadata enables persistent linking, helping users trace research outputs back to their stewards. It also helps create rich relationships between articles, datasets, software, grants, and other research objects. All of this supports the FAIR principles and contributes to a more connected and reusable scholarly record. And because Crossref’s infrastructure is open, any repository can access and use this metadata to improve the quality, visibility, and long-term value of their collections.

Steps to enrich repository metadata with Crossref:

Query the REST API using DOIs or basic metadata (visit our API learning hub to learn how to use the Crossref API)
Retrieve structured metadata like authors, ORCID iDs, funders, affiliations, ROR IDs, licenses, grants, and references
Map and merge with your local records
Display persistent links to all kinds of research objects using Crossref DOIs
Support FAIR by including open, structured, and complete metadata

Across the repository community, several institutions are already integrating Crossref metadata in meaningful ways to enrich their records and improve discoverability. DSpace users can enrich their deposits by using the platform’s “Live Import” feature, which allows them to pull in Crossref metadata, such as titles, authors, and DOIs, directly into items during the submission process. A deeper integration between DSpace and Crossref is currently in development. HAL in France uses the Crossref API to complete and standardise references, making its content more consistent and connected (hal.archives-ouvertes.fr). SciELO, a key open access platform in Latin America, leverages Crossref DOI links and citation metadata to strengthen the visibility of its journals (scielo.org). In Canada, the University of Saskatchewan’s eCommons repository queries the Crossref API to enhance metadata accuracy and link records to the broader scholarly graph (ecommons.usask.ca). The Apollo repository at the University of Cambridge uses Crossref to connect theses and articles to their published versions, creating a clearer picture of research outcomes (repository.cam.ac.uk). Zenodo, hosted by CERN, draws on Crossref metadata to link deposited datasets and software with related publications, supporting transparency and reuse (zenodo.org).

These examples show how even modest integrations with Crossref can lead to substantial gains in metadata quality, interoperability, and global discoverability. Altogether, these activities and organisations are enhancing the Research Nexus, enriching a scholarly graph for the benefit of all.

Want to learn more? You can explore the presentation slides (PDF) from Open Repositories 2025, which cover the Crossref API and its capabilities, how repositories can use it to query and enrich metadata, the benefits for repository managers, researchers, and funders, as well as recent updates to our metadata schema.

Piecing together the Research Nexus: uncovering relationships with open funding metadata

Rocío Gaudioso Pedraza — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Crossref Grant Linking System (GLS) has been facilitating the registration, sharing and re-use of open funding metadata for six years now, and we have reached some important milestones recently! What started as an interest in identifying funders through the Open Funder Registry evolved to a more nuanced and comprehensive way to share and re-use open funding data systematically. That’s how, in collaboration with the funding community, the Crossref Grant Linking System was developed. Open funding metadata is fundamental for the transparency and integrity of the research endeavour, so we are happy to see them included in the Research Nexus.

As emphasised recently by Hans de Jonge from NWO, funding metadata’s value is in the transparency of the relationships it enables. The system is powered by the collective action of the research community– including research funders – that registers open metadata with Crossref, making these relationships possible. With close to 180,000 grant records in our corpus we wanted to know how far they reach and what story they tell.

In March 2022, we developed an approach for linking grants to research outputs and analysed how many such relationships could be established. Now we’re able to present the latest dataset that contains relationships between grants and research outputs, both those deposited by Crossref members and discovered by an automated matching strategy. It includes data deposited up to the end of July 2025.

This work is part of our ongoing Metadata Matching project.

What exactly is in this new open dataset of grant<>output relationships?

The dataset contains 250,163 total funding relationships between grants and research outputs.
We welcomed a number of funders, such as the Dutch Research Council and Fonds de Recherche du Quebec, which together registered almost 27,000 grants in the past year.
It’s clear that the more grant metadata is registered the more funding relationships we can uncover.
The percentage of relationships that are registered explicitly by Crossref members providing grants IDs in funding information has grown from less than 0.1% in 2023 to 1% (modest numbers but amazing growth!).

The methodology

We created a dataset of relationships between grants and research outputs by analysing their metadata in several ways. A relationship is included in the dataset if at least one of the following conditions is met:

A relationship was explicitly deposited by a Crossref member through a finances or isFinancedBy relationship: 488 (0.2%) relationships
The research output contains the grant DOI within the award number in the funding metadata: 2,003 (0.8%) relationships
The award numbers in the grant and the research output are similar, and the associated funding organisations are either the same, or one is the sub-organisation of the other: 247,672 (99%) relationships

The dataset includes data deposited until the end of July 2025 and contains 250,163 total relationships.

The code used to generate the dataset is available in our GitLab repository.

The results

As you can see in the graph below, the number of relationships grant-research output continues to grow as the number of grants records Crossref members register with us increases.

Figure 1: Cumulative totals of grants, linked grants, research outputs, and grant–research output relationships from 2019 to 2025. Stepwise increases correspond to the addition of major funder datasets, including Wellcome (2020), OSTI (2021), JST (2022), the European Union (2022), the Austrian Science Fund (2023), and the Fonds de recherche du Québec (2025).

Looking at the numbers broken down by grant registrants we can see that the more grants registered the more relationships can be uncovered. The table below shows funders who have at least 1,000 total grants registered and for whom at least 10% of their registered grants are linked to research outputs, showing the number of relationships, grants, linked grants and linked research outputs (sorted by the percentage of linked grants), and compared with the data from the 2023 analysis (where available) to see how the uptake of open funding metadata is evolving.

Funder	Relationships		Linked research outputs		Grants		Number of linked grants		Percentage of linked grants
Funder	2023	2025	2023	2025	2023	2025	2023	2025	2023	2025
European Union	86,979	128,572	78,576	114,491	39,703	53,473	14,860	21,402	37.4%	40%
Japan Science and Technology Agency	19,549	30,728	16,265	25,003	9,923	11,866	2,609	3,900	26.3%	32.9%
Wellcome	34,254	45,596	25,720	33,783	17,547	19,929	5,238	6,206	29.9%	31.1%
American Cancer Society	50	604	49	586	380	1,162	34	277	8.9%	23.8%
American Heart Association (AHA)	40	1,040	38	935	598	2,764	30	621	5%	22.5%
Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia	0	27,915	0	15,681	5	17,422	0	3,793	–	21.8%
Austrian Science Fund (FWF)	–	10,387	–	7,459	–	19,576	–	2,712	–	13.9%

Table 1: Comparison between data from 2023-07-31 and 2025-07-31 of a number of Crossref members registering grants. It shows the number of relationships, grants, linked grants and linked research outputs, sorted by the percentage of linked grants.

We encourage funders to join as members once they have determined the means of effective implementation of the GLS within their processes. By further analysing metadata of matched outputs, funders have the opportunity to monitor compliance with their policies and learn more about the impact of their programs.

Following through funders’ Open Science commitments

The relationships showcased above and in the recent analysis are powered by open funding metadata. Open funding metadata plays a central role in building a transparent, accountable and high integrity research environment by making visible the connections between the funding, grantees, research outputs, and their impact. Funders’ openness mandates and Open Science commitments emphasize the importance of traceability in the research process, so ensuring that the support given-whether financial or otherwise-can be systematically recorded and shared is instrumental. Openness is also part of the strategic plans of institutions such as the International Science Council, who has explicitly called for greater transparency in funding as a way to strengthen trust in science and counter misinformation. At the same time, initiatives such as the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information underscores the benefits of open, reusable funding metadata for monitoring, evaluation and assessment of research and researchers.

Crossref’s Grant Linking System offers funders’ a way to demonstrate a commitment to openness, modeling the standards they expect of the research community they support, while creating a more robust, trustworthy and collaborative research ecosystem.

Economy of scale: unlocking relationships with Crossref

Crossref houses millions of records, from the ubiquitous research articles and preprints, to books, peer review records, technical reports, datasets – you name it. Our members not only register, but also regularly update their metadata as new or corrected information becomes available. Our matching workflows allow us to make visible the hidden relationships and complete and improve the metadata records by adding new and reciprocal assertions.

This analysis shows the unique value of registering funding metadata with Crossref and adding an essential piece to the Research Nexus puzzle. The relationship metadata allows the funding that underpins the research process to be connected, and contextualise scattered data points, acting as an anchor that links publications, people, and other research outputs. This is made possible by the impressive number of records continuously being registered by more than 23,000 member organisations, and by the increasing availability of funding information in the system with more research funders joining in and registering their grant metadata with us.

Next steps

As we welcome more and more funders to the GLS, we, collectively, continue to complete the Research Nexus, record by record, field by field. The more awards we have in our corpus the more relationships we’ll uncover, so we’ll keep making these analyses periodically to make sure we don’t miss them.

But it is not all on us. We are working towards a vision where Crossref Grant IDs are business as usual – where funders register their awards, grantees are aware of them and share them with publishers, and those publishers share them back with us when registering their content – closing the loop organically. We continue working on making this easier. In the upcoming works schema update a specific Crossref Grant ID field will be added in the funding information, alongside Award ID (for an internal identifier).

Crucially, as the momentum of adoption among funders increases, and thousands of Crossref Grant IDs are available in the system, we are working with all members to raise their attention to the importance and desirability of funding metadata, so inclusion of that information in metadata of all works increases and consequently, the percentage of relationships asserted by Crossref members can grow.

This matching analysis is just one example of what we do to enrich metadata to highlight relationships among works, individuals, institutions, and actions. Earlier this year, we launched the Metadata Matching project, which is a major effort to rebuild our matching workflows using modern software development and data science practices. As part of the project, we plan to expose additional matched relationships between grants and research outputs in our REST API, alongside those deposited by our members. We’ll keep you updated as we go along!

Read more about metadata matching in the blog series:

Innovation in scientific publishing and its implications for Crossref DOI registration practices - Request for input

Ludo Waltman — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Lots of exciting innovations are being made in scientific publishing, often raising fundamental questions about established publishing practices. In this guest post, Ludo Waltman and André Brasil discuss the recently launched MetaROR publish-review-curate platform and the questions it raises about good practices for Crossref DOI registration in this emerging landscape.

Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) are unique identifiers commonly assigned to research outputs such as journal articles, preprints, peer review reports, and datasets. The DOI of a research output allows the output to be identified online in a persistent way, even when the underlying publishing infrastructure changes (e.g., a journal moving from one publisher to another).

There are several DOI registration agencies. Most of the larger scientific publishers work with Crossref, and so do many preprint servers, and therefore our focus in this post is on Crossref. Crossref also keeps track of metadata associated with research outputs, such as the title, authors, and publication date of an output, and it makes this metadata openly available via APIs for all kinds of services to ingest and reuse. Because indexing, discovery, and evaluation tools rely heavily on this metadata, content registration practices and metadata design choices can have major effects on the visibility and findability of research outputs and on analytics used to monitor and assess research outputs and their contributors.

For the most common types of research outputs, such as journal articles and preprints, a broad consensus has emerged over the past decades on good practices for DOI registration. Such consensus means that articles are assigned the record type ‘article’ in their Crossref metadata. Likewise, many preprint servers register DOIs for preprints at Crossref, with the record type ‘preprint’ in the metadata. (The arXiv preprint server is an exception; it registers DOIs for preprints with DataCite rather than Crossref.)

For innovative new publication platforms, however, good practices for DOI registration are less clear. The approaches to scientific publishing offered by these platforms often do not fit neatly into established ways of working. For instance, for some of these platforms, the traditional distinction between peer-reviewed articles published in scientific journals and non-peer-reviewed articles posted on preprint servers is no longer applicable. This raises fundamental questions about suitable DOI registration practices for new approaches to scientific publishing.

MetaROR

The MetaROR (MetaResearch Open Review) platform, launched in November 2024 by the Research on Research Institute (RoRI) and the Association for Interdisciplinary Meta-Research and Open Science (AIMOS), offers an example of the challenge of developing appropriate DOI registration practices for new publishing models.

Inspired by similar initiatives such as eLife and others, MetaROR adopts the so-called publish-review-curate model. Authors first publish their article on a preprint server and then submit it to MetaROR. MetaROR then organizes an open peer review process for the article. Review reports are published on the MetaROR platform, along with a copy of the preprinted article and an editorial assessment. Rather than a simple binary decision (accept vs. reject), an editorial assessment is a short one-paragraph statement summarizing the strengths and weaknesses of an article. Each review report and each editorial assessment has its own DOI registered at Crossref. In this way, review reports are treated as first-class research outputs that can, for instance, be indexed in scientific literature databases and can be cited in other research outputs.

For an article submitted to MetaROR, the publication of the review reports, the editorial assessment, and a copy of the article itself concludes MetaROR’s publish-review-curate process. The authors of the article may revise their work in light of the feedback received, and MetaROR may review the revised article. However, there is no requirement that revisions must be made. The primary aim of the review reports and the editorial assessment published on the MetaROR platform is to offer context for readers of the article, helping readers understand the strengths and weaknesses of the article.

Crossref DOI registration

Registration of DOIs for open peer review reports is increasingly common. By registering Crossref DOIs for review reports and editorial assessments, MetaROR enables reviewers and editors to be recognized for their contributions. But what about recognition for authors?

A crucial element in MetaROR’s philosophy is that authors of articles peer-reviewed by MetaROR deserve to be recognized in a similar way as authors of articles published in traditional peer-reviewed journals. One way to promote appropriate recognition for authors of articles peer-reviewed by MetaROR is to ensure that articles on the MetaROR platform, just like articles in peer-reviewed journals, have their own DOI. While this may seem straightforward to arrange, it actually raises two non-trivial questions about good practices for Crossref DOI registration:

For each article on the MetaROR platform, there is a corresponding article on a preprint server. Is it acceptable to have two Crossref DOIs, one registered by the preprint server and one registered by the MetaROR platform, for essentially the same article?
If Crossref DOIs are registered for articles on the MetaROR platform, should the articles be assigned the type ‘article’ or the type ‘preprint’ in their Crossref metadata, or something else entirely?

On the first question, it could be argued that having two Crossref DOIs for the same article is problematic and that MetaROR, therefore, should not register DOIs for articles on its platform. Alternatively, one could argue that an article on the MetaROR platform differs in a meaningful way from the corresponding article on a preprint server, since the article on the MetaROR platform has been enriched with peer review reports and an editorial assessment, similar to the way an article in a peer-reviewed journal may be seen as an enriched version of the corresponding article on a preprint server. This line of reasoning would justify registering DOIs for articles on the MetaROR platform.

On the second question, the argument could be made that articles on the MetaROR platform should be assigned the type ‘preprint’ in their Crossref metadata, since the type ‘article’ is intended for articles in journals and MetaROR does not consider itself to be a journal (in fact, MetaROR works with partner journals to enable articles peer-reviewed by MetaROR to be published in journals) and does not certify articles in the way journals do (i.e., MetaROR does not make accept/reject decisions). On the other hand, one could argue that articles on the MetaROR platform should be assigned the type ‘article’, since the peer-reviewed nature of articles in journals is typically seen as the key factor distinguishing these articles from articles on preprint servers. Articles on the MetaROR platform have been peer-reviewed, and in that sense, they resemble articles in journals. A third line of reasoning could be that neither the ‘preprint’ nor the ‘article’ type is fully appropriate for articles on the MetaROR platform and, consequently, that there is a need for a new Crossref record type.

What is your take?

The MetaROR team, in consultation with Crossref, will need to decide how to deal with the two questions discussed in this blog post. After some preliminary conversations between the MetaROR team and Crossref, we decided to share these questions more widely to solicit input from the broader community. We invite you to share your thoughts on the two questions, either by posting a comment on this blog post or by reaching out to us on social media or by email. Community perspectives will help shape good practices not only for MetaROR but also for other publish-review-curate initiatives facing similar questions. We look forward to hearing from you!

Ludo Waltman and André Brasil are members of the editorial team of MetaROR. Ludo and André are grateful to Ginny Hendricks at Crossref for valuable discussions about the issues raised in this blog post.

Crossref and PKP enter new partnership phase to support richer and more inclusive metadata

Kornelia Korzec — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Crossref and the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) have been working closely together for many years, sharing resources and supporting our overlapping communities of organisations involved in communicating research. Now we’re delighted to share that we have agreed on a new set of objectives for our partnership, centred on further development of the tools that our shared community relies upon, as well as building capacity to enable richer metadata registration for organisations using the Open Journal Systems (OJS).

Crossref is working towards the vision of a rich and open network underpinning global scholarship, making relationships between works, people, institutions, and actions visible, thanks to the thread of metadata – the research nexus. This vision depends upon participation of research communication organisations coming from all parts of the world, disciplines, and languages. Working with PKP towards making tools for metadata registration more comprehensive, accessible, and easier to use is a big step towards supporting our community to participate in the research nexus.

The renewed partnership has three main goals:

Developments to improve experience and support metadata registration workflows in OJS, bringing relevant functionalities together under the Crossref plug-in, and developing an OMP Crossref plug-in.
Joint community engagement in support of transitioning OJS users to the future Long-Term Support (LTS) version of OJS, which will enable richer metadata registration.
Creation of a PKP School self-paced training course for system administrators.

Crossref and PKP have a rich history of collaboration, including previous investment in tools development in 2020, which resulted in some vital improvements to Crossref metadata management in OJS and a more streamlined experience for Crossref members on the platform, as well as many collaborative community events and training.

We know that thousands of Crossref members use OJS to register their metadata. Many are based in resource-constrained institutions, so the training provided by Crossref and PKP will be key to building their capacity to participate in the research nexus. With OJS 3.5 empowering organisations to register richer metadata, we look forward to opening up more opportunities for members to enhance their participation.

At PKP, we’re excited to deepen our longstanding collaboration with Crossref, supporting our global community in amplifying the visibility and impact of their research through streamlined integration for robust metadata management. By working together on both technological innovation and capacity-building initiatives, we anticipate even greater outcomes that will strengthen open scholarship throughout the duration of this partnership and well into the future.” – said Kevin Stranack, PKP Director of Operations.

– Kevin Stranack, PKP Director of Operations

About Crossref

About PKP

Public Knowledge Project (PKP) seeks to improve the scholarly and public quality, reach, and diversity of academic research through the research, development, implementation, and support of innovative open source software to support scholarly publishing and communication.

Raising the standard: GigaScience Press on metadata and discoverability

Scott Edmunds — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

To mark Crossref’s 25th anniversary, we launched our first Metadata Awards to highlight members with the best metadata practices. GigaScience Press, based in Hong Kong, was the leader among small publishers, defined as organisations with less than USD 1 million in publishing revenue or expenses. We spoke with Scott Edmunds, Ph.D., Editor-in-Chief at GigaScience Press, about how discoverability drives their high metadata standards.

What motivates your organisation/team to work towards high-quality metadata? What objectives does it support for your organisation?

Our objective is to communicate science openly and collaboratively, without barriers, to solve problems in a data- and evidence-driven manner through Open Science publishing. High-quality metadata helps us address these objectives by improving the discoverability, transparency, and provenance of the work we publish. It is an integral part of the FAIR principles and UNESCO Open Science Recommendation, playing a role in increasing the accessibility of research for both humans and machines. As one of the authors of the FAIR principles paper and an advisor of the Make Data Count project, I’ve also personally been very conscious to practice what I preach.

Do you have a strategy for complete metadata? Which elements did you prioritise? What workflows, tools, or collaborations helped you get there?

We’ve been privileged to work with our technical partners at River Valley Technologies, and the novel XML-first publishing platform they have developed has made it particularly easy to integrate and collect persistent identifiers and other metadata, embedding it into the resulting rich-XML. As Open Access advocates, licensing and machine readability were early focuses when launching our journals. We ensured that we provided a text and data mining portal, allowing bulk downloads of our content to encourage reuse. Many specific metadata elements highlighted by the FAIR principles and UNESCO Open Science recommendations, and so these have also helped guide what should be prioritised. If there’s one specific tool to mention, we’ve been big fans of the Crossref participation reports, as this has helped highlight what is missing and what we need to improve upon.

How have you integrated these into your metadata processes?

The participation reports, in particular, have been useful for this, and by regularly checking them, we’ve managed to spot when processes have broken, for example. When you’ve added new fields to the reports like ROR IDs (Research Organization Registry), this has also motivated us to prioritise integrating these, so having a curated list of metadata fields like this definitively helps users focus on what should be the most important. River Valley Technologies has been very responsive to this type of feedback, and being able to see the participation report data in real-time has helped drive them to fix and update our metadata. So I thank them for being so patient and quick to respond to our very demanding standards.

What impact of good metadata can you see for your organisation?

From an Editorial side, our technical partners at River Valley Technologies have found having this metadata information available very useful in the Research Integrity tools they have developed and integrated into our publication platform. Things like ORCID IDs, RORs, and other identifiers are very useful for tracking provenance and increasing trust.

From a business side, putting the effort into collecting rich metadata has paid off in the long run by making it easier to integrate our publishing data into new platforms. Making it easier and quicker to integrate and track our data via OA Switchboard, for example. It also helps us more easily mirror and list our content in indexes like PMC, Scopus, Web of Science, and others.

Have you encountered any challenges in curating or improving your metadata?

One of the main metadata areas that has currently let us down, funding and registries, is because our publishing model is so affordable. The automated production processes from RVT’s novel publishing platform have allowed us to publish very cost-effectively (the APC of GigaByte is $535). We’ve also received sponsorship from the WHO to publish a series of public health papers, particularly supporting authors from the Global South who may not have sources of funding listed in these registries. Because of this, we’ve published numerous papers from independent researchers, students, and self-financed projects that may not have funding IDs or grant numbers. We’d like to push to get “unfunded” counted as a metadata field to address this.

Have your efforts regarding metadata yielded tangible benefits for your community? Is this something your editors, authors, or readers are aware of and appreciate? If so, why?

We’d like to think our authors find this useful, but we’ve not had any specific feedback on this. Our readers, both human and machine, should hopefully appreciate finding our work more easily, and from a purely selfish perspective, should get us higher access and citations. This is difficult to measure, but as evidence nerds, we have attempted to conduct RCTs examining this for Data Citations. One anecdote I can give is about the author who told us they pasted their paper into ChatGPT and asked it which was the best journal for their work, and it suggested our journal. I’d like to think that putting in this effort in making our papers more machine-readable and comprehensible pays off at times like this to make the discoverability and visibility of our journals greater.

Looking ahead, how are you planning to build on your metadata quality? Are there new elements or practices you’re exploring? And what advice would you give to others just starting to strengthen their metadata?

We still need to update older content with RORs, and improve it for the datasets linked to our papers. To do this, we’ve had interns working to improve our DataCite metadata.

We encourage others to think about metadata issues when setting up their workflows. While it may seem like additional work, it will be increasingly important to future-proof and get journals ready for our increasingly AI-centric age. And as we show here, we can more easily carry out important tasks like getting your content more quickly and widely indexed and disseminated.

Strong metadata ties open science, integrity, and discoverability together. GigaScience Press shows how consistent identifiers, machine-readable formats, and continuous checks deliver real benefits. As discovery becomes more AI-assisted, the priority is clear: keep metadata complete, open, and usable.

While it may seem like additional work, it will be increasingly important to future-proof and get journals ready for our increasingly AI-centric age.

– Scott Edmunds, GigaScience

Now, a few words from Scott.

Metadata Awards video - Gigascience

Meet the candidates and cast your vote in our 2025 Board elections

Lucy Ofiesh — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

On behalf of the Nominating Committee, I’m pleased to share the slate of candidates for the 2025 board election.

Each year we do an open call for board interest. This year, the Nominating Committee received 51 submissions from members worldwide to fill five open board seats.

We have four large member seats and one small member seat open for election in 2025. We maintain a balanced board of 8 large member seats and 8 small member seats. Size is determined based on the organization’s membership tier (small members fall in the $0-$1,650 tiers and large members in the $3,900 - $50,000 tiers).

We were pleased to see the diversity in candidates, with applicants from 19 countries. The committee was keen to prepare a diverse slate of organization types, individual skills and perspectives, and global representation.

Tier 1, Small member seats (electing one candidate)

Rebecca Wambua, Distance, Open and e-Learning Practitioners’ Association of Kenya
Oscar Donde, Pan Africa Science Journal
Nwachukwu Egbunike, Pan-Atlantic University Press

Tier 2, Large member seats (electing four candidates)

Damian Bird, CABI
Rose L’Huillier, Elsevier
John Sivo, IEEE
Nick Lindsay, The MIT Press
Anjalie Nawaratne, Springer Nature

Please read the candidates’ statements

Every member has a vote

If your organisation is a voting member in good standing as of September 5th, 2025, you are eligible to vote.

The voting contact for your organisation will receive a ballot from eBallot, a third party election platform. You should receive your ballot by Wednesday, September 17th, and you will have until 12:00 UTC on October 22nd to submit your ballot.

The election results will be announced at Crossref2025, our annual online meeting on October 22nd, 2025.

Special thanks to the committee: James Phillpotts of Oxford University Press, Wendy Patterson of Beilstein Institut, Abiodun Falodun of University of Benin, Amanda Ward of Taylor & Francis, and Chaerul Umam of the National Library of Indonesia for the time they dedicated to reviewing the expressions of interest and participating in committee meetings.

If you have any questions about our election process, please contact me

Happy voting!

A second look at Crossref's carbon footprint - the 2024 report

Ed Pentz — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In 2022, we wrote a blog post “Rethinking staff travel, meetings, and events” outlining our new approach to staff travel, meetings, and events with the goal of not going back to ‘normal’ after the pandemic and said that in the future we would report on our efforts to balance online and virtual events, work life balance for staff, and track our carbon emissions. In December 2024, we wrote a blog post, “Summary of the environmental impact of Crossref,” that gave an overview of 2023 and provided the first report on our carbon emissions. Our report on 2023 only just made it into 2024, so we are happy to report on 2024 a little sooner in the year.

On the positive side, there are a few things:

Our spending on travel and meetings (a proxy for emissions) in 2024 was 56% of what it was in 2019, keeping below the target of not more than 60% of our 2019 spend
We were better at tracking hotel nights in 2024 compared to 2023
We managed to balance in-person, regional, and online meetings to engage with our global community while still not having returned to the pre-pandemic “normal”

In practice, our approach means thinking carefully about how to make the most of each trip. For example, when organising our Crossref Jakarta event, we travelled via Singapore and used the opportunity to meet with members there. Once in Jakarta, we combined our two-day event with an OJS workshop with colleagues from PKP, and another event with Universitas Indonesia. Similarly, when our colleague travelled by train to a conference in Amsterdam, they combined it with a day of visits to members in the area. These kinds of combinations reduce the need for separate trips and maximise the value of in-person travel.

Some of the less positive things were:

As our membership continues to grow globally and we expand our staff, (which are both great things in themselves), our emissions have also increased. Not only do we have more staff, but some staff travelled more in 2024 than in 2023. We’ll keep a close eye on this to avoid ever-increasing travel.
Taking a train instead of flying can take longer, and clashes with our desire for staff needing to be away from home as little time as possible.
It is difficult to find reliable data for some calculations - for example, we have decided not to try to calculate the impact of our Zoom use because there is no reliable way to do this.
We don’t have good options for offsetting our emissions, and it’s unclear whether we would want to do this even if they were available.

There is also the issue of whether it is worth it, or possible, to collect certain data, or whether it would change what we do. An example is Zoom. The estimate for the emissions from Zoom meetings in 2024 was 100 kg (that’s kilograms, not tonnes), but the calculations were made using a tool from 2020 that made many assumptions and estimates. We have no way of verifying whether the tool we used is accurate, so we decided not to update our previous calculation. In any case, we aren’t going to ration or reduce our teleconferencing, since it’s an essential tool, and especially if we want to fly less, have fewer in-person meetings, and operate effectively as a distributed organisation in multiple countries with no offices.

In summary, our total reported carbon emissions increased 40% from 105 tCO2e in 2023 to 147 tCO2e in 2024 (see below for the details). The positive aspect of this is that the increase is partly due to our improved ability to track our travel and hotel stays. The more concerning side of this is that we are travelling more. This enables us to engage with our growing community. We are still thinking strategically about our travel and meetings, following the approach outlined in our 2022 blog post. However, we need to carefully consider air travel in 2026, as it is our largest source of emissions (93%).

Total travel and carbon spending

Year	Amount	Percentage of 2019	Total carbon spent	Total hotel nights covered
2019 actuals	$585,482	100%	did not record	did not record
2020 actuals	$91,700	16%	did not record	did not record
2021 actuals	$19,066	3%	did not record	did not record
2022 actuals	$74,416	13%	did not record	did not record
2023 actuals	$305,737	52%	105 tCO2e	did not record
2024 actuals	$327,939	56%	147 tCO2e	415
2025 budget	$417,767 (reforecast)	71%	68 tCO2e (YTD)	256 (YTD)
2026 budget	$439,817	75%	TBD	TBD

In 2024, we met the target of keeping our travel expenses below 60% of our 2019 level. In 2025, we will exceed this. There are a number of reasons for this. We have more staff, more members, inflation has been high, and we are subsidising a lot more travel for others, such as our ambassadors, speakers, and collaborators at local events, and some board members (since 2019, we reduced from three to one in-person board meeting per year). This aligns with our goals of inclusivity for Crossref meetings, but we have to recognise there is a trade-off. The cost of travel, particularly airfare, has increased since 2019. Using US Bureau of Labor Statistics data from 2019 to 2025 the inflation multiplier for a dollar is 1.26 so adjusted for inflation the comparison figure for 2025 spending is $737,000 and forecasted 2025 spending is 60% of this. While we use cost as a proxy for travel volume, now that we’re better at tracking actual carbon emissions, we can try to set targets of keeping under a certain carbon tonne equivalent total instead of (only) a financial target.

Total Carbon Emissions for 2024

Our total reported carbon emissions increased 40% from 105 tCO2e in 2023 to 147 tCO2e in 2024. In 2023, we didn’t report on the estimated emissions from hotel stays, but for 2024, we have. We recorded 415 hotel nights in 2024 for 4 tCO2e using an average of Europe/US hotel per night emissions estimates (Circular Ecology). The most carbon-intensive activity was flying. There were about 215 flights in 2024, accounting for emissions of 138 tCO2e - 93% of our total. Crossref staff and community members we covered took 88 train journeys with carbon emissions of .47 tCO2e - so the more travel by train, the better, but this isn’t always possible or feasible. We haven’t included estimates of the impact of home working (Crossref is fully distributed), but we have an initial estimate below and will look to improve this analysis for the 2025 analysis and going forward.

Estimate of carbon footprint for distributed staff

Crossref is fully distributed with staff in 11 countries. We used Claude from Anthropic to calculate the emissions from home working for our staff in 2024 and asked for sources to be cited. It provided some approaches for how to go about the calculations but the results were not reliable - for our 46 staff in 10 countries (this is for 2024 - we now have 49 staff in 11 countries) estimates ranged from 5 tCO2e to 28 tCO2e depending on various assumptions such as whether to account for the grid intensity of the countries where staff are based (Our World in Data has grid intensity figures) and what estimate is used for the amount of energy an employee working from home uses each day. Circular Ecology uses UK DEFRA figures to come up with 2.67 kgCO2e/day for home working. So a simple calculation of 46 staff working 230 days per year arrives at the 28 tCO2e amount. This is much less than the equivalent figure for office-based work, which is 70 tCO2e. A number of things aren’t factored into these calculations: staff with green energy tariffs, staff with solar panels and home batteries, or other renewable energy sources, and the different needs for heating and air conditioning in different countries.

We decided not to include these figures in our overall emissions for 2024, but we are looking at a more reliable way to estimate this for 2025. However, we need to consider what we would do with the information and whether we would, or could, do anything to reduce this.

Hosting services

We use AWS for hosting our REST APIs, Metadata Search, and the website. In 2024, our main metadata registry was in a data centre in Massachusetts, which is not included in our calculations. In July 2025, we transitioned fully to AWS, so from 2025 onwards, our emissions from AWS will be higher and will encompass our entire system.

In 2023, Amazon reports Crossref’s carbon emissions were 0.216 tCO2e compared with 0.266 tCO2e in 2022. In 2024, emissions were 0.132 tCO2e.

Compared to travel, the footprint from AWS is minimal.

Online meetings

As a distributed, remote-first organisation, Crossref is a heavy Zoom user––it’s essential for staff and for engaging with our community. However, Zoom doesn’t provide tools or estimates of the carbon impact of Zoom meetings. We used a tool last year to provide an estimate, but we aren’t confident it’s accurate or meaningful. The tool was built in 2020 and made a lot of assumptions and guestimates.

Tools we used

To calculate emissions for flights and train journeys, we chose to use Carbon Calculator. For hotel stays and home working estimates, we used Circular Ecology. For AWS, we used the Customer Carbon Footprint Tool (CCFT) provided by AWS.

Offsetting

We don’t offset our emissions from travel or other operations and don’t have plans to do this. Offsetting emissions is problematic in a number of different ways, so we don’t feel confident in doing it.

In conclusion

In general, it feels good to have had a few years of tracking this, learning more, finding the right tools, and trying to stick to a target to limit our increases. While of course there are always reasons for the target to increase—as we grow and are able to subsidise others beyond our staff more—we remain committed to not just monitoring our carbon spend but also maintaining it at a reasonable level and finding ways to limit and mitigate our impact on the environment. This kind of sustainability isn’t included in the POSI Principles for open scholarly infrastructures, but we’d love to see other similar organisations share their tips and measurements so that, as a community, we can learn how to do even better.

Deprecating co-access: Crossref plans and timelines

Isaac Farley — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

To date, there are about 100 Crossref members who have made use of our co-access service for one or more of their books. The service was designed to be a last-resort measure when multiple parties - book publishers, aggregators, and other members - had rights to register book content. Unfortunately, the service allowed members to register multiple DOIs for shared books and book chapters, thereby violating our own core tenet of one DOI per content item. We should not have created a service that violated that tenet, resulting in duplicate DOIs. As we are able to offer an alternative in the form of the multiple resolution service, it is time to switch co-access off. Among other benefits – for the publisher and the authors, creation of a single DOI for each item, regardless of where it might be hosted, will result in more accurate citation counts and usage statistics. We’re retiring co-access at the end of 2026.

An idiom to start

There’s an idiom used in technology circles called ‘eating your own dog food.’ It’s used to describe an organization that tests or uses its own products in the real world. I’m no developer and only have a handful of years of exposure to this phrase, but I’ve always wanted to work it into one of my blog posts. The visceral reactions I have observed when it’s been used on internal calls are just too tempting. That, and I think it applies to our own rollout of and missteps with a service we call co-access. The decision to enable co-access reflected the priorities of that period, but we can now improve on it with an upgraded multiple resolution service. That rickety footing for co-access doomed it from the start. Now’s the time to face the music and swallow our own kibble.

Always meant as a last-resort measure, co-access allows multiple Crossref members to register metadata for shared book and book chapter content. Thus, use of co-access results in multiple, duplicate DOIs registered for the same book content. There are well over 500,000 DOIs in co-access within our corpus today. At least half of those are duplicates (more on this below).

This is far from ideal and has adverse consequences for the integrity of the scholarly record and the community. As we are able to offer an alternative in the form of the multiple resolution service, it is time to switch co-access off.

Among other benefits – for the publisher and the authors, creation of a single DOI for each item, regardless of where it might be hosted, will result in more accurate citation counts and usage statistics.

Duplicate DOIs

We frequently receive questions from members, metadata users, and others in the community, like this one, asking us what we are doing to combat the very real problem of registration and propagation of duplicate DOIs. We do take measures to prevent the registration of duplicate DOIs, including flagging registration of potential duplicate records to our members using what we call conflicts and conflict reports. As you might expect, this has been a sensitive topic for us, because we have one glaring service, yes, co-access, that has been actively exacerbating the issue of duplicate DOIs.

So, while we have been actively trying to counter the rise of duplicate DOIs, co-access enabled duplicate registrations of book DOIs. For every prefix that we configured for the service, we knew we were contributing to the problem (our members noticed too. As I said above, co-access allows multiple members to register their own DOI for shared book content. That means that book content in co-access has at least two DOIs registered. In some cases, there is book content with five or more registered DOIs for a single book. That’s a great many duplicates that this service is responsible for.

Replacing co-access

We plan to replace co-access with an existing tool, multiple resolution, which allows for more than one resolution URL to be registered to a single DOI. A user resolving the DOI is presented with an interim page, allowing them to choose from the various content sources registered with this DOI. We’ve made some progress toward making multiple resolution simpler for members to implement, but we still have more to do.

We’re aware that the technical steps involved in adopting multiple resolution might present a barrier to implementation for some of our members. To help with the transition, we are working on a basic tool (currently in beta) that simplifies the process. We will make it available to members between now and the middle of 2026.

Our timeline

We are not going to make these changes tomorrow. We’re going to give members who have been using co-access time to adjust. Right now, we trigger co-access when a secondary DOI is registered by a secondary registrant (member) that: 1) is already in a co-access group within our system with the DOI prefix that registered the original DOI, 2) has at least one shared ISBN with the metadata of that original DOI, and 3) has a title (in the title element of the book or chapter XML) that exactly matches the title of the original DOI. We’re going to stop triggering co-access for book and book chapter registrations starting 2026 July 1. No new DOIs will be placed in co-access starting then.

From there, there will be six months to clean up records already in co-access. One definitive DOI should be selected by the parties in a co-access group; the DOIs that will no longer be maintained for those books and book chapters should be aliased to the primary (definitive) DOI that will be maintained going forward. The primary DOI should be the DOI used on all landing pages for that book (or, book chapter).

In January 2027, if co-access DOIs have not been aliased to one another, we will force alias the DOIs in the record to the DOI registered by the organization identified as the publisher in the metadata records already in our system. At any point in this timeline, our team will be happy to help with the registration of secondary URLs in order to move books from co-access to multiple resolution. As a result, we will encourage members, end users, and the broader community to move back to using a single, definitive source of truth for these books and book chapters.

What will registration of books and book chapters look like post-co-access?

Coordinated. We expect that our members and their publishing partners will define the single DOI for each book and book chapter well upstream of Crossref, so all entities and their systems will use that one definitive DOI.

As for the registration process and our system, the first member to register the book (and its ISBNs) will establish the DOI for that book and its chapters. Following attempts to register the same content, with a duplicate book-level DOI(s), will fail the registration. Multiple DOIs for the same book or book chapter should be avoided starting 2026 July 01, as we will no longer be able to place books and book chapters into co-access.

We believe this will result in increased cited-by and usage metrics for that single DOI, and a cleaner, more accurate scholarly record.

We’d love to hear your reaction to this news in our Community Forum.

Celebrating one year of Crossref Grant IDs at NWO

Hans de Jonge — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This month marks one year since the Dutch Research Council (NWO) introduced grant IDs—an important milestone in our journey toward more transparent and trackable research funding. We created over 1,600 Crossref Grant IDs with associated metadata. We are beginning to see them appear in publications. These early examples show the enormous potential Grant IDs have. They also highlight that publishers could extend their efforts to improve the quality of funding metadata of publications.

The promise of grant linking

For decades, funders have struggled with a seemingly simple challenge: tracking the research outputs that arise from their funding. The traditional approach—requiring grantees to cite their grants in acknowledgement sections of their papers—has all kinds of problems. Authors make many errors in providing this information, and even when funding organizations and schemes are cited correctly, there is no guarantee that a grant number is globally unique and not already in use by another funding council in the world.

To address these issues, and in collaboration with the research funding community, Crossref introduced the Grant Linking System (GLS) six years ago. The system allows funding organizations to assign globally unique and persistent identifiers to their grants, but - more importantly - the system allows connecting these grants with the outputs arising from them. The vision is straightforward: authors include Grant IDs (which are Crossref DOIs) in the funding acknowledgements of their research articles. Publishers either take these IDs from the acknowledgement or proactively ask authors for these IDs in their submission system. Next, when a publisher registers their publication with Crossref, it includes the grant identifier in the metadata of that publication, creating an unambiguous link between the publication and the grants from which the research was funded.

This last step—including the Grant ID in the metadata of the article when registering the publication with Crossref—is a crucial part of the system as it enables anyone to automatically retrieve all publications arising from a given grant over time via the Crossref API. Funding organizations interested in tracking the impact of their funding could then stop asking their grantees to manually report on the outputs of their funding, as most still do today. Instead, this information would become open data that funding organizations harvest directly themselves, reducing administrative burden on researchers while enhancing the ability to track the impact of their funding.

As Robert Kiley, former head of Open Research at the Wellcome Trust, which piloted the GLS in 2018, put it: “…if every funder were to adopt such a system and expose their grant metadata in a consistent, machine-readable way, it would facilitate the development of applications to help funders get a greatly enhanced picture of the global funding landscape, which in turn would inform strategic planning and resource allocation.”

NWO’s implementation journey

NWO joined Crossref’s Grant Linking System in 2024. It reflects our broader commitment to open science and aligns with our Persistent Identifier Strategy published in 2021, and our support for the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information. Since August 2024, all new grants awarded from July 2024 onward receive a Crossref Grant ID that persistently resolves to the information about the grant on our website, displaying all basic award information including project titles, summaries, grantee names, and affiliations. NWO is one of the 44 funding organizations worldwide that have introduced Crossref Grant IDs for their collective 111 funding programs. Other organizations include the European Commission, OSTI-DOE, the Wellcome Trust, Moore Foundation, Fonds de Recherche du Québec, CSIRO, Japan Science and Technology Agency, and the Austrian Science Fund.

Although it took time, implementation at NWO in general proceeded smoothly. Over the course of a year, we’ve registered over 1,500 grant records without experiencing difficulties or complaints from researchers. On the contrary, after we announced the introduction of Grant IDs, some researchers expressed disappointment on our decision—for practical reasons—to only register DOIs for new grants instead of the entire historical record. This shows that researchers understand the importance of persistent identifiers. Already, a year after its introduction, we are seeing the first NWO Grant IDs appearing in publications— showing that researchers are taking the extra step to look up their Crossref Grant ID and include it in their articles, as we are asking them to do. However, publishers don’t always manage to handle these identifiers in the way we expect them to.

Linking grants to publications in real life

One of the first publications to include an NWO Grant ID is a paper by Weile et al., published by the American Physical Society (APS) in the journal Physical Review X. On the left, we see the funding information provided by the authors, as included in the acknowledgement section of the published article. Funding by NWO from its Talent Scheme VIDI is identified with a Grant ID https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.61686/YDRHT18202.

On the right, we see how APS has included this information in the metadata of the publication: NWO is identified with its Funder ID and the grant with the Grant ID - forging an unambiguous link between funding and publication, initially between this particular grant and this particular publication, but potentially in the future between this grant and all other outputs arising from it. This works so long as all publishers include this information in the metadata of their publications; we need to encourage more publishers and other Crossref members (e.g., preprint services, repositories, blog platforms) to follow the APS example and do the same.

Where publishers fall short

There are big differences among publishers in their ability to include funding metadata. Many have been including funder IDs in the metadata for more than a decade, but some are still struggling to do that. Most are yet to catch up to start including Crossref Grant IDs, too.

Let’s demonstrate that in an example. On the left, we see the acknowledgements section of a paper by Van Zundert et al. in the journal Small, published by Wiley. The authors acknowledge a host of funding organizations and grants, including NWO with Grant ID https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.61686/LVZRW92421. On the right, we see that the publisher has correctly included NWO in the metadata as the funder with our Funder ID, but there’s no reference to our Grant ID, instead mentioning an award number, which seems to refer to a Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant for the same research with their internal award identifier.

Likewise, a publication by Criscuolo et al in Physics of Life Reviews (a journal published by Elsevier) correctly identified NWO using our Funder ID, but omitted our Grant ID in the metadata, despite its clear inclusion by the author in the acknowledgements (left). Apparently, this persistent link and open metadata is being thrown out of the infrastructure at a crucial time, when the article record could be connecting up with the grant record and making it easy and open for us all to track and report on the connection.

Several publishers do not seem to register funding data at all, despite the opportunity existing for almost 15 years, and sometimes even when comprehensive funding information is provided by authors.

The broader implications

It has been known for some time that publishers struggle with registering complete, high-quality funding metadata for their publications. They sometimes blame authors for not providing the required information or making errors in reporting their funding. Or they call on funders to identify their funding more precisely by introducing persistent Grant IDs for their grants. While these are legitimate issues, and it’s true that more funders could also do this, the examples presented here suggest this narrative is incomplete—when authors provide clear, standardized funding information using persistent identifiers, many publishers still fail to capture it accurately.

The Grant Linking System is still relatively new in terms of open infrastructure and open metadata development, and adoption from funders is still in the tens rather than the tens of thousands, with publishers being more accustomed to creating and providing millions of open metadata records for their publications. Most participating funders, like us, have only started registering grants in the past couple of years. Now that Crossref Grant IDs are becoming more widespread, and with publishers’ experience in creating open metadata, we would love to see publishers prioritise collecting and including Grant IDs in their Crossref metadata. By updating their production practices, they would be supporting the community at large in reaping the benefits of open grant metadata.

To address these challenges, we are organizing a roundtable session under the Barcelona Declaration in October to discuss concrete solutions for these issues. We invite publishers who are interested in participating to contact us. This follows a 2023 workshop where many publishers were very open in discussing the challenges and working towards improving the process together with funders.

Looking ahead

The introduction of Crossref Grant IDs represents just the first step in a longer journey toward more open research information for NWO. We are happy to see how quickly researchers are adopting the system by including Crossref Grant IDs in their work. For Grant IDs to truly become a Grant Linking System and fulfil its promise, however, publishers must act on the need to collect and process funding information in their publishing workflows, just as they do for other joint efforts, such as for ORCID iDs for contributors. The information is there—authors are providing it in the acknowledgement sections of their articles (and probably would too if asked directly in a submission form). The question now is: can we encourage more publishers to take up the request to capture and transmit this information accurately and register it with Crossref?

We’re hopeful. This first year has demonstrated the enormous potential of Crossref Grant IDs in action for NWO. We call on publishers to do their bit in ensuring this vital infrastructure reaches its full potential for the research community.

An eLife filled with possibility thanks to great metadata

Frederick Atherden — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

eLife recently won a Crossref Metadata Award for the completeness of its metadata, showing itself as the clear leader among our medium-sized members. In this post, the eLife team answers our questions about how and why they produce such high-quality open metadata. For eLife, the work of creating and sharing excellent metadata aligns with their mission to foster open science and supports their preprint-centred publication model, but it also lays the groundwork for all kinds of exciting potential uses.

Having complete and rich metadata puts you in the best position to fulfil future, as-yet-undetermined requirements.

– Fred Atherden, eLife

What motivates your organisation/team to work towards high-quality metadata? What objectives does it support for your organisation?

eLife is a mission-driven organisation tasked by its founders to help scientists accelerate discovery and encourage responsible behaviours in science. As such, we’re passionate about open science and metadata, and we’re vocal advocates of the benefits these provide to academic communities and beyond.

Given Crossref’s position as a hub at the centre of scholarly communication, providing Crossref with complete metadata furthers our mission. It facilitates the discovery and reuse of research and enables linkage to key but often overlooked outputs such as datasets and software. As signatories of DORA and supporters of the Barcelona Declaration, we are keenly aware of the wider context - that these efforts enable research assessment and policy decisions to be derived from open and transparent information, moving beyond closed systems that have proliferated the damaging use of anachronistic metrics.

Do you have a strategy for complete metadata? Which elements did you prioritise? What workflows, tools, or collaborations helped you get there?

There are plenty of existing guidelines that provide a great skeleton to follow. For example, we follow FAIR data and FORCE11 software citation principles, which ensure the capture of metadata for supporting datasets and software packages. There’s not any one particular element that we’ve prioritised, although we’re keen to ensure we follow best practices while also exploring the bleeding edge.

We’ve collaborated with and relied on the advice of many organisations over the years, including (but not limited to) Crossref, Research Organization Registry (ROR), JATS4R, FORCE11, Software Heritage, openRxiv, and our production vendors Exeter Premedia.

We’ve developed our own open source Crossref metadata generation library. Keeping this process in-house has proven really fruitful. It allows us to quickly and continuously improve upon the metadata we provide.

And we have a data team that has created a centralised data hub, serving as a really useful authoritative resource that can be queried, instead of always making use of disparate systems.

How have you integrated these into your metadata processes?

At submission, we collect ROR IDs for (a subset of) affiliations, and structured data for funding, datasets, and other information. Our publication model is centred around preprints, so it’s necessary to capture related information such as the preprint DOI, preprint posted date, the version that pertains to each specific revision (and so on). Without this information, we could not post public reviews to the correct preprint version on the preprint server, or indeed ensure the article we publish is the correct iteration of that work.

The systems that enable the publication of eLife Reviewed preprints are dependent on DocMaps, a framework for a machine-readable representation of the processes involved in the creation of a document. These are provided by our Data Hub and enable us to capture structured information about the peer review process and accompanying metadata for each article.

Our proofing system for journal articles only permits login via ORCID authentication, and we don’t capture unauthenticated ORCID IDs that have been copied or keyed (see ‘What’s So Special About Signing In?’). It also makes use of both the Crossref API and the PubMed Central API to ensure we have persistent identifiers where possible for references. We have an in-house content validator, which uses ROR’s API to ensure we have ROR IDs for affiliations and funders where possible. We use Software Heritage to archive author-generated code, and include their persistent ID (SWHID) in software references.

All our published content is captured as JATS XML (the industry standard format for journal articles), which our metadata generation library uses as its input.

What impact of good metadata can you see for your organisation? Is it supporting the business and/or editorial side of your work?

Persistent identifiers are very useful for reporting. Creating a report that, for example, includes publication volumes from a particular institution is trivial when content is enriched with persistent identifiers. It’s more complex when all you have are messy author-supplied strings of text. They’re also useful for content validation. For example, when we have a persistent ID and a method to retrieve the related metadata, we can confirm that the information we’ve been provided is complete and correct.

There are, of course, many other benefits, some of which are “unknown unknowns.” Having complete and rich metadata puts you in the best position to fulfil future, as-yet-undetermined requirements.

Have you encountered any challenges in curating or improving your metadata? If so, what were they, and how did you address those?

In 2024, we started introducing persistent grant IDs for our content. While we updated our submission system to collect these from authors, it’s apparent that many authors aren’t aware when/if these have been registered by funders, and they still provide us with the (internal) grant numbers instead.

Our workaround was to pull grant data from Crossref and then replace the grant numbers with the persistent IDs when we’re confident of a match. Since the grant number registered at Crossref might not exactly match the grant number the authors have given us, potential matches are confirmed by a team member or our production vendors. Since many organisations do a great job of creating informative landing pages (for example, EuropePMC for Wellcome funding), this is feasible, but we’re investigating ways we can make this less manual while remaining careful that we don’t introduce false positives.

Have your efforts around metadata led to real benefits for your community? Is this something your editors, authors, or readers are aware of and appreciate? If so, why?

Yes, I think this is something that is becoming increasingly visible. Authors are very mindful of the benefits that good metadata can bring for discoverability and promotion. And much is lost without the increased interoperability it brings, both for publishers themselves but also the wider ecosystem. For example, we’ve had some great feedback from numerous organisations that appreciate that the outputs we publish directly link to the preprints they are based on.

In recent years, there’s been an increased focus on research integrity, and this is likely to remain the case. Metadata has an obvious and key role in providing trust and transparency, whether that’s through the presence of trust markers like ORCID IDs or through the inclusion of complete post-publication metadata such as correction, retraction, or withdrawal information.

Looking ahead, how are you planning to build on your metadata quality? Are there new elements or practices you’re exploring? And what advice would you give to others just starting to strengthen their metadata?

Several years ago, we introduced a “publish, review, curate” model of publishing, where we publish ‘Reviewed preprints’ following each stage of review. We don’t collect the same level of structured information from authors at submission for these as we do for Versions of Record. This presents a challenge for retrieving and disseminating complete metadata for Reviewed preprints. We aim to start moving this forward so that comprehensive metadata is available at earlier stages of the publication process. For example, we recently started depositing (some) funding metadata for these.

We’re also keen to explore the ways in which we can make our eLife Assessments more discoverable. Our Editors use a common vocabulary to describe the significance of the findings and strength of evidence in a paper. Other publishers moving beyond accept/reject publication models use different rubrics and taxonomies, so having one restrictive field in a schema for the entire corpus of research won’t cut it. But nevertheless making these terms more discoverable and interoperable would be preferential.

We’ve found that the integration of public APIs/data within systems (such as ROR’s, Crossref’s, PubMed’s, and OpenAlex’s) to be really helpful in validating the correctness and completeness of content/metadata. The effort in adding these integrations will pay dividends in the future.

Time to enjoy Fred’s acceptance video.

Metadata Awards video - eLife

Mejorando la visibilidad a través de los metadatos: una mirada desde Editorial CSIC

Nacho Pérez Alcalde — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Click here for the version in English

Hablamos con Nacho Pérez Alcalde, Vicedirector Técnico de Editorial CSIC, la editorial al mando de ´Boletín Geológico y Minero’, ganadora del Crossref Metadata Award en la categoría de Metadata Enrichment. Miembro de Crossref desde 2008, Editorial CSIC publica 41 revistas en acceso abierto Diamante, y juega un papel esencial en la diseminación del conocimiento científico a nivel internacional. Exploramos lo que este premio ha significado para Editorial CSIC y qué planes para el futuro tienen para seguir mejorando la calidad y uso de sus metadatos.

El ‘Boletín Geológico y Minero’ ha recibido el primer premio de Crossref al enriquecimiento de vuestros metadatos ya que en tan solo dos años, ha visto la cobertura de los metadatos pasar del 1 al 40%. ¿Cuáles han sido las motivaciones que han llevado a esta revista a ver una mejora tan grande en sus metadatos?

Editorial CSIC publica 41 revistas científicas, todas ellas presentes en los principales indexadores. Son revistas de prestigio que ofrecen, desde hace muchos años, contenidos revisados de alta calidad. Sin embargo, hoy en día, no es ya suficiente para una revista científica ofrecer contenidos de calidad, hoy en día es necesario ofrecer también una alta calidad en los metadatos generados por esas publicaciones. Algo que hace no muchos años veíamos como un servicio de valor añadido se ha convertido en algo imprescindible.

En un entorno de trabajo electrónico y en Internet, los metadatos son claves para la difusión de los contenidos, la identificación de revistas, autores/as, instituciones editoras, entidades financiadoras… Para un editor es fundamental poder transmitir esa información según unos procedimientos técnicos y unos protocolos estandarizados para garantizar su compatibilidad con las máquinas que cosechan, almacenan y distribuyen datos favoreciendo la visibilidad y la descubribilidad de nuestras revistas.

¿Seguis alguna estrategia? ¿Cómo decidís qué elementos priorizar?

Llevamos años trabajando con metadatos y, de forma periódica, vamos revisando y ampliando el número de elementos que convertimos en metadatos. Damos prioridad siempre a lo que es ya un estándar claramente identificado (por ejemplo el ORCID) y también a aquellos metadatos alineados con las políticas editoriales que consideramos prioritarias (por ejemplo la licencia CC by que aplicamos).

El flujo de trabajo requiere como primer paso la identificación, por parte del editor, de los datos que se quieren obtener y de cómo se van a pedir. Una vez se integran todos ellos en la política de envío de originales a la revista, es imprescindible la colaboración de los autores que son los que aportan los datos que, en una fase posterior son revisados por un editor técnico especializado en metadatos (diferente al revisor de texto). Por último, es imprescindible contar con una herramienta que permita automatizar la transferencia de metadatos y aquí es muy importante contar con personal técnico especializado. Nosotros trabajamos con la plataforma OJS, yo he pasado años depositando metadatos en Crossref con los archivos XML que generábamos, uno a uno. Con 1.000 artículos publicados de media al año, la creación del Módulo de exportación CrossRef XML de OJS para el depósito automatizado desde la plataforma fue de gran ayuda para nosotros porque aligera bastante el trabajo, asegura una mayor fiabilidad y nos permite dedicar nuestro tiempo a mejorar otras cosas.

También nos da una mayor flexibilidad a la hora de revisar nuestras políticas de datos, por ejemplo, nos ha permitido abordar un depósito masivo para actualizar todas nuestras referencias para corregir errores recurrentes.

¿Cómo habéis integrado esto en vuestra estrategia de metadatos?

El Crossref Metadata Enrichment Award ha sido concedido en concreto a la revista Boletín Geológico y Minero por haber experimentado una gran mejora en sus metadatos en los últimos años. Esta revista era editada por otra institución y cuando Editorial CSIC se hizo cargo de ella le aplicamos los mismos estándares que venimos utilizando en el resto de nuestras revistas desde hace años. Nos sentimos por ello especialmente orgullosos, porque entendemos este premio como el aval a una política de metadatos que llevamos años desarrollando y que ha permitido una mejora importante para esta revista en un tiempo relativamente corto.

Para ello fue clave la colaboración de la dirección científica de la revista, nosotros explicamos primero qué datos deben ser solicitados a los autores, por qué y para qué, y luego nos ocupamos de confirmar que se han ido integrando en los artículos y de implementarlos en la plataforma OJS para proceder después a su depósito en Crossref pero también a su integración en otras vías de difusión de metadatos.

A nivel de impacto, ¿cómo veis que una buena cobertura de los metadatos afecta a vuestra organización? ¿Beneficia de alguna manera vuestro trabajo editorial? O cualquier otro aspecto de vuestra actividad?

Más allá de sus beneficios obvios como potenciar la visibilidad de nuestras publicaciones y contribuir a manejar una información controlada y de calidad, en última instancia deberían ayudarnos a posicionarnos como grupo profesional. Nuestra función esencial es publicar contenido científico revisado y de calidad y transmitirlo a la comunidad científica y, cada vez más, a toda la sociedad. Sin embargo, hoy en día, deberíamos aspirar a ser identificados también como proveedores de datos. Y eso, en “la era del dato”, es mucho decir. Debemos ser capaces de extraer los metadatos de nuestras publicaciones aportados por los autores (palabras claves, filiación, bibliografías…) pero también debemos ser capaces de generar nosotros otros metadatos y de transmitirlos y difundirlos.

Las revistas científicas deben seguir contando con un editor que haga una revisión ortotipografía y de pruebas, pero también deben contar con un editor de metadatos, alguien que sepa qué es FundRef y sepa dónde y cómo hay que introducir los datos en la plataforma para garantizar que se conservan y transfieren de manera correcta y eficiente.

Por ello, quiero aprovechar esta ocasión para reivindicar el papel del editor como generador y proveedor de datos. Los editores somos la fuente de datos, hay agentes como las bibliotecas e indexadores que los cosechan, archivan, transmiten y procesan para, por ejemplo, generar nuevos contenidos o servicios, pero solo nosotros tenemos la capacidad de generarlos.

¿Habéis encontrado dificultades a la hora de mejorar y manejar vuestros metadatos? En ocasiones los autores se quejan de que se les piden muchos datos, por ejemplo, el uso de ORCID es obligatorio en nuestras publicaciones y muchos autores, sobre todo de ámbitos no europeos, se han quejado porque no saben qué es y para qué sirve o, por motivos personales, no quieren registrar ese identificador personal. Son motivos respetables, por supuesto, pero para nosotros prima la necesidad de identificar correctamente a cada autor y creemos que el ORCID ayuda a ello.

Otro problema habitual es que muchos autores, al citar una fuente de financiación, utilizan el nombre de la entidad financiadora pero a veces no lo ponen completo, o no incluyen el acrónimo o lo que es peor, ponen el nombre pero no el código de la institución o del proyecto. Los autores están acostumbrados a escribir pensando en los lectores “humanos” y no en las máquinas que van a procesar después toda esa información. Nuestro papel, como editores de metadatos, pasa por informarles, de forma didáctica, de la importancia de aportar esos códigos y pedírselos si vemos que no los han incluido en su manuscrito.

Y con respecto a vuestra comunidad, ¿se ha visto beneficiada de vuestro esfuerzo para tener unos metadatos completos y de alta calidad? ¿Están los autores, editores o lectores al tanto de estos esfuerzos o lo valoran?

Para el editor técnico es más sencillo valorarlo, nosotros sabemos cómo funciona el entorno, lo importante que es la interoperabilidad de las plataformas, la rapidez y amplitud de transmisión que puede alcanzar un dato y lo importante que es que esté correcto desde su origen porque luego puede ser muy, muy difícil corregirlo y controlarlo. Somos conscientes también de su posible impacto porque sabemos cómo los sistemas de información se alimentan unos de otros y comparten información, una información que generamos nosotros.

Los editores científicos, autores y lectores suelen valorarlo menos y no siempre son conscientes de su relevancia, aunque no se puede generalizar. Y de hecho, aunque creo que todos deberían tener al menos unas nociones básicas de cómo funciona, creo que los autores ya están bastante saturados con todos los requerimientos que les pedimos para entregar sus manuscritos como para que les pidamos, además, formación específica en metadatos. Para eso (entre otras cosas) estamos los editores, para indicarles qué datos y cómo los deben aportar.

No obstante, hoy en día todo el mundo está familiarizado con lo que son y lo que se puede hacer con los datos, todos consumimos productos muy diversos a través de internet y tenemos al menos nociones de lo que son los metadatos, los datos personales, los algoritmos… Hace años era mucho más complejo hacer didáctica de esto, pero hoy en día cualquiera lo entiende fácilmente y más en un ámbito científico y tecnológico como el de nuestras publicaciones.

Con la vista puesta en el futuro, tenéis algún plan para seguir construyendo sobre lo ya creado? ¿Algún elemento que queráis seguir implementando o prácticas que queráis incorporar en vuestra manera de trabajar?

En editorial CSIC, desde que comenzamos a publicar en formato electrónico y a distribuir nuestras revistas electrónicas en línea, hace ya casi 20 años, siempre estamos tratando de innovar en diseños, plataformas de gestión, formatos de archivo… Hablando de cosas concretas, hemos ampliado el uso obligatorio de ORCID y DOI a las contribuciones que no son puramente artículos científicos (hasta ahora nuestras reseñas, obituarios y textos similares no los tenían) y estamos valorando la implementación de identificadores ROR para organizaciones de investigación.

¿Qué consejos darías a aquellas organizaciones que están comenzando a mejorar la calidad de sus metadatos?

Para aquellos editores que están empezando a reforzar sus metadatos me atrevería a indicar algo aparentemente lógico y sencillo pero que creo que no siempre se hace: que planifiquen con calma y en detalle una política editorial de datos basada en identificar y seleccionar los datos que consideren prioritarios e implementar, después, protocolos para solicitarlos a sus autores e integrarlos en las plataformas editoriales y, por último, configurar correctamente dichas plataformas para asegurar una correcta exportación.

El metadato requiere de una cadena en la que trabajan diversas personas con distintos perfiles, hay que tener recursos para afianzar esa cadena y hay que tener en cuenta que no basta con pedir los datos a los autores, hay que seguir el recorrido de los datos desde su origen hasta donde podamos y eso no termina cuando los depositamos en Crossref: podemos depositarlos de manera adicional en otros sitios, podemos darles otras salidas y, además, debemos volver sobre ellos si detectamos algún error sistemático que podamos corregir.

Los Metadata Excellence Awards fueron entregados en mayo de 2025, en el contexto del encuentro anual de Crossref con su comunidad. Os dejamos el vídeo de aceptación del premio por parte de la revista Boletín Geológico y Minero, editada por Editorial CSIC.

Y ahora disfruta de este vídeo de aceptación.

Version in English

Improving visibility through metadata: a look from CSIC Editorial

We spoke with Nacho Pérez Alcalde, Technical Deputy Director of Editorial CSIC, the publisher behind ‘Boletín Geológico y Minero’, recipient of the Crossref Metadata Award in the Metadata Enrichment category. A Crossref member since 2008, Editorial CSIC publishes 41 Diamond Open Access journals and plays a key role in scholarly communication at the international level. We explore what this award has meant for Editorial CSIC and what plans they have for the future to continue improving the quality and use of their metadata.

What motivates your team to work towards high-quality metadata? What objectives does it support for your organisation?

Editorial CSIC publishes 41 scientific journals, all of which are included in major indexing databases. These are prestigious journals that have offered high-quality, peer-reviewed content for many years. However, today, it is no longer enough for a scientific journal to provide quality content alone; it is now also essential to deliver high-quality metadata associated with those publications. What just a few years ago was considered a value-added service has now become indispensable.

In an electronic and internet-based working environment, metadata is key to content dissemination and to the identification of journals, authors, publishing institutions, and funding organizations. For a publisher, it is crucial to be able to transmit this information through technical procedures and standardised protocols to ensure compatibility with the systems that harvest, store, and distribute data, enhancing the visibility and discoverability of our journals.

Do you have a strategy for complete metadata?

We’ve been working with metadata for years and, periodically, we review and expand the number of elements we convert into metadata. We always prioritise what is already a clearly established standard (for example, ORCID), as well as metadata aligned with editorial policies we consider a priority (such as the CC BY license we apply).

The workflow begins with the editor identifying the data to be collected and how it will be requested. Once this is integrated into the journal’s submission guidelines, the collaboration of authors becomes essential, as they are the ones who provide the data. In a later phase, the data is reviewed by a technical editor specialising in metadata (different from the content reviewer). Finally, it’s crucial to have a tool that enables the automated transfer of metadata, and here, having specialised technical staff is very important.

We work with the OJS platform; I spent years depositing metadata in Crossref using XML files that we generated manually, one by one. With an average of 1,000 articles published per year, the creation of the Crossref XML export module in OJS for automated deposit from the platform was a huge help for us – it significantly lightened the workload, ensured greater reliability, and allowed us to focus our time on improving other aspects.

It also gives us more flexibility when reviewing our data policies. For example, it allowed us to carry out a bulk deposit to update all our references in order to correct a recurring error.

How have you integrated these into your metadata processes?

The Crossref Metadata Enrichment Award was specifically granted to the journal Boletín Geológico y Minero for having shown significant improvement in its metadata in recent years. This journal was previously published by another institution, and when Editorial CSIC took over, we applied the same standards we have been using for our other journals for many years. We are especially proud of this because we see the award as recognition of a metadata policy we’ve been developing over the years, one that has led to significant improvements for this journal in a relatively short time.

The collaboration of the journal’s scientific leadership was key to achieving this. We first explained which data should be requested from authors, why, and for what purpose. Then we ensured that the data was being properly integrated into the articles and implemented it within the OJS platform. From there, we proceeded with depositing the metadata in Crossref and also integrating it into other metadata dissemination channels.

What impact of good metadata can you see for your organisation? Is it supporting the business and/or editorial side of your work?

Beyond their obvious benefits, such as increasing the visibility of our publications and contributing to the management of controlled, high-quality information, they should ultimately help us position ourselves as a professional group. Our essential role is to publish peer-reviewed, high-quality scientific content and deliver it to the scientific community and, increasingly, to society at large. However, today, we should also aim to be recognised as data providers. And that, in the “age of data,” is a significant shift. We must be able to extract metadata from our publications-supplied by authors (keywords, affiliations, bibliographies…). We also need to generate other metadata ourselves, and transmit and disseminate those effectively. Scientific journals must still have editors who perform copy editing and proofreading, but they must also have metadata editors, people who understand what FundRef is, and know where and how to input data into the platform to ensure it is preserved and transferred correctly and efficiently.

That’s why I want to take this opportunity to highlight the role of the editor as a generator and provider of data. Editors are the source of data. There are other actors-like libraries and indexers-who harvest, archive, transmit, and process that data to, for example, create new content or services. But only we have the capacity to generate it.

Have you encountered any challenges in curating or improving your metadata?

Sometimes authors complain about being asked for too much information. For example, the use of ORCID is mandatory in our publications, and many authors, especially those from non-European regions, have complained because they don’t know what it is or what it’s for, or – for personal reasons – they don’t want to register for a personal identifier. These reasons are, of course, valid and understandable, but for us, the priority is to correctly identify each author, and we believe ORCID helps achieve that. Another common issue is that when authors cite a funding source, they often include the name of the funding body, but sometimes don’t write it in full, or they omit the acronym, or worse – they include the name but not the institution or project code. Authors are used to writing with “human” readers in mind, not the machines that will later process all that information. Our role, as metadata editors, involves educating them about the importance of providing these codes and requesting them when we see they’ve been left out of the manuscript.

Have your efforts around metadata led to real benefits for your community? Is this something your editors, authors, or readers are aware of and appreciate? If so, why?

For the technical editor, it’s easier to assess the value of metadata. We understand how the ecosystem works, how important platform interoperability is, how quickly and widely data can be transmitted, and how crucial it is for data to be correct from the very beginning. Once it’s out there, it can be very, very difficult to correct or control. We’re also aware of its potential impact because we know how information systems feed off each other and share information – information that we generate.

Scientific editors, authors, and readers tend to value it less and aren’t always aware of its importance, though of course there are exceptions. While I believe everyone should at least have a basic understanding of how it works, I also think authors are already overwhelmed with all the requirements we ask of them when submitting manuscripts. Editors are here to guide them on what data to provide and how to provide it.

That said, today, everyone is at least somewhat familiar with what data is and what can be done with it. We all consume a wide variety of digital content online and have at least a basic idea of what metadata, personal data, and algorithms are. A few years ago, explaining all this was much more difficult, but nowadays, it’s much easier for people to grasp, especially within the scientific and technological environment in which we publish.

Looking ahead, how are you planning to build on your metadata quality? Are there new elements or practices you’re exploring? And what advice would you give to others just starting to strengthen their metadata?

At Editorial CSIC, ever since we began publishing in electronic format and distributing our journals online, almost 20 years ago, we have consistently sought to innovate in design, management platforms, and file formats. Speaking of specific actions, we have extended the mandatory use of ORCID and DOI to contributions that are not strictly scientific articles (until now, our book reviews, obituaries, and similar texts didn’t have them), and we are currently considering the implementation of ROR identifiers for research organizations.

Do you have any advice for organisations that are making an effort to improve the quality of their metadata?

For editors who are just beginning to strengthen their metadata, I would suggest something that seems logical and simple, but is not always put into practice: take the time to calmly and thoroughly plan a data policy. This should be based on identifying and selecting which data elements are most important, then implementing protocols to request them from authors and integrate them into editorial platforms, and finally, configuring those platforms correctly to ensure proper export.

Metadata involves a chain of tasks carried out by people with different profiles. You need to have resources to strengthen that chain. It’s good to remember that it’s not enough to simply ask authors for data – you have to follow the data along its entire path from the source as far as possible. That journey doesn’t end when we deposit it in Crossref: we can also deposit it in other repositories, find additional ways to disseminate it, and we must revisit it if we detect any recurring errors that can be corrected.

And now enjoy this acceptance video.

We’ve migrated to the cloud; we hope you didn’t notice (but maybe you did)

Sara Bowman — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

TLDR: We’ve successfully moved the main Crossref systems to the cloud! We’ve more to do, with several bugs identified and fixed, and a few still ongoing. However, it’s a step in the right direction and a significant milestone, as, whilst it is a much larger financial investment, it addresses several risks and limitations and shores up the Crossref infrastructure for the future.

Some background

We have been doing a lot of thinking, planning, and working on paying down our technical debt and modernising our systems. It’s not fun and flashy work, but it is vital for sustaining our infrastructure, meeting the demand on existing services, and developing new services.

Just about a year ago, we completed phase one, migrating our main database from Oracle to PostgreSQL, an open-source database. This move brought us more in line with our commitment to the POSI principles, reduced our dependencies on costly private licenses, and opened up the possibility to use and offer additional and more contemporary features. With the transition to PostgreSQL we made upgrades to the operating system, the database software, and the underlying hardware, resulting in significant improvements to the overall throughput and capacity of the deposit system. Previously, we typically maintained a queue of more than 10,000 deposits waiting to be processed; now, the queue holds fewer than 100 deposits on average. Consequently, the average latency – the elapsed time from submission to deposit – has reduced from hours to seconds.

During phase one, a total of 35 new servers were created, and for the first time, the entire system configuration was defined through infrastructure-as-code, enabling the infrastructure to be recreated as necessary. This effort not only enabled the migration but also established a solid foundation for our cloud migration strategy, as the code was leveraged to configure our infrastructure on AWS. Additionally, it serves as a critical component of our disaster recovery planning.

Most importantly, phase one set us up for phase two and our next migration: moving the system into the cloud.

Why we moved to the cloud

We had been running most of our services in a physical data centre near Boston, MA, USA (there are a few exceptions: the REST API and our test system (test.crossref.org) were already in the cloud, as was the Crossref website). We’ve been planning to move to the cloud for ahem quite some time, but as always, competing priorities and limited resources have thwarted us, and the data centre was mainly serving us well.

But… with staff across 12 countries, and increased global use of our system, operating our own hardware in a physical data centre was becoming increasingly challenging and risky, not to mention, frustrating.

Moving to the cloud has solved several pain points for us:

Physical access to the data centre was required for various tasks (e.g., hardware upgrades, troubleshooting, general maintenance), but as Crossref grew as an organisation and became more distributed, we had fewer staff in the area. Hosting services in the cloud means staff around the world can access our servers remotely from anywhere (and we can leave the hardware upgrades to our vendor).
Scalability in the data centre required installing new hardware or upgrading connections, which also meant a good amount of time. In the cloud, we can scale up almost instantly.
We can maintain copies of our databases and services in distributed places, providing insurance against natural or other disasters. Upgrades now don’t involve buying physical hardware and installing it; it’s a much quicker and more straightforward process.

Moving from a physical data centre to the cloud also has some trade-offs; for instance, the cost will be approximately five times higher than running the system in the data centre; with initial data, it’s not unlikely the annual cost may be up to 2,000,000 USD. We aim to optimise and control this cost going forward.

What we did

The size of the undertaking was partly due to leaving it so long; technical debt has accumulated over many years of running the system in the data centre.

The whole plan was hugely detailed, but we can distil it to a few bullets:

We conducted an analysis of components, considered risks and sequencing, and created a test plan and timeline, including comms.
While most of the drive and work was on the shoulders of two infrastructure services colleagues, our software engineers were heavily involved too, and we had weekly check-ins with a cross-team group to review progress, reassess risks, and adjust timelines as we got closer to the migration date (or decided to move it once or twice).
We first created the deposit system in the cloud.
We then created other parts of our services that aren’t in the deposit system code base, but run alongside it, such as reports, querying, and other tools. We replicated our databases (of which there are several, in a few different flavours - PostgreSQL, MySQL).
We gave 14 days’ notice to our members, via email, and kept this maintenance notice up to date.
We commenced the migration on 8th July, which involved taking the whole system down and rejecting deposits for up to 24 hours.
In the process, we scripted the process to create CS and the other services using Terraform and Ansible, so that going forward, bringing up a whole new instance of CS (should we need to) won’t be a manual process.
We moved the DNS to point at our new system in the cloud, rather than the data centre. We brought the system back up on 9th July, after 14 hours of downtime, and watched the first few deposits come in, while testing thoroughly.
Alongside the technical team, the membership and support team was at the ready to work through the testing in the new live production environment.

The message we sent to members, Metadata Plus subscribers, and key integrators like PKP and Turnitin, listed which services would be down and described what changes they might see, such as:

The system timezone shifted from EST to UTC (universal coordinated time), which would be noticeable in the timestamps reported back to members after metadata deposits
Our IP address became dynamic and is no longer static. If members had hardcoded our previous IP static address to connect to our services, that would no longer work.
We previously allowed connections using the HTTP/1.0 protocol, but now require HTTP/1.1. Likewise, we previously allowed TLS version 1.1, but now require at least version 1.2. Older ciphers will not work. A list of accepted ciphers can be found on this page for “ELBSecurityPolicy-TLS13-1-2-2021-06”.

How it went and what’s next

We still have more to do, with both expected and unexpected issues arising from the migration. There are a couple of functions that still route through the data centre, configuration changes to wrangle, and processes to iron out, so we’ll be keeping that open for another couple of months.

Those were the known issues…

…we also uncovered a few bugs along the way, and we’ve been reporting those (and our progress toward fixing them) on our status page. See history.

A few diligent members also alerted us to problems they were having. In some cases, we could tell why, and in many cases, their systems needed to be upgraded to work with ours. Thanks go to mEDRA, Spandidos Publications, and Stichting SciPost who helped us identify gaps that resulted in configuration improvements and lessons learned (that we then shared with other members).

There were three issues that we were contacted about more than others:

Delayed delivery of notification emails which is partly due to the volume of backlogged notification emails in the system.
- Mostly solved: We have repaired delivery of notification emails for all metadata deposits and are working on a fix for the delivery of messages associated with very large queries.
A small percentage of registered records not being indexed in the REST API - this can cause downstream issues for a number of other services (e.g., Crossref metadata search - search.crossref.org, Participation Reports, ORCID auto-update, and for external services that make use of the metadata from our REST API).
- Mostly solved: All records in July are now indexed in the REST API, albeit we have new reports of a few records missing in the last week, which we are actively investigating.
Delayed delivery of July’s resolution reports.
- Solved - not only has July’s resolution report run completed, but we also completed August’s ahead of schedule.

This migration was a significant effort, and 2025’s top priority project for the Open and Sustainable Operations (OSO) program team. Overall, we’re happy with our progress toward making Crossref infrastructure more robust, reliable, and future-proof. And judging by the messages of support we received, you are too! Onwards to the next infrastructure project… check out our roadmap to see what’s up next.

References

‘Infrastructure as code’ (2025) Wikipedia, 12 August. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrastructure_as_code (Accessed: 12 August 2025).
‘The programs approach: our experiences during the first quarter of 2025’ (2025) Crossref. Available at: https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.64000/4s2ee-wkr84 (Accessed: 12 August 2025).

From storage closet to metadata champions: ASM's journey toward a smarter scholarly infrastructure

David Haber — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The American Society for Microbiology (ASM) has earned recognition in Crossref’s Participation Reports for its exceptional metadata coverage among large publishing members––an achievement built on intentional change, technical investment, and collaborative work. In this Q&A, the ASM team shares what that journey looked like, the challenges they’ve tackled, and how centering metadata has helped them better connect research with the global scientific community.

A key lesson we learned is that meaningful progress doesn’t require perfection from day one. Start small, find manageable wins, refine as you go, and build a shared understanding across all your teams.

– David Haber, ASM

Since we first featured your metadata efforts in 2022, what developments or improvements have you made—and how does this new recognition reflect the journey so far?

Once we completed our initial metadata cleanup of our backfile and made sure that we were producing good, clean, and consistent Crossref metadata (no small feat), we realized that each new policy, process, or even style change should be viewed through a metadata capture lens. By looking at our publishing goals through that lens, we are better able to see the right time and method to help enrich and “grow” both our article metadata breadth and depth. Much of the metadata work is invisible or an afterthought. But the recognition of ASM’s coverage in the participation reports has affirmed that our change in perspective — shifting from viewing Crossref metadata as something produced as an afterthought to centering our processes around the creation of that metadata — has put us on the right path.

Have any of your goals around metadata changed or grown since then? What feels different about your work now compared to when you were first featured?

When we first started on our various metadata cleanup projects, it felt like there were just a few of us, arguing, agreeing, and arguing some more about obscure tagging structures and proper XML modeling in a closet––literally… My office actually was an old storage closet, and my pre-pandemic whiteboard still has that ghostly blue haze of angle brackets scribbled with dry-erase markers.

Since then, our goals have shifted significantly. Early on, we just wanted all our content mapped to DOIs; then we thought, “Oh wait. Let’s include as many abstracts as possible. And references. If we have the data, let’s send it.” Now that we have a strong metadata foundation, we can think proactively about what to capture and transmit, how we want to prioritize our efforts, and how to make research we publish more discoverable to those who need it.

Looking back, were there any changes in internal collaboration or external partnerships that influenced your progress?

Over the past three to four years, we have made some significant changes to our partnerships. We migrated to a new online platform (Atypon), a new production partner (Kriyadocs), a new submission platform (Chronoshub), and a new billing system (RLSC). Each of these partnerships allowed us to evaluate how we were capturing metadata, when that capture occurred, and how best to improve the QC process to ensure accuracy and quality. These partnerships accelerated all our efforts to improve hidden metadata and finally brought them out of the storage closet into the light.

Have you adopted any new tools, standards, or technologies since your last blog?

Our production software (Kriyadocs) has centered metadata capture as a core function. We have processes and procedures that match all affiliations to Ringgold and ROR IDs. We have invested heavily in partnerships with organizations like Chronoshub to utilize natural language processing, automating the identification of authors and affiliations, so that users no longer have to fill out tedious forms. We embraced ORCID and strongly encourage all authors to register for one if they don’t already have it. We have also adopted the CRediT taxonomy as a contributor framework and have built processes to make it easy for authors to stay within that taxonomy.

Have you encountered any challenges in curating or improving your metadata? If so – what were they and how did you address those?

The core problem (from our perspective) has always been the difference between author profile information and what is actually submitted in manuscripts. Auto-extraction of manuscript data into submission forms is one small step toward unifying author identity with manuscript data. One of our biggest pain points now is reconciling the chaotic data on author affiliations in manuscripts with institutional identifiers. Over the next year, this will be one of our main initiatives.

The capture of ORCID IDs has improved our ability to match papers to editors and identify hidden conflicts of interest. ORCID IDs have also helped us expand our reviewer pool, as they enable us to better disambiguate individuals with similar names.

Because we now capture CRediT roles in a controlled manner (rather than as loose text in the acknowledgments section), we are better able to identify when authors are contributing equally and how authors determine author order in the byline when this occurs. This analysis was undertaken by one of our Editors-in-Chief to study gender bias when authors contributed equally to a work. Now that we capture CRediT roles as structured data, we can build on his research.

In the last two years, we have also begun capturing Data Availability Statements and Ethics Statements in unique metadata fields (rather than as unstructured text in the body of an article or in the acknowledgments sections) because some of our editors are curious about open data policy compliance and whether there is higher uptake of open science initiatives in certain microbiology fields.

RC: These are very interesting and quite profound results, especially for integrity and equality in the publishing process! Good to see how useful you find this information as we’re approaching our schema updates to include contributor roles, among other things. I see that editors are already on board and taking advantage of high quality metadata. Are authors more engaged with metadata now than before?

Our authors likely are engaged too––though we have tried to build author metadata QC into our proofing and typesetting process in such a way that they wouldn’t even notice.

What challenges have you encountered while sustaining or scaling your metadata work?

In the realm of metadata, there are two standard solutions: 1) hire vendors to clean data at the end (the throw-people-at-the-problem philosophy); or 2) trust a black-box technical solution. The problem with the first method is that it is inefficient and can become expensive. The issue with the second is that, in my experience, most technical solutions have an 80% success rate. That may be acceptable for certain types of data, but it can fail spectacularly at the worst possible moment.

For example, let’s say you find a technical solution that parses affiliation data in such a way as to assign a PID. Great, wonderful. Let’s say your parser is the best natural language processor in the world and makes matches 90% of the time (if you have one that does this, I’m all ears). You announce that you are including these IDs. Everyone cheers. It is great, right? Now, imagine you want to use those IDs to identify subscribing institutions to offer discounts or fee-less publishing for authors. You also want to use those IDs to send alerts to institutional admins of publishing activity. In both situations, achieving 90% accuracy simply won’t work. What we’ve learned is that black-box technology and ’throw people at it’ philosophies cannot work alone. Metadata curation must be a collaborative effort among authors, publishers, funders, and institutions, where the information grows throughout the research process.

What’s next? Are you exploring any new metadata elements or areas (e.g., funding data, peer review metadata, preprints)?

Over the next year, we will focus on CRediT identifiers and pass them to Crossref, along with institutional PIDs (ROR, Ringgold, and ISNI). We are also exploring various ways to capture peer reviewer activity and contributions, which will inevitably lead us down new and interesting paths.

Here’s the thing about metadata that I wish I’d known when I started: it’s not a project with a finish line. It’s more like tending a garden that keeps growing in unexpected directions. Every time you think you’ve got it figured out, someone invents a new identifier, or your authors start doing something creative with their affiliations, or a funder changes their requirements, and suddenly you’re back to the drawing board.

But what I’ve also learned from our journey out of that metaphorical (and literal) storage closet: the best metadata work happens when you start thinking of it as infrastructure. Good metadata is like good plumbing; when it’s working, nobody notices it, but when it’s not, everything backs up and gets messy fast.

If you’re just starting this journey, my advice is this: don’t try to boil the ocean (gosh, I still need to remember that one). Pick one thing. Perhaps it could be ORCID IDs or institutional identifiers. Do it really, really well. Then build on that success. And please, for the love of all that is holy, invest in good partnerships. We couldn’t have done any of this without partners who understood that metadata isn’t just data entry; it’s the connective tissue of scholarly communication.

Of course, even with the best partners and aligned teams, there will still be moments when you’ll sit dumbfounded in front of a screen where an author’s affiliation that was listed as “Bloomberg School of Public Health” matched to the identifier linked to the “Escuela Nacional de Sanidad.” On those days, just remember: at least you’re not still working in a storage closet with a haunted whiteboard.

Good metadata is more than just a technical specification, and it’s not just for those XML wonks and nerds. It’s a service to science, and its core mission is to help us understand the world around us.

– David Haber, ASM

ASM’s story is a reminder that building a strong metadata infrastructure isn’t just about meeting technical requirements—it’s about aligning people, tools, and values around the idea that clean, connected, and consistent metadata is foundational to open and discoverable research. Whether you’re starting small or overhauling major systems, their experience shows what’s possible when you treat metadata not as a checkbox, but as a core part of scholarly publishing.

Thank you, David, for taking the time to share your insights. Again, congratulations!

Changing fees to increase equity and reduce complexity

Amanda Bartell — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Crossref Board recently approved three recommendations for changes to our fees: introduction of a new lowest membership fee tier, removal of volume discounts for record registration, and normalisation of registration fees for peer reviews. The changes will be applied from January 2026.

This is the first outcome of the Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability (RCFS) program, launched in 2023, as a comprehensive effort to review all aspects of Crossref revenue and how we’re adapting to growth and the diversification of our membership. The program aims to make fees more equitable, simplify our complex fee schedule, and rebalance revenue sources.

Following two rounds of member surveys, feedback gathered from the community in polls, open discussions, and emails, the Membership and Fees (M&F) Committee (made up of 30+ representatives from members, service providers, sponsors, and community partners) discussed evidence and made the first round of recommendations to the Board this month. We’re very thankful for their time spent reviewing data and sharing their experiences to get to this point.

GOAL 1: More equitable fees

Our membership has changed over the years - members now tend to be less well-resourced, more likely to be based in Asia or Latin America, and more likely to be much smaller operations, some of which may not even be organisations but volunteer groups. We are seeing more universities join as members, and fewer members now consider themselves publishers first and foremost. With our mission of creating a complete global research nexus, this growing diversity is excellent news.

While new member growth is steady (2.3k members per year), over half join via a Sponsor (that makes membership more accessible both financially and technically), and close to 300 members have their membership revoked due to unpaid invoices each year, indicating that the current fee may be a barrier to participation for some.

Area of focus: Define a new basis for sizing and tiering members for their capacity to pay

Our annual membership fees are currently tiered according to the publishing revenue or expenses (whichever is higher) of each member. This enables each member to contribute to the community infrastructure according to their capacity to pay.

One of the first areas under consideration throughout 2024 was an option to change the basis of our membership fees from the publishing revenue (or expenses) of each organization to their overall organisational revenue (or expenses) instead.

Through surveys, discussions with the M&F committee, and at the Crossref 2024 Annual Meeting, we received strong feedback, particularly from those based at institutions and/or following a diamond open-access model, that making this change would put Crossref beyond their reach.

It became clear therefore that we should NOT change the basis for sizing and tiering members.

Instead, we will maintain the current basis for sizing and tiering members by considering their publishing revenue or expenses, whichever is higher. For non-publisher members, we advise taking ‘publishing’ to mean ‘producing’, so taking their cost of producing the works being registered with us, whether that is data, software, imagery, physical objects, etc.

Area of focus: Evaluate the USD 275 annual membership fee tier and propose a more equitable pricing structure, which might entail breaking this down into two or more different tiers.

We also looked into making our fees more equitable. It’s been long recognised that our lowest fee tier (an annual fee payment of USD 275 for all members with publishing revenue up to USD 1 million) represents a huge diversity of organisations operating within a range of financial contexts - over 95% of our non-sponsored members are in this category, and this is the category almost all new members join in. Throughout the project, we ran various surveys with our members to learn more about the makeup and factors affecting the capacity to pay for this group.

From January 2026, we will create a new annual membership tier for members whose publishing revenue/expenses (whichever is higher) is equal to or lower than USD 1,000 per year.

Based on survey data, we expect 30-60% of our current members in the current USD 275 tier to move to this new category. This new membership fee tier will be set at USD 200 in 2026, which is 27% lower than the current 275 membership fee. We will monitor the uptake in this category, with a view to identify necessary adjustments in future years. As a result, we expect a decrease in revenue of between USD 174k (if 30% of current lowest tier members move into the new tier) and USD 348k (if 60% of those members move into the new tier).

Our Membership team will reach out to help qualifying members change to the new tier well before January 2026. If your publishing revenue or expenses are equal to or lower than USD 1,000 per year, look out for our email in the next couple of weeks to help you transition to the lower USD 200 tier.

GOAL 2: Simplify complex fees

Area of focus: Address and adjust volume discounts for Content Registration

We currently offer volume discounts for several of our record types. These are calculated at the end of each quarter.

In order to reduce the complexity of our pricing, we will eliminate all volume discounts.

They are underused, accessible only to a small percentage of members, and the financial impact of making the change is small. These discounts contribute to complexity in our billing process and block our ability to offer members a running total or provide leaving members with a timely final invoice.

Having consulted with affected organisations, we’re reassured that the change will not adversely affect their ability to register their works with us. We appreciate their understanding of the overall positive impact of this change for Crossref and their support for our sustainability.

Area of focus: Reduce complexity in peer review fees

Finally, prompted by feedback from our members, we looked into normalising fees for peer review registration. We currently have two sets of fees for peer reviews based on whether the review is registered by the owner of the item being reviewed. There is a charge for the first review for a specific article, and a different charge for subsequent reviews for the same article by the same member. This charge for the subsequent reviews also varies depending on who registered the review. Very few members register peer reviews for records that they do not own, so having a separate, higher set of fees just adds complexity to the fee schedule with no financial or strategic benefit.

Starting from January 2026, we will consolidate all peer review fees, regardless of who registers it, to USD 0.25 for the first review for an article, and free registration for any subsequent reviews of that same record by the same member.

Area of focus: Address and adjust back-year discounts for record registration

Another recommendation, related to the removal of back-year discounts for select record types (conference proceedings, technical reports and working papers, theses and dissertations, and posted content/preprints) due to under use, hasn’t been approved yet. Based on feedback from the board, more research will be conducted on trends related to specific record types, such as theses and dissertations, so we can better understand potential unintended consequences of such changes.

We’re looking to retain back-year discounts for record types where they continue to be well-used, including those for journal articles and book titles. We’re also looking to retain back-year discounts for grants, as these are at an early stage of adoption, and new funders coming on board naturally start with a backlog of grants to register in the Grant Linking System.

What happens next?

The Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability (RCFS) initiative is very broad, and in the coming months and years you can expect progress with other aspects of our fees and resourcing. There is more work to come, including the rebalancing of revenue from the use of our metadata, the future of fees for our funder members, and further changes to record registration fees.

We’re glad to see the first changes progressing to implementation, and would like to thank our Membership and Fees Committee and all members who took part in the consultations so far for your continued support.

Metadata excellence among new members: La Salle University, Perú

Yasiel Pérez Vera — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Click here for the version in English

En 2025, lanzamos los Premios Crossref a los Metadatos, con el objetivo de destacar el rol de nuestra comunidad en la gestión y el enriquecimiento del registro académico. En esta publicación, destacamos a la Universidad La Salle, Perú, ganadora del premio a la excelencia entre los nuevos miembros, y contamos con la participación de Yasiel Pérez, Responsable Técnico y Editor de la Revista, quien comparte sus ideas:

Por qué los metadatos importan para nosotros

La Universidad La Salle se convirtió en miembro de Crossref hace relativamente poco tiempo, en 2023. Gestionamos nuestras revistas usando Open Journal Systems (OJS), y una vez que nos unimos a esta comunidad, los diferentes Consejos Editoriales compartimos la motivación de lograr una mayor visibilidad global, y vimos una oportunidad de mejora al proporcionar más metadatos y más completos.

El lado técnico de subsanar las deficiencias

Nuestras revistas, que llevan activas entre dos y cuatro años, han comenzado a enriquecer sus metadatos faltantes a niveles aceptables (¡creemos que aún podemos mejorar a niveles excelentes!). Gracias a mi formación como ingeniero de software, adaptamos el plugin de OJS para que admita campos de metadatos adicionales que no están disponibles en las versiones anteriores. El plugin requiere actualizaciones, por lo que realizamos modificaciones personalizadas para que sea compatible con los esquemas Crossref más recientes. Debido a limitaciones de tiempo, recursos humanos y financieros, consideramos más eficiente adaptar el plugin en lugar de adaptar nuestras instalaciones de OJS a las últimas versiones. Con estas modificaciones, depositamos los ROR ID, las licencias, las páginas de políticas y las actualizaciones de las revistas en Crossmark.

Por otro lado, hemos probado la versión con Soporte a Largo Plazo actual y la versión 3.5 de OJS, y recomiendo encarecidamente a cualquier usuario que actualice a cualquiera de estas versiones más recientes. Incluyen importantes parches de seguridad y, además, los plugins de Crossref son compatibles con los esquemas más recientes. Desafortunadamente, para nosotros, actualizar los sistemas desde una versión anterior a la 3.3 requiere tiempo adicional y soporte técnico, dada la importancia de los cambios de la v3.2 a la v3.3.

Haciendo las políticas sobre metadatos una prioridad

Tenemos un compromiso institucional con la provisión de metadatos enriquecidos. Contamos con políticas que exigen metadatos lo más completos posible como parte de nuestros flujos de trabajo, y lo convertimos en un requisito estricto. Naturalmente, existen algunos desafíos. Los metadatos abiertos y transparentes aún están relativamente poco valorados. A veces, los editores no comprenden completamente las implicaciones de proporcionar metadatos enriquecidos; mostrar su nombre en el sitio web no es lo mismo que tenerlo en los metadatos, por lo que la conexión entre la versión de registro y su visibilidad no siempre es evidente para autores y editores. Los apoyamos proporcionando directrices y capacitación a los consejos editoriales y equipos de las revistas. Por ejemplo, si una afiliación no está disponible en ROR, animamos a los autores a solicitar su inclusión en el registro.

Por otro lado, esto también nos motiva. Nos estamos preparando para empezar a incluir metadatos de subvenciones y financiación en nuestros flujos de trabajo. También apuntamos a utilizar estos datos para estudiar el impacto de nuestras políticas editoriales en la visibilidad, el uso, las citas, la indexación y otras métricas institucionales. La Universidad La Salle es una organización interesante porque formamos una red de universidades de todo el mundo, lo que provoca errores en la identificación adecuada.

Creemos que ciertamente otras organizaciones pueden lograr altos niveles de enriquecimiento de metadatos. Esto tiene dos aspectos fundamentales: uno técnico y otro organizativo. Desde nuestra perspectiva, el primer paso es obtener el apoyo de la organización y establecer políticas a nivel de toda la organización. Las soluciones técnicas pueden seguir después y no son fundamentalmente difíciles en comparación con conseguir que la comunidad proporcione metadatos buenos y completos.

Una vez que se consigue la asignación de recursos, se planifica la hoja de ruta para recopilar más metadatos. Es mejor tenerlos y no usarlos que necesitarlos y no tenerlos. Por ejemplo, ya estamos recopilando los roles de autor utilizando la taxonomía CRediT, por lo que una vez que sea totalmente compatible con el esquema de Crossref, queremos estar preparados para enviarlos. Idealmente, nos gustaría ver compatibilidad con identificadores alternativos y más tipos de fechas. Recopilamos las fechas de envío y aceptación a través de Crossmark y asignamos simultáneamente DOI, PURL y ARK. Con el tiempo suficiente, también planeamos implementar la revisión por pares abierta en nuestras revistas.

Lo que el reconocimiento nos ayudó a lograr

Recibir este premio ha tenido un profundo impacto en nuestra organización; nos ayuda a reforzar el mensaje que intentamos transmitir a nuestra comunidad. Abrió los ojos de las autoridades y los gestores de presupuesto, y también está aumentando la visibilidad de la organización en la región. Queremos ser vistos como un ejemplo en la comunidad local y regional: «Si una institución provincial puede hacerlo, otras también». Hemos comenzado a recibir llamadas solicitando capacitación para otras organizaciones. Por lo tanto, este premio ha sido sin duda fundamental para nosotros.

Version in English

In 2025, we launched the Crossref Metadata Awards, aiming to highlight our community’s role in stewarding and enriching the scholarly record. In this post, we put the spotlight on La Salle University, Perú, winner of the award for excellence among new members, and have Yasiel Pérez, Technical Head and Journal Editor, sharing his insights:

Why metadata matters to us

La Salle University became a Crossref member relatively recently, in 2023. We manage our journals using Open Journal Systems (OJS), and once we became part of this community, the different Editorial Boards had as a common motivation achieving more global visibility, and we saw an opportunity for improvement by providing more and richer metadata.

Technical side of filling the gaps

Our journals that have been active for two to four years started enriching their missing metadata to acceptable levels (we still think we can improve to excellent levels!). Because of my background as a software engineer, we adapted the OJS plugin to support additional metadata fields not yet available in the older versions. The plugin requires updates, so we made custom modifications to support the latest Crossref schemas. Because of time, human, and financial constraints, we found it most efficient to adapt the plugin rather than to adapt our OJS installations to the latest versions. With these modifications, we deposit ROR IDs, licences, and the journals’ policy pages and updates to Crossmark.

On the other hand, we have tested the current Long-term support and the 3.5 versions of OJS and I fully recommend to any user to upgrade to any of these more recent versions, there are important security patches and also the Crossref plugins are compatible with the latest schemas. Unfortunately, for us, upgrading the systems from a version older than 3.3 requires additional time and technical support, given the importance of changes from v3.2 to v3.3.

Making metadata a policy priority

We have an institutional commitment to the provision of rich metadata. We have policies in place to require metadata as complete as possible as part of our workflows and we make this a strict requirement. Naturally, there are some challenges. Open and transparent metadata is still relatively underappreciated. Sometimes editors don’t fully understand the implications of providing rich metadata; displaying your name in the website is not the same as having it on the metadata so the connection between the version of record and its visibility is not always evident for authors and editors. We support them by providing guidelines and training to the editorial boards and journal teams. E.g. if an affiliation is not available in ROR we encourage authors to request their inclusion in the registry.

On the other hand, this is also a motivational push for us. We are preparing to start including grant and funding metadata in our workflows. We also aim to use this data to study the impact of our editorial policies on the visibility, use, citations, indexation, and other institutional metrics. La Salle University is an interesting organization because we are a network of universities across the world, leading to mistakes in proper identification.

We certainly think that other organizations can achieve high levels of metadata enrichment. There are two fundamental aspects to it: A technical aspect and an organizational aspect. From our point of view, the first step is gaining organizational support, establishing organization-wide policies. The technical solutions can follow and are not fundamentally difficult compared with having the community provide good and complete metadata.

Once you manage to secure the assignment of resources, then you plan the roadmap for collecting more metadata. It’s better to have it and not use it than to need it and not have it. For example, we already collect author roles using the CRediT taxonomy, so once it is fully supported by Crossref’s schema, we want to be prepared to submit them. Ideally, we would like to see support for alternative identifiers and more types of dates. We collect submission and acceptance dates via Crossmark and we simultaneously assign DOI, PURL, and ARK. Given enough time, we are also planning to implement open peer review in our journals.

What the recognition helped us achieve

Receiving this award has been profoundly impactful for our organization; it helps us reinforce the message that we are trying to deliver to our community. It opened the eyes of the authorities and budget managers, and it is also increasing the organization’s visibility in the region. We want to be seen as an example in the local and regional community—“if a provincial institution can do it, others can too.” We have started receiving calls requesting training for other organizations. So, this award has certainly become pivotal for us.

Crossref at Beijing International Book Fair 2025

Johanssen Obanda — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This June, we presented at the Beijing International Book Fair (BIBF) and connected directly with our growing community in China. With a surge of interest from Chinese publishers and partners, it was clear: there’s a strong and rising curiosity around how metadata plays a vital role in maintaining the integrity of the scholarly record.

And we were not alone: our incredible Crossref Ambassadors based in the region joined us at the booth, and together we hosted visitors and answered questions. Throughout the fair, we engaged in passionate conversations, provided metadata guidance, and shared our knowledge as part of a panel session focused on how metadata supports scholarship. Ms. Ran Dang, Editorial Director at Atlantis Press (Springer Nature), supports Crossref outreach and advocates for Open Access and Open Science. Ms. Xiaofeng Guo, Director at Sin-Chn Scientific Press, leads DOI infrastructure efforts in China and supports Crossref members across the region. Mr. Gantulga Lkhagva, Founder and CEO of Mongolian Digital Knowledge Solutions and MongoliaJOL, works to strengthen local scholarly publishing and promote metadata best practices.

Photo: Crossref Ambassadors and Staff

This was the first time some of us had met in person after years of online collaboration, and the sense of connection and shared purpose was energising. Our Ambassadors also contributed to this post, sharing their favourite moments, key takeaways, and stories from the fair.

A snapshot from the panel discussion

During BIBF, we hosted a panel session focused on the role of metadata in supporting scholarship. Ms. Alicia Wang, Vice President - CNPIEC Kexin Technology Co., Ltd, Robbykha Rosalien, Membership Support Specialist - Crossref, Johanssen Obanda - Community Engagement Manager - Crossref, and our Ambassadors joined the panel, and we were glad to have a mix of Crossref members, Metadata Plus users, and curious participants join the discussion.

Photo: Panel session - Ms. Alicia Wang, Mr. Gantulga Lkhagva, Ms. Robbykha Rosalien, Mr. Johanssen Obanda, Ms. Xiaofeng Guo, Ms. Ran Dang.

Ms Xiaofeng Guo making a presentation about how metadata supports scholarship

Key questions from the session included the status of open abstracts in Crossref, how retracted articles affect citation tracking and research integrity, and what happens when DOIs no longer resolve due to unmaintained landing pages.

Robbykha explained our DOI resolution and archival systems, clarifying that DOIs are designed to always resolve, even when the original content moves or becomes unavailable. We also touched on the work Crossref is doing to support transparency around retractions, and the goals of The Initiative for Open Abstracts, which aims to make research summaries more accessible.

Metadata Plus use cases from China

Two of our Metadata Plus users were present during the panel and generously shared how they are leveraging Crossref metadata in their work.

Jie He from ScienceRiver described how their team translates Crossref metadata from English into Chinese, making it possible for users in China to search for relevant academic literature originally published outside the mainland. Their efforts open up global research to local audiences, bridging language and accessibility gaps. This conversation also led to broader discussions about multilingual metadata and the work our Metadata Advisory Group hopes to support in this area.

Eurasia Academic Publishing Group, based in Hong Kong, talked about using Crossref metadata coupled with AI approaches to develop a tool for readers, editors, and institutions to help assess the integrity of research articles and detect paper mills.

Reflections from our Ambassadors and the community

One common thread throughout our time at BIBF was the recognition that many of our resources, documentation, and support materials are still primarily in English. For Chinese-speaking community members who are new to Crossref or metadata concepts, this creates a pretty steep learning curve. We heard this clearly, and we know there’s work to do in making our services more accessible across languages.

From personal highlights to fascinating conversations, here’s what some of our Ambassadors had to say:

I am very happy to have met with colleagues from Crossref and several Ambassadors from Asia! We have met many times online, but this was the first time we met face-to-face and worked together to engage with our members and host events! I learned a great deal from our face-to-face exchanges, including updates on Crossref’s latest use cases, industry development trends, and even information about my colleagues’ hometowns. We built friendships and successfully participated in the first BIBF event for Crossref, which was the biggest takeaway!

我非常高兴，能够与Crossref的同事和亚洲的几位大使见面！我们曾经多次在网络会议中见面，但是这是第一次面对面，并且共同面对用户、举办活动！在我们面对面的交流中我也学到了很多，包括Crossref的最新应用案例，行业发展情况，甚至同事们自己家乡的情况！我们建立了友谊，成功举办了第一次BIBF活动，这是最大的收获！

At the BIBF exhibition and events, we had good conversations with our Chinese partners and some members, and learned about actual application needs and use cases, which was very helpful to me. Most of the people I met spoke Chinese, but their publishers or institutions may have come from countries and regions outside mainland China, such as Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

在此次BIBF展览和活动中，我们与中国的合作伙伴以及很多用户面对面交流，了解到实际的应用需求和应用案例，这对我帮助很大。我接触的客户多半讲华语，但是他们的出版社或机构可能来自新加坡、香港、台湾等中国大陆以外的国家和地区。

I also participated in the BIBF Forum events held before the exhibition, including the PubTech Conference, the first STM Asia-Pacific Conference, and the networking dinner. These three events were jointly organised by China National Publications Import and Export (Group) Corporation (CNPIEC), STM, and the Chinese Society of China University Journals (SCUJ). During the events, I heard about the latest developments in the publishing industry and gained valuable insights into hot topics. I also met many new and old friends and partners, some from China and others from around the world. Interacting with them not only allowed me to reminisce about the past but also provided me with new perspectives and expanded my professional network.

我这次也参加了在展览之前举办的BIBF论坛活动，包括的PubTech论坛，以及首界STM亚太会议和交流晚宴。这三个活动是由中国图书进出口公司（CNPIEC）、STM和中国高校科技期刊研究会（SCUJ）联合举办的。在活动中我听到了很多出版行业的最新发展以及针对热点问题的真知灼见，见到了很多新老朋友和伙伴，他们部分来自中国，部分来自世界各地。与他们交流不仅让我重温旧时光，也获得了新的见解、新的人脉。

Discussion with Ms. Bo Li from China Education Publication Import & Export Corporation (CEPIEC) on matching papers with their funding grants from China. This is an excellent use case for Crossref’s Grant Linking System (GLS) service and related metadata. We introduced the GLS service and Crossref metadata to Ms. Bo Li and will follow up with her and her colleagues to help them use Crossref’s metadata to complete this task more easily.

与中国教育图书进出口公司的李博女士讨论为科研基金匹配项目资助的论文元数据。这是一个非常好的应用案例，可以利用Crossref的GLS服务以及相关元数据。我们向李博介绍了GLS服务以及元数据的相关情况，之后还将与她和她的同事进行深入讨论，帮助他们利用Crossref的元数据更快捷地完成此项工作。

Discussion with Dr. Zhu Xuefeng. Their team has developed an application that identifies research integrity issues in journals and articles. They primarily utilise Crossref metadata (including article metadata and retraction observation data), withdrarXiv, ORCID and Research Organization Registry (ROR) data, among others. By linking and integrating these data, they calculate the research integrity risk of relevant journals and articles, providing a reference for authors submitting manuscripts, editors reviewing manuscripts, and institutions monitoring research integrity issues.

与朱学峰博士的讨论。他们的团队开发了一款应用程序，识别期刊/文章的科研诚信问题。他们主要利用了Crossref元数据（包括文章元数据和撤稿观察数据），arXiv的撤回数据集，以及ORCID和ROR数据等，通过关联、集成这些数据计算相关期刊/文章的科研诚信风险，为作者投稿、编辑审稿、机构监测科研诚信问题等提供参考。

At the Crossref BIBF event, Ms. Wang Xuan, Vice President of CNPIEC Kexin Technology Co., Ltd, a Crossref sponsor in China, discussed the strong demand for reliable data sources when applying AI in the field of scientific research, as well as how Crossref metadata can provide strong support. She proposed that all AI products focusing on scientific research should show the original DOIs for the academic resources they cite in the results they provide to users, to enhance the reliability and traceability of data sources. She committed that her company, Ke Xin, as a provider of research AI assistants, will implement this functionality in its products and hopes to promote this as a best practice to all research AI application developers and providers. This reflects that, as cutting-edge technology advances and requirements for research integrity and compliance continue to rise, Crossref metadata continues to play an important role in scholarship and will become increasingly extensive and indispensable.

在Crossref BIBF活动上，中图科信公司（Crossref中国赞助机构）副总经理王轩女士在讨论中阐述了关于AI在科研领域应用时对于可信数据来源的强烈需求，以及Crossref元数据如何能提供有力支撑的想法。她倡议所有的科研AI产品在为用户提供结果时，应对引用的学术资源提供原始的DOI标识，以增强数据来源的可信度和可追踪性。她承诺中图科信公司作为科研AI助手的提供者将在其产品中实现这一功能，并希望能将此作为最佳实践向所有科研AI应用的开发者、提供者进行推广。这反映了随着前沿科技发展以及科研诚信与合规要求不断提升，Crossref元数据对于学术研究提供的支撑作用将越来越广泛、越来越重要。

Connecting the dots: FWFs transition to linked grant metadata to support a thriving culture of openness

Rocío Gaudioso Pedraza — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Click here for the version in German

As a new Community Engagement Manager at Crossref, dedicated to working with the funders community, I frequently hear requests for examples and case studies of adopting Crossref’s Grant Linking System (GLS) by ‘funders like us’. This has spurred me to start a series of blog posts presenting funders’ perspectives on joining Crossref and using our system – to demonstrate how it’s done.

In the first case study of a series, I speak with Katharina Rieck, Open Science Manager at the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), Austria’s national funding agency for basic research, about the agency’s approach to research metadata, transparency and openness, and the role that the Grant Linking System plays in it.

With a strong track record in Open Access and Open Science, the FWF’s decision to implement grant IDs represents more than a mere technical upgrade. What began as an initiative to enhance the openness and interoperability of grant information illustrates that truly open research infrastructure is not solely a matter of systems, but about people, policies and collaboration.

Katharina was also elected to the Crossref Board at our November 2024 Annual Meeting, and started her three-year term in January 2025.

Could you introduce your organisation? And what is your role?

The Austrian Science Fund (FWF) is Austria’s national funding agency for basic research. The FWF funds all disciplines, from Social Sciences and Humanities to Life Sciences and Natural Sciences and Technology. As Open Science Manager, I am responsible for developing the FWF’s Open Science strategy, including the development of the Open Access Policy for Peer-Reviewed Publications, the Open Access Policy for Research Data as well as the FWF Research Data Management Policy. I am also responsible for the development and implementation of funding instruments such as the FWF Open-Access Block Grant and support for Open Science infrastructures.

What motivated you to join Crossref?

For more than two decades, the FWF has actively promoted and supported various aspects of Open Science. In 2004, it published its first Open Access Policy, making it one of the first funding organizations worldwide to adopt an Open Access policy for publications. In line with the commitment to open research information as a core pillar of Open Science, the FWF has taken further steps to strengthen openness and transparency: it joined Crossref to register grant DOIs and became a signatory of the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information and joined Crossref to register grant DOIs.

While funding metadata––information about projects funded by the FWF––has long been freely available on our website, the launch of the Research Radar in 2023 marked a significant step forward. Our goal was not only to maintain accessibility but to ensure that the data published in the Research Radar is interoperable and aligned with the FAIR principles. By implementing the Grant Linking System from Crossref, we assign each FWF funded project a unique, persistent identifier with associated metadata, helping to make FWF grant information open, interoperable and sustainable.

Can you tell us about your experience using the Grant Linking System?

We have been using the Grant Linking System since November 2023. With the launch of the FWF’s new website and the introduction of the Research Radar, we began registering Crossref grant IDs (DOIs) for all grants included in the Research Radar database. As a result, all FWF-funded projects dating back to 1995 are now uniquely identifiable. The process of registering grant metadata with Crossref is straightforward, and we have set up a smooth internal workflow that enables the registration of DOIs after the FWF’s funding decision.

It is important to note that implementing Crossref grant IDs involved more than just a technical setup––it required the development of new internal processes and coordination through a dedicated Crossref grant DOI implementation group. The implementation process also resulted in a revised structure for grant numbers (DOI suffixes) for FWF-funded projects, establishing a sustainable and future-proof system.

How was your journey to socialise the Grant Linking System within your research community? How did you communicate the importance of identifiers and grant metadata to your grant holders?

The introduction of grant DOIs was supported by a comprehensive communication strategy, including dedicated online resources (e.g., New Identification Numbers for FWF Projects –– FWF), updates across multiple pages of the FWF website (such as Carrying out Your Project –– FWF), and presentations at various events. This communication strategy aimed to explain the purpose and value of the “new numbers” ensuring that researchers and stakeholders understood how this contributes to greater visibility, traceability, and openness of funded research.

As a funding organisation, we require grant recipients to acknowledge FWF support in all research outputs resulting from their projects. With the integration of grant DOIs into FWF’s metadata, the standardised acknowledgment text was updated to ensure that the DOIs are now included in outputs. The new required wording is: ‘This research was funded in whole or in part by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) [grant DOI],’ and is now a requirement in the FWF funding agreement. Including the grant DOI both in the output metadata and the acknowledgment text enhances traceability and supports more effective analysis of FWF-funded outputs.

What do you find useful about registering grant metadata with Crossref?

One of the key benefits of registering grant metadata is the enhanced interconnectivity and the unique identification of FWF’s grant information. By registering our grants with Crossref, funding information becomes more than just information on the FWF website––it becomes interoperable data that is accessible and reusable. This not only increases visibility but also enables us to better analyse the outcomes of funded projects and ensures that the data is accessible as well as (re)usable by the broader research community.

In addition to assigning Crossref Grant IDs and registering grant metadata, the FWF has required ORCID IDs for researchers since 2016 and mandates the use of ROR IDs for institutions. The consistent use of persistent identifiers in metadata ensures the interoperability of FWF grant information and facilitates seamless integration with external data sources.

What are your hopes for the GLS and greater transparency in funding metadata in general?

The FAIRness and openness of research information––including metadata on funding information, research outputs, researchers, and institutions––are fundamental to a well-functioning research ecosystem. I hope to see a broader adoption of persistent identifiers in metadata, particularly in grant information, as well as a broader commitment to openly sharing research information as expressed in the Barcelona Declaration. Moreover, a key objective should be to ensure the highest possible accuracy of metadata at the point of entry. This entails, for instance, that publication metadata accurately includes funding metadata.

What were the key challenges you encountered when embracing the GLS, and how did you overcome them?

One of the key challenges we encountered when adopting the GLS was ensuring seamless integration in our existing IT infrastructure and workflows. Integrating the new number across different systems required considerable coordination. We overcame this challenge by establishing a dedicated implementation team that included IT experts.

Another challenge involved communicating and disseminating information regarding the grant DOI, ensuring that researchers and other relevant stakeholders were adequately informed. This was successfully managed through targeted and comprehensive communication efforts.

Based on your experience, what would be your advice for colleagues from other research funders?

It is important to recognise that registering grant identifers and metadata goes beyond a mere technical implementation. This is an opportunity to engage with diverse stakeholders, rethink processes and highlight the value of open funding metadata for the entire research community.

We are grateful to Katharina Rieck and FWF for generously sharing their insights and know-how. Their experience highlights the importance of seeing metadata not just as information, but as a shared resource that connects and empowers the research community.

Version in German

The title has been changed slightly from the original version. Translation by Lena Stoll.

Connecting the Dots: Wie der FWF durch die Umstellung auf vernetzte Fördermetadaten eine Kultur der Offenheit fördert

Als neue Community-Engagement-Managerin bei Crossref, die sich der Zusammenarbeit mit Fördergebern widmet, werde ich häufig gefragt, ob ich Beispiele und Fallstudien von „Förderern wie uns“ geben kann, die Crossrefs Grant Linking System (GLS) bereits eingeführt haben. Dies hat mich dazu veranlasst, eine Blogreihe zu starten, in der ich die Perspektiven von Fördergebern auf eine Crossref-Mitgliedschaft und die Nutzung unseres Systems vorstelle – um zu zeigen, wie es funktioniert.

In der ersten Fallstudie dieser Reihe spreche ich mit Katharina Rieck, Open-Science-Managerin beim Österreichischen Wissenschaftsfonds FWF, Österreichs nationaler Förderagentur für Grundlagenforschung, über den Ansatz des FWF zu Forschungsmetadaten, Transparenz und Offenheit sowie über die Rolle, die das Grant Linking System dabei spielt.

Mit seiner langjährigen Erfahrung im Bereich Open Access und Open Science stellt die Entscheidung des FWF, Grant-IDs (DOIs für Fördermittel) einzuführen, mehr als nur eine technische Verbesserung dar. Die Initiative begann mit dem Ziel, die Offenheit und Interoperabilität von Förderinformationen zu verbessern, aber schon bald wurde klar, dass eine wirklich offene Forschungsinfrastruktur nicht nur eine Frage der Systeme ist, sondern auch Menschen, Regelwerke, Abläufe und die Zusammenarbeit betrifft.

Katharina Rieck wurde auf unserer Jahresversammlung im November 2024 außerdem in Crossrefs Board of Directors gewählt und ist im Januar 2025 ihre dreijährige Amtszeit angetreten.

Bitte stellen Sie den FWF kurz vor und erklären Sie unseren Leser:innen, was Ihre Rolle dort ist.

Der Österreichische Wissenschaftsfonds FWF ist Österreichs nationale Förderorganisation für Grundlagenforschung. Der FWF fördert alle Disziplinen, von den Sozial- und Geisteswissenschaften über die Lebenswissenschaften bis hin zu Naturwissenschaften und Technik. Als Open-Science-Managerin bin ich für die Entwicklung der Open-Science-Strategie des FWF verantwortlich, einschließlich der Entwicklung der Open-Access-Policy für begutachtete Publikationen, der Open-Access-Policy für Forschungsdaten sowie der FWF-Richtlinie zum Forschungsdatenmanagement. Darüber hinaus bin ich verantwortlich für die Entwicklung und Umsetzung von Förderinstrumenten wie der Open-Access-Pauschale des FWF sowie die Unterstützung von Open-Science-Infrastrukturen.

Was hat Sie dazu bewogen, Crossref beizutreten?

Der FWF fördert und unterstützt seit mehr als zwei Jahrzehnten aktiv verschiedene Aspekte von Open Science. 2004 veröffentlichte er seine erste Open-Access-Policy und war damit eine der ersten Förderorganisationen weltweit, die eine Open-Access-Policy für Publikationen eingeführt haben. Im Einklang mit seinem Engagement für offene Forschungsinformationen als zentrale Säule von Open Science hat der FWF weitere Schritte unternommen, um Offenheit und Transparenz zu stärken: Der FWF ist Crossref beigetreten, um Grant-DOIs zu registrieren, und ist Unterzeichner der Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information.

Zwar sind Metadaten zur Forschungsförderung – also Informationen über FWF-geförderte Projekte – schon seit Langem über unsere Website frei verfügbar. Doch die Einführung des Research Radar im Jahr 2023 war nochmal ein bedeutender Fortschritt. Unser Ziel war es nicht nur, den offenen Zugang zu den Metadaten aufrechtzuerhalten, sondern auch sicherzustellen, dass die im Forschungsradar veröffentlichten Daten interoperabel und mit den FAIR-Prinzipien vereinbar sind. Durch die Anwendung von Crossrefs Grant Linking System bekommt jetzt jedes vom FWF geförderte Projekt eine eindeutige, unveränderliche ID mit dazugehörigen Metadaten – und die Informationen zu FWF-Fördermitteln sind somit offen, interoperabel und nachhaltig verfügbar.

Können Sie uns mehr über Ihre Erfahrungen mit dem Grant Linking System erzählen?

Wir nutzen das Grant Linking System seit November 2023. Mit dem Launch der neuen FWF-Website und des Research Radar begannen wir damit, Crossref-Grant-IDs (DOIs) für alle in der Forschungsradar-Datenbank enthaltenen Förderungen zu registrieren. Dadurch sind nun alle FWF-geförderten Projekte seit 1995 eindeutig identifizierbar. Die Registrierung von Grant-Metadaten bei Crossref ist unkompliziert, und wir haben einen reibungslosen internen Workflow entwickelt, um DOIs nach der Förderentscheidung des FWF zu registrieren.

Es ist wichtig zu erwähnen, dass es für die Einführung von Crossref-Grant-IDs mehr als nur den Aufbau technischer Prozesse brauchte – wir haben auch neue interne Abläufe entwickelt und eine eigene Arbeitsgruppe für die Koordination von Crossref-Grant-DOIs gebildet. Im Zuge dieses Prozesses haben wir auch die Struktur der Projektnummern für FWF-geförderte Projekte (also der DOI-Suffixe) überarbeitet und somit ein nachhaltiges und zukunftssicheres System aufgebaut.

Welche Erfahrungen haben Sie damit gemacht, das Grant Linking System in Ihrer Forschungscommunity zu bewerben? Wie haben Sie Ihren Fördernehmer:innen die Wichtigkeit von Identifiern und Metadaten vermittelt?

Wir haben die Einführung der Grant-DOIs mit einer umfassenden Kommunikationsstrategie unterstützt, inklusive spezieller Online-Ressourcen (z. B. Neue Identifikationsnummern für FWF-Projekte), der Aktualisierung mehrerer Seiten auf der FWF-Website (z. B. Projekt durchführen) sowie Vorträgen bei diversen Veranstaltungen. Ziel dieser Kommunikationsstrategie war es, Zweck und Nutzen der „neuen Nummern“ zu erläutern und sicherzustellen, dass Forschende und Stakeholder verstehen, wie diese zu mehr Sichtbarkeit, Nachvollziehbarkeit und Offenheit der geförderten Forschung beitragen.

Als Förderorganisation verlangen wir von unseren Fördernehmer:innen, die Unterstützung durch den FWF in allen Forschungsergebnissen zu erwähnen, die aus dem Projekt resultieren. Mit der Integration der Grant-DOIs in die Metadaten des FWF haben wir den standardisierten Acknowledgement-Text aktualisiert, um sicherzustellen, dass die DOIs in den Ergebnissen erwähnt werden. Der neue erforderliche Wortlaut ist: „Diese Forschung wurde gänzlich oder teilweise durch den Wissenschaftsfonds FWF finanziert [Grant-DOI].“ und ist in jedem FWF-Fördervertrag festgeschrieben. Die Angabe von Grant-DOIs sowohl in den Metadaten als auch im Acknowledgement-Text von wissenschaftlichem Output verbessert die Rückverfolgbarkeit und ermöglicht eine genauere Analyse der vom FWF geförderten Ergebnisse.

Was finden Sie an der Registrierung von Fördermetadaten bei Crossref am hilfreichsten?

Einer der Hauptvorteile der Registrierung von Fördermetadaten ist die verbesserte Vernetzung und die eindeutige Identifizierung der Förderinformationen des FWF. Durch die Registrierung unserer Projekte bei Crossref werden Förderinformationen zu mehr als nur Informationen auf unserer Website – sie werden zu interoperablen Daten, die abrufbar und wiederverwendbar sind. Dies erhöht nicht nur die Sichtbarkeit, sondern ermöglicht uns auch eine bessere Analyse der Ergebnisse geförderter Projekte und stellt sicher, dass die Daten für die allgemeine Forschungsgemeinschaft zugänglich und (wieder-)verwendbar sind.

Neben der Vergabe von Crossref-Grant-IDs und der Registrierung von Fördermetadaten schreibt der FWF seit 2016 ORCID für Forschende sowie die Verwendung von ROR IDs für Institutionen vor. Die konsequente Verwendung persistenter IDs in den Metadaten gewährleistet die Interoperabilität der FWF-Förderinformationen und erleichtert die nahtlose Integration mit externen Datenquellen.

Was erhoffen Sie sich vom GLS und von mehr Transparenz bei Fördermetadaten im Allgemeinen?

Die FAIRness und Offenheit von Forschungsinformationen – einschließlich der Metadaten zu Förderinformationen, Forschungsergebnissen, Forschenden und Institutionen – sind für ein gut funktionierendes Forschungsökosystem wesentlich. Ich hoffe auf eine weiterreichende Anwendung von persistenten IDs in Metadaten, insbesondere in Förderinformationen, und auf ein größeres Engagement für den offenen Austausch von Forschungsinformationen, wie es zum Beispiel in der Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information gefordert wird. Darüber hinaus sollte sichergestellt werden, dass die Metadaten bereits bei der Eingabe und damit bei ihrer Generierung möglichst korrekt sind. Das bedeutet unter anderem, dass die Metadaten von Publikationen die korrekten Fördermetadaten enthalten sollten.

Welche Herausforderungen sind bei der Einführung des GLS aufgetreten und wie haben Sie diese gemeistert?

Eine der größten Herausforderungen bestand darin, das Grant Linking System nahtlos in unsere bestehende IT-Infrastruktur und Arbeitsabläufe zu integrieren. Die „neue Nummer“ in die unterschiedlichen Systeme zu integrieren, bedeutete einen hohen Koordinationsaufwand. Gemeistert haben wir diese Herausforderung durch die Bildung einer eigenen Arbeitsgruppe für die Anwendung von Crossref-Grant-DOIs, in der auch IT-Expert:innen vertreten waren.

Eine weitere Herausforderung bestand in der Kommunikation und Verbreitung von Informationen zu Grant-DOIs, um Forschende und andere Stakeholder angemessen zu informieren. Das haben wir durch gezielte und umfassende Kommunikationsmaßnahmen erreicht.

Basierend auf Ihrer eigenen Erfahrung, welchen Ratschlag würden Sie Kolleg:innen bei anderen Fördergebern mitgeben?

Es ist wichtig zu verstehen, dass die Registrierung von Grant-IDs und Metadaten über eine bloße technische Umsetzung hinausgeht. Der Prozess bietet die Gelegenheit, mit verschiedenen Stakeholdern in Kontakt zu treten, Abläufe zu überdenken und den Wert offener Fördermetadaten für die gesamte Forschungsgemeinschaft zu unterstreichen.

Wir danken Katharina Rieck und dem FWF für ihre Bereitschaft, ihre Erkenntnisse und ihr Know-how so großzügig zu teilen. Ihr Erfahrungsbericht hat uns gezeigt, wie wichtig es ist, Metadaten nicht nur als Informationen zu betrachten, sondern als eine gemeinsame Ressource, die die gesamte Forschungsgemeinschaft vernetzen und stärken kann.

Data Science @Crossref

Dominika Tkaczyk — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

To address the growing scale and complexity of scholarly data, we’ve launched a new data science function at Crossref. In April, we were excited to welcome our first data scientists, Jason Portenoy and Alex Bédard-Vallée, to the team. With their arrival, the Data Science team is now fully up and running. In this blog post, we’re sharing our vision and what’s ahead for data science at Crossref.

New approach to achieve our mission

Over the last few years, we have witnessed substantial growth of the scholarly community in general, and Crossref in particular. This has been reflected in the increase in the volume and variety of the data we collect, store and process, including scholarly metadata and Crossref operational data related to membership, DOI registrations, billing, usage measurement, and other activities.

On the one hand, this growth opens new possibilities for using the data to better understand the scholarly landscape, serve our community, develop services, and make informed decisions. On the other hand, it forces us to address a set of challenges related to the scale and complexity of the data.

The new Data Science team, created as part of last year’s broader organisational changes, will address these challenges and fulfil our data-related ambitions. As part of our strategic mission, we created the following vision for the Data Science team within Crossref and our community:

The Data Science team uses scientific research and data science to deliver, assess, improve, and enrich scholarly metadata.

The work of the Data Science team broadly entails two types of projects: 1) data analysis & insights; and 2) data services & workflows.

Data analysis & insights: The goal of these kinds of projects is to broaden our understanding of the scholarly record and our community and help Crossref make decisions in a data-driven way, without trying to create any specific application or product. They will help Crossref explore new strategic directions, make more informed decisions, monitor the trends and outcomes of certain decisions and policies, and discover and share new insights with the community. This category also involves large and small data assessments and analyses, measuring and monitoring certain metrics, verifying hypotheses, answering questions using data, monitoring trends in the metadata, forecasting, data visualisation, reporting, and interpreting results.

Data services & workflows: The goal of these kinds of projects is to apply scientific knowledge and data analysis to build and maintain Crossref services, tools, and workflows. The Data Science team collaborates with other Crossref teams on the research, design and implementation of the Crossref system and its various components. This will involve modelling across different data stores and APIs, as well as designing efficient and robust data workflows for various processes, including metadata deposit, validation, and dissemination. Furthermore, the team will investigate and implement modern tools and techniques for efficient data processing, storage and analysis, and strategies for data enrichment. Finally, the Data Science team is involved in planning and implementing comprehensive monitoring and reporting for various features and services.

Connecting with the community

Crossref exists as part of a diverse, global community of 22,000 members from 160 countries, plus countless systems that rely on our metadata. Launching the new Data Science function gives us a great opportunity to connect more deeply and in new ways with the wider scholarly community. We’re keen to engage with Crossref members, users of our services, and partner organisations to better understand trends and needs, and to contribute to others’ community initiatives and awareness.

One area we’re particularly interested in is the growing range of initiatives in the metascience space. We’re looking to expand and solidify our understanding of how researchers use our data and services, and to learn more about their needs and perspectives. These insights will help inform the design and functionality of our data workflows and APIs over the long term.

We’re also committed to supporting the scholarly community’s efforts to preserve the integrity of the scholarly record (ISR). By applying modern, scalable data processing techniques, we aim to help detect and investigate potential issues affecting metadata quality, including both intentional manipulation and unintentional errors or inconsistencies.

More broadly, we’re looking forward to engaging with our community on scalable data processing approaches, as well as best practices and standards for processing and enriching scholarly metadata.

Introducing new members of the team

We couldn’t pursue our ambitious goals without the dedication and passion of our team. In April, we were thrilled to welcome two data scientists, Jason Portenoy and Alex Bédard-Vallée, to the Crossref team.

Alex Bédard-Vallée brings over six years of experience extracting meaningful insights from data within the research and scholarly publishing sector, applying it to large-scale bibliometric data, aiming to better serve the scholarly community. Prior to Crossref, during his tenure at Elsevier, he was instrumental in modernising data infrastructure, significantly enhancing the efficiency of massive research data pipelines. His contributions included developing automated data quality checks, creating reusable Python tools to streamline data access, and leveraging machine learning techniques to uncover research trends. Alex provided key insights for major reports, contributing to evaluations for the Canada Research Chairs Program and the NSF Science and Engineering Indicators between 2020 and 2024. Alex holds an M.Sc. in Quantum Physics (2018) and a B.Sc. in Physics (2016) from the Université de Sherbrooke.

Jason Portenoy is a New York-based data scientist with a background in bibliometric research and building applications using scholarly data. Through his work, he has become a passionate advocate for the maintenance and improvement of high-quality scholarly metadata. He holds a PhD in Information Science from the University of Washington where he studied how scholarly metadata can offer insights into scientific activity and help develop tools to address information overload. He brings experience working at OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, and other organisations concerned with scholarly communication. Most recently, he was the Senior Data Engineer at OpenAlex, and he is now excited to continue his work using data science to support and strengthen crucial open scholarly infrastructure.

What’s next for us?

In the short term, we are focusing on two main projects: analysing how reliably DOIs resolve, and detecting discrepancies in bibliographic references at scale.

DOI resolutions: DOIs are persistent identifiers and links that are meant to consistently resolve to landing pages that represent the object they identify and Crossref has certain obligations that members have to adhere to, one of which is that if the location of the landing page changes, it is the responsibility of the member to update the metadata so the DOI continues to resolve correctly. Some prior work has suggested this doesn’t always happen, so there are some gaps in the scholarly record. We’re now analysing metadata from a broad sample of members to better understand the scale of the issue, and to identify cases where members may need to update their metadata records.

Detecting discrepancies in bibliographic references: Following last year’s reports of discrepancies between bibliographic references in metadata records and those found in full-text PDFs, we’ve explored ways to run broader, systematic checks across a larger set of members and metadata records. The goal was to understand how widespread these inconsistencies are and to identify cases where members may need support in correcting references in their metadata records. Ultimately, we aim to create a collaborative process that improves the accuracy and reliability of bibliographic references across the scholarly record, enhancing research discovery and reproducibility and ensuring impact assessments are reliable.

Look out for forthcoming blog posts with more details on these projects!

Looking further ahead, Crossref has two big projects for which the Data Science team will serve central roles: developing dashboards, and improving metadata matching.

Data dashboards: We are planning to develop a series of dashboards to monitor the state of the scholarly record over time. These will include both work-level statistics (e.g., how many works of a given type have been registered?) and more detailed insights at the relationship level (e.g., how many bibliographic references have been automatically matched? How often are ROR IDs included in funder assertions?). Upstream, this will require us to build an environment where all relevant data sources can be combined, as well as adopting a suite of scalable tools and data processing techniques.

Metadata matching: In April, we commenced the matching project. It is a major effort to rebuild Crossref’s metadata matching workflows using modern software development and data science practices. The goal is to create a dedicated consolidated matching workflow that will eventually replace all existing production matching processes, with results made available through the REST API. This project covers six matching tasks: bibliographic reference matching, funder name matching, preprint matching, affiliation matching, grant matching, and title matching.

(In the meantime, as we do not have a good mechanism to add matching results to the REST API yet, we separately released two datasets with relationships discovered by automated matching strategies: a dataset of relationships between preprints and journal articles, and a dataset of relationships involving research organisations.)

As you can tell, we are very excited about Crossref’s role in the modern, open, community-focused future of scholarly infrastructure. The new Data Science team is a crucial component of this vision. If you’re interested in collaborating or learning more about data science at Crossref, we’d love to hear from you!

Scholarly blogs and their place in the research nexus

Lena Stoll — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

If you are reading this blog on our website, you may have noticed that alongside each post we now list a Crossref DOI link, which was not the case a few months ago (though we have retroactively added DOIs to all older posts too). You can find the persistent link for this post right above this paragraph. Go on, click on it, we’ll wait.

Are you back here? Good. As you probably expected, the DOI link for this post resolves to the post itself, and you should use it anytime you want to cite this post. But the DOI does more than just point readers to this page––it is part of a rich metadata record that includes the authors’ ORCID iDs, the publication date, and more. In other words, the posts on this blog are part of what we call the research nexus: the open network of relationships connecting research outputs, people, organisations, and actions.

Crossref research nexus vision

Why blogs deserve a place in the scholarly record

A blog post may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of scholarly outputs. But scholarly blogs have been around since at least the early 2000s and have carved out a niche for themselves as a type of “grey literature” that allows researchers to write about research in a way that may not fit neatly into more traditional, peer-reviewed publishing venues, but also is too long-form for social media. Science blogs can give readers a window into ongoing work that isn’t ready to publish yet, serve as a self-publishing venue, or allow researchers to comment on others’ work and recent developments in science and science communication. These kinds of perspectives add crucial context to the scholarly record that should not be overlooked.

However, as Martin Fenner explained at the #Crossref2023 annual meeting, blogs have largely not benefitted from the metadata and long-term archiving solutions that tend to be applied to more “traditional” forms of publishing. As a result, most blogs have been left out of the scholarly record. But in recent years, there have been some efforts in the community to change this. Earlier this year, ORCID added support for the work type blog post, among others, to align more closely with the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) vocabulary of resource types.

At our 2025 midyear community update, we asked our community what content types they saw as growing in importance. Blog posts were mentioned several times as a ‘trending’ record type, and as one that members would like to see support for in the Crossref system.

Eating our own dog food

We had already been thinking for a while about how our own blog should be a part of the research nexus. We started out by manually uploading XML files through our Admin tool for each post. We did this for a few months and quickly found, like many of our members do, that this can be a laborious and error-prone process.

In the product management world, the process of using the products you usually spend your time building and maintaining is often referred to as dogfooding. The idea is that firsthand experience makes it easier to understand your end users’ needs and feel their pain - and we have certainly found that registering metadata for our blog posts has reinforced the importance of making manual registration easier for our members, but also of supporting and enabling machine-to-machine integrations.

What did we do?

The Crossref website, which includes this blog, uses an open-source static site generator named Hugo. Rather than using a content management system (CMS), we edit the website content in Markdown format using code editors. Whenever we start working on a post for this blog, we not only write the content of the post itself, but also include some front matter for the page, which contains some key metadata about the post.

The front matter of a recent post on this blog

We wanted this metadata to be part of the research nexus. But then there was also the question of archiving. Our membership terms state that:

The Member shall use best efforts to contract with a third-party archive or other content host (an “Archive”) (a list of which can be found here) for such Archive to preserve the Member’s Content and, in the event that the Member ceases to host the Member’s Content, to make such Content available for persistent linking.

So we knew that if this blog was to be part of the scholarly record, we would need to ensure that it would be available in perpetuity, even if www.crossref.org were to go offline one day.

Doing this properly was starting to look like a sizeable project!

Fortunately, we knew that others had already done some great work in this field, so we would not have to start from scratch. After considering our options, we opted to integrate our blog with an established workflow for registering blog metadata: the Rogue Scholar service.

The Rogue Scholar was launched in 2023 by Martin Fenner as an archive for scholarly blog posts, hosted by Front Matter. Rogue Scholar improves science blogs in important ways, including full-text search, long-term archiving, and DOIs and metadata, such as versions and relationships along with identifiers such as ORCID iDs and ROR IDs. It provides the necessary tools to treat blog posts as research outputs through better attribution, preservation, and discoverability.

How did we do it?

Rogue Scholar works on the basis of consuming RSS and ATOM feeds (you may remember them from the days of getting headlines direct to your browser or feed reader). We created a new feed, including the proposed DOI as each entry’s id: and taking full advantage of the ATOM format by listing the post’s authors and including their ORCID iDs. We also provide the entire post as the entry’s <content> to allow for full-text indexing and archiving.

The XML feed entry for a recent post on this blog

For each post, we generate and assign a unique DOI under the Crossref prefix 10.64000. The Rogue Scholar integration then registers the DOI along with the metadata of the post as posted content. If you are interested in getting a similar workflow set up for your blog, you can read more in the Rogue Scholar blog and documentation.

What does the future hold for scholarly blogs?

Researchers are increasingly sharing their early work, or commenting on others’ work, in less formal ways, and if you look at the growth in the number of blogs covered in the Rogue Scholar platform in just a couple of years, it seems like science blogging is here to stay and will only increase. We believe that this practice is an integral part of a healthy scholarly ecosystem, and it needs to be represented in the research nexus.

The Crossref input schema does not include a blog work type, but we are planning to add it as a subtype of posted content in our next schema update. We will discuss this and other plans and ideas in the metadata advisory group that we are currently forming.

If you have thoughts on the role of blogs in the public discourse around science and science communications, or you would like to share your experience of registering metadata for your blog, let us know by commenting below. Your comments will be threaded in our community forum for discussion.

Sprinting to Progress: Behind the scenes of our first metadata sprint

Luis Montilla — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

If you take a peek at our blog, you’ll notice that metadata and community are the most frequently used categories. This is not a coincidence – community is central to everything we do at Crossref. Our first-ever Metadata Sprint was a natural step in strengthening both. Cue fanfare!. And what better way of celebrating 25 years of Crossref?

We designed the Crossref Metadata Sprint as a relatively short event where people can form teams and tackle short problems. What kind of problems? While we expected many to involve coding, teams also explored documenting, translating, researching—anything that taps into our open, member-curated metadata. Our motivation behind this format was to create a space for networking, collaboration, and feedback, centered on co-creation using the scholarly metadata from our REST API, the Public Data File, and other sources.

What have we learned in planning

The journey towards the event was filled with valuable lessons and learnings from our community. Our initial call received submissions from 71 people, which was exciting but presented the first challenge: we felt our event would work better with a relatively smaller group. An additional challenge we faced was the enthusiasm from people from different regions of the world who were eager to join, but needed support to attend in person. It reminded us how global our community is, and how important it is to think about different ways of making participation possible, especially in future events.

We also wanted to make sure that participation wasn’t limited by technical background. The selection process included a preliminary review by several members of our team to bring in a mix of perspectives and reduce bias. The event welcomed participants from all kinds of expertise levels, including colleagues who had never worked with APIs before. We sought to provide common ground for all with several group calls, where we presented introductions to our tools and used the opportunity to collect requests about tools, specific data, and questions from the participants that could enhance their preparation during the sprint.

At the Crossref Metadata Sprint

I’ve recently stumbled upon the following quote from a recognized data scientist:

Numbers have an important story to tell. They rely on you to give them a clear and convincing voice. (Stephen Few) ¹

It made me think that we can replace numbers for metadata and the idea still holds. Surrounded by the paleontological collections of the National Museum of Natural History, on 8th of April in Madrid, 21 participants and 5 Crossref staff came together to work on twelve different projects. These ranged from improvements to our Public Data file formats and exploring metadata completeness, to tackling multilingual metadata challenges, understanding citation impact for retracted works, and connecting Retraction Watch metadata with other knowledge graphs metadata.

The different teams that participated in the first Crossref Metadata Sprint.
The initial hours were the most energetic (but not chaotic!) as most of the participants had the chance to interact in person for the first time, ideas were exchanged, and pre-formed groups became more stable (however, one of the advantages of the format is that teams don't have to be rigid). Twelve coffee- and tea-powered projects started taking shape, a few of which are part of larger ideas under development. By the end of the second day, we saw:

Author changes between preprints and published articles.
Coverage of funding information by publisher.
Enriching citations with Crossref metadata.
Funding metadata completeness.
Improvement to the Public Data File.
Interoperability between Crossref DOIs and hash-based identifiers.
University of Tetova’s metadata coverage.
Retraction Watch data mash-up.
Perspective about AI-driven multilingual metadata.
Public Data File in Google Big Query.
Visibility of retractions across citations.
Visualising Crossref geographic member data.

Our team worked as part of some of these projects, providing valuable insights and feedback to the participants. We ended the first session with a group dinner and re-energised for the second day, which started with everybody fully immersed in their tasks. As we approached the conclusion, the groups started preparing some quick slides for a short presentation (that you can find here).

Our team and the participants left excited and looking forward to the next opportunity to collaborate. We certainly see the potential of recreating these spaces, and we’ll work on future editions in a different location. All of the project summaries and notes will remain stored in our metadata sprint Gitlab repo. Would you like to know more about any of these ideas? Let us know in the comments.

The first Crossref Metadata Sprint in a nutshell

Participants

None of this would’ve been possible without our enthusiastic participants. Huge thanks to everyone! Here is the full list of those who attended our inaugural Sprint:

Name
Blessing Abumere
Ana Bermejo
Robert Bianchi
Adam Buttrick
María de la Paz
Nicoleta Roxana Dinu
Jack Ekinsmyth
Castedo Ellerman
Álvaro Hontanar
Bianca Kramer
Anne L’Hôte
Cyril Labbe
Alexandra Malaga
Agon Memeti
Kaitlin Newson
Yağmur Öztürk
Dietrich Rordorf
Mohamed Selim
Sajad Sepehri
Ramazan Turgut
Iñaki Úcar

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brentdykes/2016/03/31/data-storytelling-the-essential-data-science-skill-everyone-needs/ ↩︎

Evolving the preprint evaluation world with Sciety

Luis Montilla — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This post is based on an interview with Sciety team at eLife.

What is Sciety?

Sciety is a community-led initiative developed by a team within eLife, that brings together expert evaluations of papers in one place. It is focused on preprints, preprint review and curation.

Can you tell us more about how Sciety works?

Sciety aggregates preprints from different sources to facilitate the processes of discovery and evaluation. Groups can triage the content and offer preprint reviews and endorsements, and individual researchers can learn about and share preprints of interest and their evaluations. We see the value of increasing trust in preprints, and transparency around the process of peer review, and we are trying to highlight this value and encourage more people to take part.

There are two key angles to Sciety: first, as preprints proliferate, we’re helping to make people more productive in their research by only surfacing the content they might be interested in and that they know they can trust. Second, we are also trying to get more people involved in the public review and curation of preprints. Contributors on Sciety are part of ‘groups’, representing organisations and other communities that facilitate some form of preprint evaluation. We’re broadly talking about peer review, but we also see the highlighting and summarisation of research. eLife, Biophysics Colab, MetaROR and Gigabyte, for example, are all providing some kind of review summary which Sciety shows as a ‘curation statement’. There’s also this additional layer of individual curation on top of it: we have people creating their own highlights in lists which they curate by topic; for example, ‘preprints by authors in the Global South’ or ‘Papers we want to discuss in our lab’. There is also an update feed available to users to help them keep track of all the reviews and endorsements from the groups they follow. We post these assessments and reviews alongside the preprint, which others can then use as an indicator of trust: why should one care about this particular study? As a given group – let’s say GigaByte – and its reviewers highlight the specific strengths of a preprint or reference an updated version, this feedback offers essential context for readers.

By making this evaluation and curation activity visible, Sciety clarifies who has reviewed the work and which groups have added it to their lists. These signals are invaluable for readers seeking reliable, curated research. The activity feed, which at present shows you all the added value in the form of comments, reviews and curation we are bringing from diverse sources, could be expanded to show different forms of curation activity in the future. Furthermore, other providers ingest and surface this information on their own platforms, such as Europe PMC and bioRxiv.

What is your main use of Crossref resources?

We started using the Crossref API to pull in the front matter of articles. Originally, these were only bioRxiv preprints, and then we expanded to various other preprint servers. We would aggregate reviews and build on top of all the preprint servers that have put the authors’ content out there.

We were mostly after a representation of the papers that we could link to: titles, authors, abstracts, publication dates, and, to have a way to go from the DOI of a paper, a classic Crossref entry point. Initially, we used the public API, but the performance wasn’t high enough for what we needed and we switched to Metadata Plus. This immediately increased the speed at which we got data to the point where we could compose pages on the fly and talk to Crossref simultaneously. Even if we needed to pull 10 or 20 different paper titles at the same time to show a list of articles, it stayed that way for a long time. Next, we implemented caching – that is, we started storing temporal local copies to improve performance further. Eventually, we expanded the set of preprint servers we were interested in. It’s always been quite a good experience to be able to put in a DOI and use the same code, essentially, to pull out titles, author information and so on. Crossref does this great job of aggregating the world of content so that we don’t have to. The metadata standardisation via Crossref’s API saves us the need to write special code for every new preprint server.

By the end of 2023, we were interested in multiple revisions and versions of a single preprint. Because the scholarly world is moving on, we can now see cases where the updates to a manuscript produce multiple versions in bioRxiv, and these might eventually evolve into an article in eLife, Nature, or another journal. The publication history complexity of papers has been increasing and we started relying a lot on Crossref to trace the relationships and the different versions of a paper across time. There is some good support on the relationship metadata on Crossref APIs, where you can see that a preprint has a new version with a different DOI, or conversely, that a preprint has an older version. Or you can see that a preprint has become a journal article, or the journal article was originally a preprint – along with all the dates that accompany these different versions. And we can establish the time it took for a preprint to become a journal article. In some cases it can take years, which is not great, right? We don’t want science to be stuck and not relied upon for years. So it helps us to make our case that preprints are the evolution of publishing, that authors publish them and then the preprints evolve rather than being stuck between gates kept by journals.

What can you tell us about the use of preprints?

We have noticed an increase in the interest in how a paper evolves over time and the cross-links between different preprint expressions or journal articles. We’re now seeing enthusiasm from those who are trying alternative publishing models to bring reviewed scientific preprints to people faster, and there is also interest in the transparency of a journal. And I think that’s part of what the Crossref relationship metadata gives us.

For example, we collaborated on a paper aimed at enhancing the culture of preprint peer review. One of the things we observed was that it was published on an OSF preprint server, and then went on to be published in PLOS Biology. As we’d started this project to show the relationships between something that had originally been a preprint, we noticed that the connection between PLOS and OSF for that specific preprint was not explicit. So, we asked a colleague if this was something that could be done. And our contact at PLOS said, “yes, we’ll do this”. At the time, we were aware of Crossref’s intention to either make this more manageable or to do it in bulk. This also prompted another group on Sciety to explore whether they could do the same. Consequently, GigaByte and GigaScience, two other reviewing communities on Sciety, inquired with their publishing platform, Riverview, if they could do the same. Eventually, they realised there was a way to connect the dots through Crossref, and they also started doing it. So, there seems to be a lot of enthusiasm around this idea of making the relationships more explicit: we should show if something has been a preprint, because it’s important to the authors, and it’s important to show the transparency in the journey. That was a real-world example of something that we’re able to service through Sciety by using the Crossref metadata, and the community is responding in a very positive manner to that.

How has your experience been using Crossref services? What are you looking forward to seeing in the future?

The works endpoint is really the 99% of what we have been historically interested in. We generally experiment by putting DOIs in the public API or trying to discover content in the API itself. The amount of data is so big that there are always different examples of what we seek. And we don’t have many performance problems now because we have adopted some aggressive caching. So anything that comes from Crossref is typically cached for 24 hours.

For example, take a bioRxiv preprint that might have multiple versions available on bioRxiv itself, because it’s quite common for authors to update the preprint as they make new changes to it. With this context, an example of something we would like to see is supporting the preprint version number. So this is something that we could implement for bioRxiv over some specific preprint servers on Sciety. But in the end, as we expanded our set of preprint servers, we had to get rid of that, because there wasn’t a sustainable way to aggregate it across most servers, like we would do with Crossref. So there’s probably a space there for papers as living documents. And we certainly have an interest in preprint-specific metadata – that’s where we will place our bets.

Also, as part of the preprint review metadata group, which is something that formed out of the recent meeting with EMC Europe and ASAPbio, we’re trying to drive forward a recommendation and prototypes for more consistency in preprint review metadata. It’s quite exciting to be involved in this and, as you can see, Sciety is a place where we’re starting to pull all this stuff together. And like I say, it is a bit of a Wild West. There are so many things that are called a review, but in metadata, we know there are different terminologies. As people are saying, everyone should be commenting on preprints, everyone should be curating them, and we’re trying to make some sense of that.

Working on Sciety and exploring Crossref metadata to make preprint review more open and valuable has been a rewarding experience.

With thanks to Giorgio Sironi, former Tech Lead Manager, and Mark Williams, Product Manager, at eLife

Destacando nuestra comunidad en Colombia

Susan Collins — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

English version

Dado que Crossref celebra su 25º aniversario este año, nos gustaría destacar algunas de las regiones activas y comprometidas en nuestra comunidad global.

Durante los primeros 25 años, la composición de los miembros de Crossref ha evolucionado significativamente. De un puñado de grandes editoriales fundadoras, ahora tenemos más de 22.000 miembros de 160 países. Casi dos tercios de ellos se identifican como universidades, bibliotecas, entidades gubernamentales, fundaciones, editoriales académicas, e institutos de investigación.

Una de las regiones de mayor crecimiento es Latinoamérica, con más de 3.200 miembros, la mitad de los cuales se unió en los pasados cinco años. Colombia fue uno de los primeros miembros de Crossref en Latinoamérica y continua siendo uno de los países más activos con 242 organizaciones.

“Creo que las organizaciones en Colombia siempre están abiertas a nuevos cambios, y a implementar nuevas estrategias que permitan mejorar o generar vínculos entre diversos actores, el programa Nexo podría verse de gran utilidad puesto que Colombia está uno de los grandes generadores de investigación en la región, y el poder conectar de una manera ágil y rápida toda una red de investigación va a representar grandes ventajas en los procesos”, – dice nuestro Embajador Juan Felipe Vargas Martínez, Cofundador y Director de Journals & Authors, en Medellín.

Una de las razones del aumento en la participación en Colombia es nuestro programa de patrocinadores. Los patrocinadores proveen apoyo a organizaciones más pequeñas que a menudo enfrentan barreras financieras, técnicas, y linguísticas que les dificultan convertirse en miembros de Crossref. Uno de los primeros patrocinadores en Colombia, Journals & Authors, se unió en 2016, siendo de los primeros en Latinoamérica. Ahora tenemos cinco patrocinadores ubicados en Colombia, apoyando 114 miembros.

Nuestros patrocinadores también han sido aliados clave en ayudarnos a interactuar con la comunidad, facilitando numerosos webinars y apoyando nuestras reuniones presenciales en Colombia en 2019 y 2024. Su conocimiento de la comunidad editorial a lo largo del país y sus extensas redes ayudan a las organizaciones nuevas a aprender más sobre Crossref de manera accesible, y a crecer continuamente la participación con nosotros.

También tenemos embajadores altamente dedicados ubicados en Colombia que son fuertes promotores de la misión de Crossref: Nicolás Mejía Torres y Juan Felipe Vargas Martínez. A lo largo de los años, ellos han sido instrumentales en ayudar a organizar eventos presenciales y webinarios para miembros, así como también en representar a Crossref en eventos a en Latinoamérica. Puedes aprender sobre nuestras discusiones en el resumen de los eventos más recientes en nuestro Foro Comunitario. Recientemente Juan Felipe y Nicolás participaron en la Feria Internacional del Libro en Bogotá donde presentaron una charla sobre los beneficios de los metadatos académicos abiertos.

Nuestra membresía en Colombia está conformada fundamentalmente por universidades, sociedades, e instituciones públicas. Casi todas las revistas dejan su contenido disponible abiertamente. La mayoría del contenido de revistas se publica usando la plataforma de publicación OJS de PKP - Colombia es el 8vo mayor usuario de OJS globalmente, y el segundo mayor en Latinoamérica.

“Entendemos que hay todavía mucho margen de uso de editoriales colombianas de Crossref.” Jaime Iván Hurtado, CEO & Fundador de Hipertexto-Netizen, un patrocinador de Crossref, reporta que “algunas hacen uso del DOI pero centradas en revistas tímidamente en los libros y poco en los capítulos de libros,” Hipertexto ha estado contribuyendo al incremento en el uso de identificadores persistentes para libros y capítulos de libros a través de sus herramientas y manejo estadarizado de metadatos.

Los miembros de Crossref a menudo conocen la importancia de los identificadores persistentes para su contenido, pero hay una necesidad de incrementar la conciencia sobre los beneficios y la importancia de incluír metadatos adicionales. Estamos concientes que muchos editores ofrecen su tiempo de manera voluntaria lo cual puede limitar su disponibilidad para entrenamiento adicional y participación en eventos relacionados con la edición y las buenas practicas para el manejo de metadatos. Queremos aumentar las oportunidades para el entrenamiento tanto presencial como remotamente, y nuestros patrocinadores y embajadores han sido aliados clave en la facilitación de estos eventos. En febrero de 2024 nos aliamos con nuestro patrocinador Biteca en un evento de dos días en Bogotá, en el que participaron más de 100 miembro. Hubo diuscusiones activas sobre los fundamentos de Crossref y el rol de los metadatos de calidad en la visibilidad de contenido, así como también presentaciones sobre la integridad y ética en la investigación y la publicación, con compañeros clave como COPE, PKP, Scielo, y DOAJ.

En Colombia no hay un requerimiento de usar identificadores persistentes (o no específicamente el DOI). Cada institución decide si usarlos de manera independiente, así que vemos con agrado tantos miembros de Crossref activos, registrando su contenido, y cada mes se unen más. Ellos reconocen el beneficio de los metadatos, así como también el ser parte de la comunidad de Crossref en general: “En Colombia, Crossref es un referente gracias al uso del DOI. Si bien en sus inicios este identificador se veía como otro requisito más que complicaba el trabajo de las editoriales, hoy es reconocido como una herramienta clave para mejorar la visibilidad y el impacto de las publicaciones. Asimismo, Crossref, a través de sus encuentros y recursos, brinda apoyo a los equipos editoriales al ofrecer pautas, herramientas e información valiosa que facilita la adopción de buenas prácticas y el cumplimiento de estándares de calidad” reporta Luz Ayda Becerra, Consultora de Innovación con nuestro patrocinador Biteca.

Las organizaciones tienen varias razones para convertirse en miembros de Crossref - la principal motivación es incrementar la visbilidad global de su contenido y, por lo tanto, incrementar el impacto de sus publicaciones. Los metadatos de Crossref son accesibles de manera abierta para todos en la comunidad. Cada mes tenemos millones de búsquedas en nuestra base de datos por parte de investigadores, bibñiotecas, herramientas que perfilan autores, servicios de búsqueda, y muchos más. Otras partes usan estos metadatos para crear herramientas y servicios que incrementan la visibilidad y la recuperabilidad del contenido de los miembros.

Sin embargo, existen desafíos que los miembros aún enfrentan cuando trabajan con nosotros. El obstáculo más frecuentemente mencionado al trabajar con Crossref es el lenguaje. La mayoría de nuestros correos electrónicos, documentación y herramientas están en inglés, y a los miembros les gustaría tener la oportunidad de recibir soporte, recursos y correspondencia en español. Aquellos que trabajan con patrocinadores se benefician de soporte de esta manera. Estamos aumentando el número de oportunidades de entrenamiento remoto y webinarios en español, y nuestros embajadores han estado interactuando con la comunidad local para proveer recursos adicionales. A principios de este año, el primer miembro de nuestro equipo ubicado en un país de Latinoamérica se unió a nuestro equipo de soporte técnico, y ahora podemos proveer soporte en español (recursos como este aparecerán más frecuentemente ahora). Reconocemos que aun tenemos trabajo por hacer para que Crossref sea más accesible a las comunidades globalmente.

Nuestros miembros han sugerido que más eventos locales y presenciales serian beneficiosos. Y estamos de acuerdo que las interacciones cara a cara son una manera clave para nosotros construir relaciones e incrementar la representación y visibilidad en las comunidades, y aspiramos a crear oportunidades de interacturas con nuestros miembros en todos los rincones del mundo.

Mostrar como se utilizan los metadatos puede resaltar los beneficios y la importancia de incluir metadatos adicionales. Varios de nuestros miembros y Patrocinadores han solicitado entrenamiento adicional en español sobre el uso de nuestras APIs, lo cual les permitiría obtener y analizar elementos clave de los metadatos.

“Al especializarse en este tipo de tecnologías, puedo analizar y estructurar la información de manera efectiva, generando informes útiles para los editores. Esto facilita la toma de decisiones informadas sobre sus publicaciones, optimizando la gestión editorial y asegurando una mejor visibilidad e impacto de los contenidos académicos.” (Luz Ayda Becerra)

En años anteriores Crossref ha sido invitado a participar en webinars y eventos presenciales en Colombia, dado el interés en crecimiento y la conciencia de la importancia de los metadatos para la comunidad de investigadores y la visibilidad de las publicaciones.

Gran parte de la información en este reporte proviene de encuestas enviadas a nuestros miembros, patrocinadores, y embajadores en Colombia. Apreciamos toda la retroalimentación, comentarios y sugerencias que hemos recibido, y queremos continuar la colaboración e incrementar la interacción con la comunidad.

English version

A spotlight on our community in Colombia

As Crossref celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, we would like to highlight some of the active and engaged regions in our global community.

Over the past 25 years, the makeup of Crossref membership has evolved significantly; from a handful of founding large publishers, we now have more than 22,000 members from 160 countries. Nearly two-thirds of them self-identify as universities, libraries, government agencies, foundations, scholar publishers, and research institutions.

One of our fastest-growing regions is Latin America, with over 3,200 members, half of whom joined us in the past five years. Colombia was one of the early adopters of Crossref from Latin America and remains one of our most active countries with 242 organisations.

“I believe that organisations in Colombia are always open to new changes and to implementing new strategies that allow for improvement or the creation of connections between diverse actors. The Research Nexus program could be very useful since Colombia is one of the largest producers of research in the region, and being able to connect an entire research network quickly and efficiently will represent significant advantages in the processes”, – says our Ambassador Juan Felipe Vargas Martínez, Co-founder and Director, Journals & Authors, in Medellín.

One of the reasons for increased participation in Colombia is our sponsor program. Sponsors provide support for smaller organisations that often face financial, technical, and language barriers that make becoming a member difficult. Our first sponsor in Colombia, Journals & Authors, joined in 2016, one of our first in Latin America. We now have five sponsors based in Colombia, supporting 114 members.

Our sponsors have also been key partners in helping us engage with the community, facilitating numerous webinars and supporting our in-person meetings in Colombia in 2019 and 2024. Their knowledge of the publishing community across the country and extensive networks help new organisations learn more about Crossref in an accessible way, and continuously grow participation with us.

We also have very dedicated ambassadors based in Colombia who are strong advocates for Crossref’s mission: Nicolás Mejía Torres and Juan Felipe Vargas Martínez. Over the years, they have been instrumental in helping to organise in-person events and webinars for members, as well as representing Crossref at events throughout Latin America. You can learn more about our discussions from the summary of the latest event on our Community Forum. Most recently, Juan Felipe and Nicolás attended the Bogotá International Book Fair, where they gave a presentation on the benefits of open academic metadata.

Our membership in Colombia is made up primarily of universities, societies, and public institutions. Almost all journals make their content openly available. Most of the journal content is published using the OJS publishing platform from PKP. Colombia is the eighth-largest user of OJS globally and the second-largest in Latin America.

“There is still considerable scope for Colombian publishers to utilise Crossref” Jaime Iván Hurtado, CEO & Founder of Hipertexto-Netizen, a Crossref sponsor, reports that “while organisations use DOIs most commonly for journals, there’s potential for greater use for books and chapters.” Hipertexto has been contributing to the increased use of persistent identifiers for books and book chapters through their tools and standardised metadata management.

Members often know the importance of persistent identifiers for their content, but there is a need to increase awareness of the benefits and importance of including additional metadata. We’re aware that many editors volunteer their time, which can limit their availability for additional training and participation in events related to publishing and metadata best practices. We aim to increase opportunities for training, both in-person and online, and our sponsors and ambassadors have been key partners in facilitating these events. In February 2024, we partnered with our Sponsor, Biteca, on a two-day event in Bogotá, attended by over 100 members. There were lively discussions on the fundamentals of Crossref and the role of quality metadata for content discovery, as well as additional presentations on research integrity and publication ethics, with key partners including COPE, PKP, Scielo, and DOAJ.

There is no requirement to use persistent identifiers (or specifically DOIs) in Colombia. Each institution decides whether to use them independently, so we’re delighted to see so many are active Crossref members, registering their content, and more are joining every month. They recognise the benefit of metadata, as well as being part of the Crossref community at large: “In Colombia, Crossref is a benchmark thanks to its use of the DOI. While initially viewed as yet another requirement that complicated the work of publishers, this identifier (and related metadata) is now recognised as a key tool for improving the visibility and impact of publications. Furthermore, through its meetings and resources, Crossref supports editorial teams by offering guidelines, tools, and valuable information that facilitate the adoption of best practices and compliance with quality standards,” reports Luz Ayda Becerra, Innovation Advisor with our sponsor, Biteca.

Organisations have various reasons for becoming members with Crossref – the main motivation is to increase the global visibility of their content and, therefore, to increase the impact of their publications. Crossref’s metadata is openly accessible and free for everyone in the community. Each month, we have millions of queries to our database from researchers, libraries, author profiling tools, discovery services and many more. Third parties use this metadata to create tools and services that increase visibility and discoverability of members’ content.

There are, however, challenges that members still face when working with us. The most frequently listed obstacle in working with Crossref is language. Most of our emails, documentation and tools are in English, and members would like the opportunity for support, resources, and correspondence in Spanish. Those working with sponsors benefit from their support in this way. For all, we are increasing the number of Spanish language online training opportunities and webinars, and our ambassadors have been engaging with the local community to provide additional resources. Earlier this year, the first staff member based in Latin America joined our technical support team, and we can now provide Spanish language support (resources like this will appear more frequently now). We recognise that we still have work to do to make Crossref more accessible to global communities.

Members have suggested that more local in-person events would be beneficial. And we agree - face-to-face interactions are a key way for us to build relationships and increase representation and visibility in communities, and we aspire to create opportunities to engage with members in all corners of the world.

Showing how metadata is utilised can show the benefits and importance of including additional metadata. Several of our members and sponsors have requested additional Spanish language training on using our APIs, which would enable them to obtain and analyse key metadata elements.

“By specialising in these technologies, I can effectively analyse and structure information, generating useful reports for editors. This facilitates informed decision-making regarding their publications, optimising editorial management, and ensuring greater visibility and impact of scholarly content.” (Luz Ayda Becerra)

Over the past several years, Crossref has been invited to participate in webinars and in-person events in Colombia, as there is an increased interest and awareness of the importance of metadata for the research community and the visibility of publications.

Much of the information in this report is taken from a survey sent to our members, sponsors, and ambassadors in Colombia. We appreciate all the feedback, comments, and suggestions we received, and we look forward to continuing our collaborations and increasing our engagement with the community.

Our annual open call for expressions of interest to join our board

Lucy Ofiesh — Wed, 14 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Crossref Nominating Committee invites expressions of interest to join the Board of Directors of Crossref for the term starting in January 2026. The committee will gather responses from those interested and create the slate of candidates that our membership will vote on in an election in September.

Expressions of interest will be due Monday, June 9th, 2025

This is an exciting time to join the board, as we have a number of active projects underway. Our focus is on how our community and metadata can contribute to ensuring the integrity of the scholarly record. We are redesigning our content system to better serve the changing needs of our community. We’re broadening our metadata record to capture richer funding and institutional affiliations. New board members will be part of on-going discussions about how to make our fees simpler and more equitable. Additionally, we envision a future where the scholarly record prioritizes relationships between research outputs to build a holistic research nexus. The board helps guide this work.

About our board elections

The board is elected through the “one member, one vote” policy wherein every member organisation of Crossref has a single vote to elect representatives to the Crossref board. Board terms are for three years, and this year, there are five seats open for election.

The board maintains a balance of seats, with eight seats for smaller members and eight seats for larger members (based on total revenue to Crossref). This is an effort to ensure that the scholarly community’s diversity of experiences and perspectives is represented in decisions made at Crossref.

This year, we will elect four of the larger member seats (membership tiers $3,900 and above) and one of the smaller member seats (membership tiers $1,650 and below). You don’t need to specify which seat you are applying for; we will provide that information to the nominating committee.

The online election will open in September, with results announced at the annual meeting scheduled for October 22nd. New members will begin their term in January 2026.

About the Nominating Committee

The Nominating Committee reviews the expressions of interest and selects a slate of candidates for election. The slate put forward will exceed the total number of open seats. The committee considers the statements of interest, organisational size, geography, and experience.

James Phillpotts*, Oxford University Press, committee chair
Abiodun Falodun, University of Benin
Wendy Patterson*, Beilstein Institut
Chaerul Umam, National Library of Indonesia
Amanda Ward*, Taylor & Francis

(*) indicates Crossref board member

Board roles and responsibilities

Crossref’s services provide a central infrastructure for scholarly communications. Crossref’s board helps shape the future of our services and by extension, impacts the broader scholarly ecosystem. We are looking for board members to contribute their experience and perspective.

The role of the board at Crossref is to provide strategic and financial oversight of the organisation, as well as guidance to the Executive Director and the staff leadership team, with the key responsibilities being:

Setting the strategic direction for the organisation;
Providing financial oversight; and
Approving new policies and services.

The board represents of our membership base and guides the staff leadership team on trends affecting scholarly communications.

The work of the board takes place in board meetings and board committees. The board sets strategic directions for the organisation while also providing oversight into policy changes and implementation. Board members join four meetings each year that typically take place in January, March, July, and November. The July meeting is in-person and may take place in a variety of international locations; travel support is provided when needed. January, March, and November board meetings are held virtually, and all committee meetings take place virtually. Each board member should sit on at least one Crossref committee. Care is taken to accommodate the wide range of time zones in which our board members live.

While the expressions of interest are specific to an individual, the seat that is elected to the board belongs to the member organisation. The primary board member also names an alternate who may attend meetings in the event that the primary board member is unable to. There is no personal financial obligation to sit on the board. The member organisation must remain in good standing.

Board members are expected to be comfortable assuming the responsibilities listed above and to prepare and participate in board meeting discussions.

Who can apply to join the board?

Any active member of Crossref can apply to join the board. Crossref membership is open to organisations that produce content, such as academic presses, commercial publishers, standards organisations, and research funders.

What does the committee look for?

The committee looks for skills and experience that will complement the rest of the board. Candidates from countries and regions not currently reflected on the board are strongly encouraged to apply. Successful candidates often have some or all of these characteristics:

Demonstrate a commitment to or understanding of our strategic agenda or the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure
Have expertise that may be underrepresented on the board currently;
Hold decision-making positions in their organisations;
Have experience with governance or community involvement;
Represent member organisations that are active in the scholarly communications ecosystem;
Demonstrate metadata best practices as shown in the member’s participation report

The board is also encouraging Crossref members who are research funders to apply.

What does the application evaluation process look like?

Open call for board interest, May 14 to June 9th: Any active member in good standing can apply for a seat on the board. This includes direct members, sponsored members, and GEM members. Sponsoring organisations, service providers, and Metadata Plus subscribers who are not also members are not eligible to sit on the board.

Application review, June through August: Applications will be reviewed by our Nominating Committee. We also gather internal information about the member organisation, such as metadata habits, history with Crossref, any previous experience in Crossref working groups or community initiatives.

We might also refer to external information to help the committee’s review including LinkedIn profiles or member organisation websites and publications.

Brief interviews with final candidates, August: The committee will hold brief virtual interviews with the top candidates before finalising the slate of nominations.

Announcement of the slate and election, September: The committee will announce the final slate of candidates in September and the online election will begin, culminating at the annual meeting at the end of October.

How to apply

Please click here to submit your expression of interest by Monday, June 9th. We ask for a brief statement about how your organisation could enhance the Crossref board and a brief personal statement about your interest and experience with Crossref.

Please contact me with any questions at voting@crossref.org

Notice of amendments to Crossref membership terms and bylaws

Amanda Bartell — Sun, 11 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In its March 2025 meeting, the Crossref board unanimously voted to update both the Crossref bylaws and the Crossref membership terms to:

Provide more clarity and alignment between our bylaws and membership terms, where they had become out of sync over the years.
Reflect previous board motions and bring both documents up-to-date with current processes for suspending and revoking membership, and reviewing those decisions.
Work towards being more explicit about what “Member Practices” should look like in terms of preserving the integrity of the scholarly record.

Link to updated membership terms and link to updated bylaws

The bylaw changes are effective immediately, and the updated version of the membership terms will come into effect on 11th July 2025.

In accordance with the 60-day notice period, we have emailed the Primary contact on all our active member accounts today. Note: Members do not need to do anything in response to these changes - by continuing to use our services after 11th July, they are accepting the latest version of the terms.

Changes to the membership terms

The membership terms will be updated on 11th July to be clearer on, among other things, the importance of accurate metadata, using DOI links everywhere, the all-important reference linking obligation, and the process for suspending and revoking/terminating membership. It also introduces the new concept of “Member Practices”, which a dedicated community committee will propose for board approval. More information about this will follow soon.

You can find the specific changes below, or take a look at this marked-up PDF showing the changes between the current (from June 2022) terms and the revised (July 2025) terms.

Topic	Section	Summary of Change(s)
Terminology	Various sections (e.g., 1, 2(i), 2(k), 5)	Streamlines some legal language to enhance clarity and readability.
Member Practices	2(a)	Establishes an obligation of Members to comply with Member Practices, to be established soon through a dedicated committee.
Unauthorised use of metadata	2(d)	Highlights the harmful impact of unauthorised use or deposit of metadata on Crossref, its Members, and the integrity of the scholarly record.
Reference linking	2(f), (g)	Updates the language referring to reference linking, and makes explicit Members’ obligation to maintain reference linking throughout membership, not only upon first joining Crossref. It also makes it clear that members should use DOI links wherever they communicate about any item with a DOI.
Displaying identifiers	2(h)	Strengthens Members’ obligation to display DOIs in accordance with Crossref’s Display Guidelines (by eliminating the “commercially reasonable efforts” qualifier).
Fees	3	Expands the definition of “Fees” to include all usage fees and fees for optional services, in addition to annual fees and Content Registration fees. Crossref’s right to suspend or terminate a Member’s account for non-payment extends to any of these fees.
Termination of Membership	9	Significantly revises the provision regarding termination of a Member’s membership by Crossref:
		Updates the bases for ‘for-cause’ termination, to include ongoing misrepresentations in a Member’s practices; misleading use or creation of DOIs; and failure to pay fees due (without the former 120-day minimum duration of nonpayment);
		Clarifies the distinction between suspension and termination (also referred to as revocation or expulsion) of a Member’s Crossref membership;
		Eliminates the existing procedures for automatic Board review of a termination or extended suspension. (Crossref’s bylaws have been amended to prescribe a new suspension/termination process and right to request Board review);
		Adds a termination trigger for cases where a Sponsor cancels its agreement with a Sponsored Member. (The member, of course, has the option to move to a new Sponsor, or re-join Crossref as an independent member).
Notice contacts	8(d)	Updates Crossref’s Notice contact; updates the list of required Member contacts.

Changes to the bylaws

Our bylaws have needed updating for a while, but since these seldom change, we’ve saved up a few changes, also to bring them in line with the revised membership terms.

We’ve now modernised the language, ensured that the bylaws match what’s in the membership terms, and we’ve added in motions that have been agreed by the board but not updated in the bylaws over the last few years. We’ve also updated the bylaws in line with the new membership revocation process in the new July 2025 membership terms. The new bylaws also allow for a new group of members to be created to help Crossref define Member Practices.

You can find a summary of the changes below, or take a look at this marked-up PDF showing all the changes to the bylaws.

Topic	Section	Summary of Changes
Terminology	Various sections	Eliminates gender-specific terminology, e.g. replaces “Chairman” with “Chair”.
		Makes minor clean-up edits (e.g. deletion of unused “Reserved” section and renumbering).
Membership Qualification	Art. I Sec. 1	Replaces “publishes” professional and scholarly materials with “produces” professional and scholarly materials to match the language in the already-current membership terms.
Non-Voting Membership	Art. I Sec. 2; Art. IV Secs. 7, 8; Art. VII Sec. 4	Reflects the establishment of a non-voting Member category as previously approved by the Board.
Membership Procedures	Art. I Sec. 3; Art. I Sec. 5	Clarifies that acceptance of new Members is delegable to Crossref personnel generally, replacing a narrow reference to the Executive Director.
		Eliminates superfluous procedural steps regarding Member resignation.
Suspension and Termination of Membership	Art. I Sec. 6	Significantly revises the provision regarding termination of a Member’s membership by Crossref:
		Updates the bases for ‘for-cause’ termination, to include various specific prongs (matching those already in the Member Terms), while maintaining the catch-all for conduct prejudicial to Crossref’s best interests.
		Authorises the Board to define standards and procedures for ‘for-cause’ terminations, or establish a committee (which can be comprised of both Board members and non-Board members) for that purpose.
		Specifies that Crossref staff is responsible for implementing the ‘for-cause’ termination standards.
		Eliminates the existing procedures for automatic Board review of a termination or extended suspension; specifies the Board’s authority to delegate discretionary appeals/review to the ExCo or other committee of Board members.
		Restates that temporary suspension may be used in lieu of, or in advance of, termination.
Annual Meeting	Art. IV Sec. 1	Updates language around the timing of the annual Member meeting:
		Replaces reference to the “second week of November” with “during the month of October or November”.
		Eliminates language regarding avoiding legal or religious holidays; given Crossref’s global footprint, this is not feasible.

Thanks for reading this far!

Don’t forget, members do not need to do anything in response to these changes - by continuing to register metadata after 11th July, they are accepting the latest version of the terms. But do let us know if you have any questions by emailing member@crossref.org.

Meet six winners of the first ever Crossref Metadata Awards

Kornelia Korzec — Wed, 07 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Marking our 25th anniversary, we launch the Crossref Metadata Awards to emphasise our community’s role in stewarding and enriching the scholarly record.

We are pleased to recognise Noyam Publishers, GigaScience Press, eLife, American Society for Microbiology, and Universidad La Salle Arequipa Perú with the Crossref Metadata Excellence Awards, and Instituto Geologico y Minero de España wins the Crossref Metadata Enrichment Award. These inaugural awards highlight the leadership of members who show dedication to the best metadata practices.

Crossref exists to make scholarly communications better by making research objects easy to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse. Our members weave the research nexus: a rich and reusable open network of connections between works resulting from the scholarly process and the people and institutions engaged in it.

Rich metadata improves discoverability of and trust in published works. Many institutions now strive to turn towards open research information in their reporting, assessment and evaluation. And so we believe it’s time to give credit to members that are doing the best work in supporting others across the scholarly ecosystem with their metadata.

The awards presented today will be followed by a series of blog interviews, where the winners will share how they achieved their high level of metadata completeness.

Starting in 2025, we will hold the awards every other year.

Read on to get more acquainted with the winners, learn about other high performing organisations and overall trends in metadata practices we see at Crossref.

Recognising Metadata Excellence

Noyam Publishers is based in Ghana. Colleagues had the pleasure of meeting them in person, during the Crossref Accra event this March. Striving for visibility motivates Noyam’s high performance when it comes to metadata. With 57% coverage of key metadata elements across their records, they are a leader among the members in our Global Equitable Membership (GEM) program.

Among other GEM members who show high participation in the research nexus, we see more than 40% coverage of key metadata elements for the records registered by University of Sierra Leone Teaching Hospitals Complex in Sierra Leone, Queen Arwa University in Yemen, Kathmandu University School of Education in Nepal, and International Journal for Innovation Education and Research in Bangladesh.

GigaScience Press, based in Hong Kong, is the leader among small members (organisations of less than USD 1 mln of publishing revenue or expenses). Discoverability drives their high metadata standards, and GigaSciencePress sees those having advantages in terms of service integrations and development too. They are quick to credit the expertise of their technology partner, River Valley Technologies as the strategic contributor to them achieving 82% coverage of key metadata elements across their records.

It’s worth highlighting that the competition among our small members was much closer than in any other category! Stichting SciPost (Netherlands) also show more than 80% coverage across their records, followed by Life Science Alliance, LLC (United States), National Institute for Health and Care Research (United Kingdom), and Universidad La Salle Arequipa (Peru), each of which achieved more than 70% metadata coverage across their registered works.

eLife leads among our medium members (organisations between USD 1 mln and 10 mln of publishing revenue or expenses) with 85% coverage of key metadata elements. They have shown dedication to metadata quality and consistently high performance over the years. They are also the first publisher to include Crossref grant IDs in their records, adopting the Grant Linking System.

Other medium-sized organisations to note are MDPI AG in Switzerland, and XMLink in South Korea – while there’s a significant gap to the leader, each of these organisations has more than 50% coverage of key metadata elements across their records.

It appears that large members (organisations with more than USD 10 mln of publishing revenue or expenses) struggle to achieve consistency in metadata quality across all of their records. Yet, we are delighted to recognise the American Society for Microbiology in the United States, who have embarked on a large metadata quality improvement project several years ago, and it continues to bear fruit as we see 56% of metadata coverage across ASM’s records. They’ve shared their experience on our blog already, so this time we’ll invite them to follow up with the latest updates on their metadata practices.

American Geophysical Union (AGU), Public Library of Science (PLOS), SAGE Publications, and Wiley, all based in the United States, are ASM’s closest runners up. While the gap is significant – still each of these organisations has more than 40% of metadata coverage across their records. PLOS has an impressive proportion of Crossmark-enabled works (99%), and American Geophysical Union and Wiley are registering a significant proportion of abstracts for their records (87% and 59% respectively).

It often takes time to hone new processes and learn about metadata practices, so we decided to recognise metadata excellence among our new members: organisations that joined Crossref within the past two years. Our inaugural award for excellence among new members goes to Universidad La Salle Arequipa Perú, who joined Crossref in May 2023, and have 71% metadata coverage across their records.

Rewarding Metadata Enrichment

Our members don’t just register their records with us – they also steward and maintain their metadata over time. As new technical capabilities and metadata elements become available, members have the ability to update their metadata. We decided to recognise the member who achieved the biggest transformation to their records in the past two years: Instituto Geologico y Minero de España, based in Spain, jumped from just over 1% to more than 40% metadata coverage for their records in the space of the past two years.

Others who made more than 30% jump in their metadata completeness in the past two years are Cabrera Research Lab (United States), Centro de Investigaciones Sociologicas (Spain), Bon View Publishing PTE (Singapore), Asociacion Colombiana de Neurologia (Colombia), Instituto Superior Tecnológico Almirante Illingworth (Ecuador), and Tashkent State University of Economics (Uzbekistan).

How did we select the winners?

Our Metadata Excellence Awardees have been selected on the basis of the overall highest coverage of metadata elements included in Participation Reports as of March 2025, and the Metadata Enrichment Award was based on the comparison between performance on the same criteria between March 2023 and March 2025. Participation Reports are openly available and provide information about the proportion of a given member’s records that include the following high-value metadata elements:

References
Abstracts
ORCID iDs
Affiliations
ROR IDs
Funder Registry IDs
Funding award numbers
Crossmark enabled
Text mining URLs
License URLs

The report also includes Similarity Check URLs. However, since Similarity Check is an optional service that attracts a separate fee – it wouldn’t be equitable to include it in our analysis.

We encourage all members to periodically monitor their participation reports, and we offer frequent drop-in metadata health-check sessions, where we review the reports together and offer advice on making improvements in areas where our members experience challenges.

In a membership of more than 22,000 organisations, it’s difficult to recognise just one organisation as a model of best practices. There are many nuances that influence the performance and we would like to be transparent about some considerations we made in our awarding process.

First of all, we considered volume of publishing as a key variable, and decided to qualify organisations with a minimum of 20 items of registered content.

We also recognise that size matters – and decided to award our Metadata Excellence Awards in four categories corresponding with organisational size and resourcing.

Beyond the winners – overview of good metadata practice across different types of works

The scholarly communications landscape is always evolving, and new types of content arise all the time. Crossref schema enables rich metadata collection about journal articles, books, book chapters, preprints, conference proceedings, technical reports, as well as grants, and more.

At this point, the most prolific way of sharing scholarship - at least judging by the number of records registered with Crossref – is a journal article. There are 112,982,290 journal articles in the Crossref database, and in 2024 alone our members created 6,747,031 journal articles records with us.

When it comes to books (2,212,221 total records) and book chapters (22,892,785 total records), publishers with the richest metadata records include Universitatsbibliothek Kiel (Germany) with more than 50% coverage of key metadata elements across their book records, and 70% for their book chapters. RTI Press (US) also has strong metadata for books (52%), while Firenze University Press (Italy) has 56% of metadata coverage across their book chapters. Incidentally, Universitatsbibliothek Kiel (Germany) are also leaders in metadata for conference proceedings (53% metadata coverage of those records).

Preprints and posted content (including preprints, eprints, working papers, reports) are relatively new on the scene and growing rapidly – Crossref has 1,683,351 preprint records (413,742 registered in 2024). The richest metadata records for preprints belong to eLife (UK) - they cover more than 50% of key metadata elements across their preprints records in Crossref. Springer Science and Business Media LLC (Netherlands) have 48% metadata coverage for their preprints, American Chemical Society (ACS; United States) with 46%, and UNISA Press (South Africa) and PeerJ (US) follow with 44% coverage.

The newest of record types that can be registered with us are grants. At present this is an early adopters domain, with 152,810 registered grants so far. The European Union (represented in Crossref by the Publications Office of the European Union) registered the most grants to date.

Beyond the winners – overview of coverage in key metadata elements

When speaking about key metadata elements reflected in our Participation Report, the coverage varies widely. For example, overall 21% of records in Crossref have abstract metadata; 2,000 members have a full coverage of their records with abstracts, while 1,000 don’t include any. Deposition of ORCID iDs is growing but still very low, with only 10% of records including ORCID iDs.

Affiliation metadata, broadly sought after by many stakeholders in the scholarly ecosystem - not least because of its role as a key marker of trust - is growing steadily but slowly: only 16% of records included it at the end of March 2025. With recent improvements in our helper tools (especially the latest version of the record registration form), and the upcoming developments in other publishing software (notably the upcoming 3.5 version of OJS), which support affiliation metadata better – we’re expecting a significant improvement in the coming months.

As with affiliations, when research integrity judgements are concerned, another key element is the funding information. The growing interest in metadata among funders further strengthens the case for increasing inclusion of funder information in this way, ideally including Crossref grant DOIs that funders are registering in the hope of using the Grant Linking System to help their assessment and evaluation work. At the moment the space for improvement is vast, with only 6% of Crossref metadata including funder IDs and award numbers.

We support ROR IDs in both affiliation and funding metadata, but adoption among our members is slow. So far the top five contributors of ROR IDs to Crossref are Fonds de recherche du Québec, eLife, American Physical Society (APS), Optica Publishing Group, and Wellcome.

Licence metadata is currently included for 43% of records in Crossref, and we see that thousands of members don’t include it. Not all members realise that this is a practical challenge for their authors, as it hinders institutions and funders who seek to monitor compliance with their openness mandates.

Finally, references metadata is the lifeblood of the research nexus, supporting transparency and discoverability of scholarship. We’ve got 44% coverage of reference metadata across records registered in Crossref. While reference linking is a member obligation, including references in the metadata is a recommended best practice. The way references are recognised and included in works varies by publication type and discipline, which makes it harder for some members to provide it.

There’s an ongoing need to raise awareness about the role of metadata among the wider community, including editors and researchers. We have collaborated with practitioners, supporters, and users of metadata to develop relevant resources as part of the Metadata 20/20 initiative.

We make efforts to educate our members about best practices when it comes to registering their metadata with us and offer a range of support options, including technical support on our Community Forum. Recognising the leaders in metadata participation is part of that process too. With the upcoming blog series from our awardees, we hope to spur peer-to-peer learning to facilitate widespread improvements and to raise the profile of metadata quality among the community.

Metadata Advisory Group call for applications

Patricia Feeney — Fri, 02 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve been accelerating our metadata development efforts and recently released version 5.4 of our metadata schema, and are planning to release version 5.5 (including support for multiple contributor roles and the CRediT taxonomy) this summer. We will also extend our grants schema based on the Funders Advisory Group work, and make progress on other changes as set out on our new metadata development roadmap.

As we work towards the vision of the rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organisations, people, things, and actions, dubbed the Research Nexus, our schemas need to change to accommodate the evolving landscape of research processes and communications.

In the past we convened the Metadata Interest Group that helped shape the current set of updates we’re now working through, including changes to names, expansion of support for abstracts, dates, and multilingual metadata. As we’ll soon move into new territory (support for subjects, keywords, and other metadata essential to developing a robust research nexus), we want to further enlist the support of our community to help shape the metadata we collect and the metadata best practices we promote.

We are inviting Crossref members, metadata users, and others with an interest in shaping metadata development at Crossref to apply to join our new Metadata Advisory Group.

The purpose of the group is to contribute your advice and insight to help shape our metadata development as we broaden the metadata we collect and outputs we support to better align with the Research Nexus. Group participants will help shape metadata development at Crossref, and will discuss potential new metadata to adopt, best practices, and the overall needs of metadata providers and users.

We’re looking for participants with experience with XML, JSON, and other metadata formats. We’ll cover a range of topics but we would particularly like to engage with those of you with an interest in emerging content types.

The Metadata Advisory Group will meet quarterly and we’ll accommodate multiple time zones as needed as we want participation to reflect the regional diversity of our membership.

If you’re interested, please submit an application!

Reflections from Crossref Accra 2025 - Strengthening open science and partnerships in Ghana

Johanssen Obanda — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Crossref is a membership organisation, and it’s the global community of members that creates the Research Nexus together. Meeting our community locally is a highlight and an important learning experience. This year, we started by connecting with a growing community in Accra, Ghana - our first in-person event in the country included in our GEM program. From 14 members in 2023 to 31 in 2025, our community in Ghana is blooming.

At its core, Crossref Accra 2025 was about showing up for the community in Ghana - listening, learning, and building together. On the 20th of March, we welcomed 66 participants: journal editors, university staff, librarians, and researchers. People who are doing the real work of making scholarly publishing happen in the region.

Photo: Participants from across Ghana’s research and publishing landscape.

We started the day with a walkthrough of Crossref’s services, then shifted into more tailored conversations - talking metadata quality, improving discoverability, and making Crossref tools work for the local context. The panel featuring AJOL, WACREN, and CARLIGH was a key moment. We heard honest reflections about journal sustainability, the barriers to indexing, and how Open Access can grow if local infrastructure is supported. Each organisation shared how they’re working to strengthen research communities and where they see Crossref fitting into that bigger picture.

Photo: Crossref Ambassador Richard Lamptey moderates a panel with WACREN’s Effah Amponsah, CARLIGH’s Mac Anthony Cobblah, and AJOL’s Kylie van Zyl on sustaining journals and advancing Open Access in the region.

During the dedicated listening session, participants spoke candidly about the cost burden of APCs, the over-reliance on foreign journals for recognition, and the uphill battle local journals face, from limited resources to slow workflows. There was a clear push for stronger local publishing platforms and more training around tools like OJS. People want technical clarity: How does Crossref fit into their workflows? What’s involved in registering metadata and DOIs? What’s the actual value? Many also voiced interest in strengthening relationships with indexing services, and connecting university presses more directly with Crossref. The afternoon breakout sessions were hands-on. One group explored how to use the Participation Reports to check metadata completeness, while the other dove into using the Crossref API. People started swapping tips, asking questions, and brainstorming ways to improve how their institutions handle metadata. Several wanted to know how to automate more of their workflows through OJS, boost reference linking, and pull better reports from the Crossref system.

Photo: A collage of snapshots capturing activities at the Crossref Accra event.

Outside the main event, we also visited some of our members and stopped by the Association of African Universities. These visits gave us more time for deeper conversations about publishing workflows, ORCID uptake, metadata visibility, and the bigger picture of Open Access in Ghana. We heard a lot about the potential for more equitable partnerships and stronger local ownership of publishing infrastructure.

Post-event feedback made one thing clear: people want more opportunities to learn - more practical workshops, more guidance on using Crossref tools, and more support navigating the technical side of things. There’s growing interest in forming a local user group, a space to keep sharing, troubleshooting, and moving forward together. And the desire to improve indexing and visibility was a recurring theme. People see registering identifiers for content as an essential step on that journey. There’s also a broader concern about long-term sustainability and ethical publishing practices. Many journals are doing their best in tough conditions, and there’s a real appetite for honest conversations about quality, trust, and resilience.

Photo: Crossref staff and ambassadors with member Amy Asimah from Regional Maritime University. Pictured: Johanssen Obanda, Oumy Ndiaye, Evans Atoni, Patience Mbum, Audrey Kenni Nganmeni, Ginny Hendricks, and Richard Lamptey.

Crossref Accra 2025 reminded us how valuable these local gatherings are - not just for sharing tools and workflows, but for building lasting connections. We’re grateful to our Ambassadors and team who helped make it happen, and we’re committed to deepening our support across the region. There’s so much potential in Ghana’s scholarly community, and in West Africa more broadly, as we’ve seen again at WACREN in Senegal a couple of weeks later. We’re committed to working with local partners to help it grow.

Enhancing DOI Accessibility for All Users

Patrick Vale — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

2025 Update

In 2022, we set out to update our DOI display guidelines with the intention to adopt the proposals in 2025. It’s important to note from the outset that we are not mandating any immediate changes to the DOI display guidelines. Instead, we are working with our community to co-create a solution that addresses the diverse needs of all users, rather than imposing technical changes that may not suit everyone.

Background

DOI links are the lifeblood of scholarly communication. They’re the canonical identifiers that enable researchers to find, cite, and assess academic work. In essence, they’re stable, reliable, and easy to use—provided you can see them. But what happens when a user can’t rely on visual cues?

The Accessibility Challenge

For users of screen readers and other assistive technologies, the full value of a DOI link can be lost. While sighted users benefit from the context surrounding a DOI link—such as the title, abstract, and other metadata—screen reader users often hear just the bare URL. This means they might not know what content the DOI link represents, leading to confusion and a diminished browsing experience.

The problem is compounded by the technical nature of DOI links. Being URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers), they don’t naturally lend themselves to the same accessibility techniques as standard URLs. When we attempted to tweak DOI links directly, every change that improved accessibility for one group inadvertently hindered another. Whether it was a WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) rule or an ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) attribute, a solution that worked in one area would break in another.

A Community-Driven Approach

Realizing that a one-size-fits-all fix wouldn’t work, we took a different approach - one that involved the community from the outset. After consulting with early adopters and attending an insightful session with the JATS4R accessibility group, it became clear that the answer lay in experimentation and iteration. Rather than modifying the DOI display guidelines immediately, we are developing a tool that enhances the user experience without disrupting the current standards.

It’s worth noting that this solution places the responsibility on the end user rather than on publishers and platform providers. However, by doing so, users can have a consistent browsing experience regardless of the platform they use to access scholarly content. This approach also serves as an important stepping stone toward a future publisher-provided solution—be it via accessibility-focused JavaScript or a mandated dual-link implementation—and any efforts to recommend or mandate such changes will benefit greatly from concrete evidence of the effectiveness and scalability of this approach.

Introducing the DOI Accessibility Enhancer

First demonstrated at the recent Crossref Annual Meeting, here we share our DOI Accessibility Enhancer browser extension. Available now on the Firefox Add-on Store and the Chrome Web Store, this extension is designed to improve the experience of DOI links for screen reader users without altering the default behavior for sighted users.

How It Works

Scanning for DOI Links: The extension scans any webpage for DOI links.
Querying Metadata: Once a DOI is detected, it queries the Crossref REST API to retrieve the title of the corresponding scholarly work.
Enhancing the Link: The title is then injected as a screen-reader–only link. This means that when a screen reader user navigates to the DOI, they hear the title of the paper rather than the opaque URL.
Maintaining Visual Integrity: For sighted users, the original DOI link remains unchanged—visible, clickable, and easy to copy-and-paste.
Highlighting for Testing: An optional feature highlights updated links, making it easier for developers and testers to see the changes in action.

Get Involved

This project is very much a community effort. The extension is open-source, and we welcome feedback and contributions via our GitLab repository, email, or Community Forum. Your real-life experiences and insights will drive future improvements, ensuring that our solution meets the diverse needs of all users.

Try It Out

If you’re using Firefox, head over to the Firefox Add-on Store and install the DOI Accessibility Enhancer today. If you’re a Chrome user, you can find the extension directly in the Chrome Web Store. If you use a screen reader you’ll experience the difference firsthand - and if you don’t, give it a try with VoiceOver enabled (Command-F5 on a Mac).

Together, we can advance scholarly accessibility and ensure that critical research remains discoverable for everyone.

Supporting Membership through the Sponsor Program

Susan Collins — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Sponsors make Crossref membership accessible to organisations that would otherwise face barriers to joining us. They also provide support to facilitate participation, which increases the amount and diversity of metadata in the global Research Nexus. This in turn improves discoverability and transparency of scholarship behind the works.

Growing number of sponsors

Our first sponsors joined in 2008, but the program started to grow rapidly between 2012-2014, with the addition of sponsors in South Korea, Türkiye, Russia, India, and Ukraine. In 2015, we welcomed our first South American sponsor from Brazil, followed by more sponsors in Latin America starting in 2016, and our first sponsor in Indonesia in 2017.

As of December 2024, Crossref works with 124 sponsoring organisations that support 12,195 sponsored members.

In 2021, we updated the criteria for organisations to be accepted as sponsors, raising the bar to ensure that potential sponsors accurately and successfully represent Crossref in the community. We also paused the acceptance of new Sponsors from regions where such organisations are already prolific. By doing so, we can focus on growing the program in areas with the greatest need.

In 2024, we added eight new sponsors to the program; these included our first sponsor in Bangladesh (our first GEM sponsor), as well as sponsors in China, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Türkiye, Tunisia, Iraq, and Kenya.

Our five largest sponsors, based on the number of members they support (as of the end of 2024) are:

Relawan Jurnal Indonesia, Indonesia - 3076 members
Associacao Brasileira de Editores Cientificos do Brasil (ABEC Brasil) - 1312
Tubitak Ulakbim DergiPark, Türkiye - 1248
NEICON ISP, Russia- 713
Kyobobook Center, South Korea - 419

The majority of sponsors are much smaller than this, looking after 25 or fewer Sponsored Members.

Each sponsor has specific criteria for what kind of organisations they work with. Some are dedicated to supporting organisations in a specific country or region, while others may be based on geography, language, subject area, or usage of a specific platform, e.g. OJS.

Our sponsors are distributed across all regions of the world, and we’re continuously working to forge networks with organisations in regions with the least coverage, to ensure scholarly communicators anywhere can join Crossref and contribute to the Research Nexus.

Asia Pacific: 22
Central and Eastern Europe: 29
Central and South Asia: 25
Latin America and the Caribbean: 24
North Africa and the Middle East: 3
Sub-Saharan Africa: 2
US and Canada: 5
Western Europe: 14

Currently, sponsored members represent 115 different countries, with the largest proportions from Latin America, South-eastern Asia, and Eastern Europe. Nearly two-thirds of sponsored members self-identify as universities, libraries, government agencies, foundations, scholar publishers, and research institutions.

To date, sponsored members have contributed 6.5 million works to the Research Nexus.

Importantly, the sponsored members have the ability to fully participate in Crossref – they are stewards of their records (even if some choose to delegate this activity to their sponsor), they can vote, stand in for elections to our Board of Directors, and collaborate with others in the Crossref community, just as any other member.

Sponsors are key partners for us in making participation easier for organisations in their communities. They work with us to provide administrative, billing, technical, and local language support to the members they work with. Depending on the financial model, they may charge members for their services.

Technical support they provide for members makes it more tailored and often quicker than the Crossref team could offer. For example, sponsors can provide service in their local language using their preferred method (helpdesk, WhatsApp, phone, email), which varies widely by region; or, where they charge any fees – they tend to collect those in the local currency. Some sponsors even take care of all the records registration for the members they support.

It’s important to note that sponsors can only support the participation of organisations that would otherwise be in the current $275 fee tier (or up to $500 for funders) if these organisations were to join independently. Regardless of the number of sponsored members, the sponsor pays one membership fee on behalf of them all, and then they also pay all the registration fees that are due on behalf of their sponsored members, which alleviates challenges related to paying in foreign currency. Overall, sponsors make Crossref membership more economical for the organisations that participate this way, and Crossref benefits from billing efficiencies.

In a recent survey of sponsored members (carried out in July 2023, with 204 responses from members working with 53 sponsors), the majority of sponsored members (88%) said that sponsors met their expectations and 85% are likely or very likely to recommend their sponsors to another organisation.

Respondents indicated that the aspects of working with a sponsor that were most valued are technical support (72%), financial assistance/no annual fee (37.3%), ability to pay in local currency (43%), and local language support (44%).

It’s important to note that sponsors often offer many non-Crossref services to members too, including anything from website design, copy editing, typesetting, set up of publishing platform, XML-JATS markup, to assistance with submitting content to third-party databases.

Sponsors represent Crossref in the community. They also assist us in connecting with their communities locally. In 2024, we collaborated with Biteca for an event in Bogotá, and Relawan Jurnal Indonesia for a two-day event in Jakarta. Both sponsors advised on venues, promoted the event to the members they support, coordinated local guest speakers, and provided translation services as needed. We also collaborated with Hipertexto-Netizen on engaging our community at the Guadalajara Book Fair. The success of these events was in part due to our collaboration with each sponsor.

Ensuring quality experience for our members

We try to make sure that every sponsor we work with will be able to commit to helping our members long-term. We offer training too, with an expectation that they can disseminate the learning to their members. The majority of sponsored members report receiving some training from their Sponsors (with 70% in our survey saying they’ve received adequate training on all services, while only 3% haven’t received any so far). Most recently we engaged sponsors with the Participation Reports to help them improve metadata completeness for their members.

In 2024, we’ve been meeting sponsors individually to review how things are going for them and their members – assessing member metadata quality, and additional services, as well as inviting their feedback about the program and suggestions for improvements that Crossref could make.

We’ve learnt a lot about practices related to record registration and training, business models and especially – a whole range of attitudes and approaches related to metadata completeness. Some sponsors register content for all or some of their members, while others provide technical support but do not register the content directly for members.

Members who used OJS often had higher scores because of the ease of use and availability of the plugins. Some sponsors noted that many journal editors are volunteers and don’t have the time or financial resources to collect extra metadata or update existing metadata records; they collect only what is required to register an item. Several sponsors also reported a barrier with authors’ mindset – they don’t tend to see the value of including ORCiDs or ROR IDs in their submissions. Somewhat surprisingly, we learned that not all members see the value in including references in their deposits or don’t wish to take the time to add them – this is a concern, as relationships created by references are a cornerstone of the Research Nexus, and markedly support discoverability of the content.

Sometimes, sponsors are unable to continue to provide services, or they are unable to meet the obligations of being a sponsor and their accounts are closed. In the cases where a sponsor account is closed, we will work with their members to find an alternative sponsor when possible.

Similarity Check is an external service provided in partnership with iThenticate, that’s available to Crossref members at a more competitive price, and it is in demand among the sponsored members too. Currently, 78 Sponsors offer Similarity Check to their members (however, not all sponsored members working with these sponsors have elected to use the service).

Sponsor LIBCOM Piotr Karwasinski was pleased that “All the rules of Crossref are unified. Everything is the same for everyone - the same for big publishers as well as small. Equal for everyone.”

Costs can sometimes be a concern; sponsors in India and Algeria both noted that $1USD is a lot of money for some. We mentioned the fee review being conducted with the RCFS project.

In summary

As we move toward realizing our vision of a connected Research Nexus, building a network for the global community must include input from all of the global community. When Crossref began 25 years ago our first members were mainly from the United States and Western Europe, but today our membership is much more global and diverse. Though our membership has grown to more than 22,000 organisations around the world, we are not seeing significant membership growth from all regions.

In the last few years, almost half of our members came from Southeastern Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America combined. However, there is much slower growth in other regions, mostly notably Northern and Sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of Central Asia, with only 5% of new member applications coming from these regions collectively. We know there are organisations in those areas contributing to the scholarly record, however, many continue to face financial, technical, and administrative barriers to become members.

The Sponsor Program is one of the avenues established to address and reduce barriers and to help facilitate membership and participation to all knowledge-sharing organisations worldwide. Ensuring it remains strong and successful requires collaboration, communication, and comprehensive training.

Request for proposals: Crossref website information architecture review

Lena Stoll — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We are looking for an organisation to perform an audit of, and propose changes to, the structure and information architecture underlying our website, with the aim of making it easier for everyone in our community to navigate the website and find the information they need.

UPDATE, August 2025: We are partnering with Cazinc and Cactus AI Solutions on this work. Stay tuned for updates on the progress of this project over the coming months.

About Crossref

Crossref is a nonprofit membership organisation that exists to make scholarly communications better. We run open infrastructure to link research objects, entities, and actions, creating a lasting and reusable scholarly record that underpins open science and makes research outputs easy to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse.

Together with our 22,000 members in 160 countries, we drive metadata exchange and support nearly 2 billion monthly API queries, facilitating global research communication, for the benefit of society. Our members include research institutions, publishers, libraries, funders, government bodies, and other stakeholders in the scholarly communications ecosystem.

About the Crossref website

We launched the current website in 2016. A few years later, we custom-developed the current Documentation section, moving from a separate site (Zendesk, and prior to that HelpIQ). We subsequently launched a Discourse community forum and actively encourage self-service there. Despite these efforts, we still answered about 50,000 support emails in 2024.

We use the Hugo static site generator, and all the content, assets, and code are open in GitLab. We have dedicated staging and sandbox branches, and use staging for editing instead of the usual git merge requests, and sandbox for testing more substantial code or navigation changes.

We share the responsibility for editing across the teams, with a page owner/author denoted for each page. Most staff use VSCode for editing; we don’t have or need a CMS. We deploy changes to the live site around twice a week. Several custom shortcodes are in place, such as for tables and displaying related information based on tags, or for presentation elements like highlight boxes or columns. We host (many) images and files directly in the repository, rather than using a CDN. We use Algolia for site search, which was chosen because it can support multiple languages.

Current website structure

There are currently four main sections of the website:

Get involved: this landing page is the most up-to-date with our current positioning and messaging. The section includes how to join as a member and the ways you can participate, obligations and benefits; a welcome page for new members to get started; events and webinars like our annual meeting; special projects or campaigns that need landing pages; fees; programs such as for service providers and ambassadors; global equitable membership; code of conduct; and working groups (which are different from board committees).
Find a service: listing the purpose and value/benefits for each service, such as content registration, metadata retrieval/APIs/Search, Crossmark, Similarity Check, Grant Linking System, and some other quasi-services that require members to develop or enable something, like reference linking or the Open Funder Registry or ROR.
Documentation: following more-or-less our “managed member journey” pathway, this includes getting set up, how to create DOI suffixes, how to select the right tool for content registration, how to interpret the various reports that members receive, what to expect in terms of invoicing, schema library and best practices for metadata sharing incl. guidance on principles to follow and sample XML files to edit. Each ‘service’ then has it’s own documentation section too.
About: governance, including information about our board, committees, and bylaws. Financial information and annual reports. Staff pages, org chart, jobs, and policies incl. employee handbooks. History of Crossref and mission. Under the sub-heading “Operations & sustainability”, there is also detailed information about membership processes such as revocations, managing legal sanctions, member practices, and member offboarding.

Additionally, the website hosts our blog and allows users to sign up for our newsletter, which are two key ways in which we keep our community informed.

Project overview

End goal

We want to allow our community to self-serve with information about what Crossref does, how to become a member, how to use our tools, and how to participate in our programs and services. The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure are central to how we operate, and we want the information about the how, what, and why of Crossref to not only be openly available, but also easy to discover and reuse.

Visitors to www.crossref.org should be offered the information that they are looking for quickly and intuitively. A reduction in the number of help-desk tickets we receive (in 2024 we answered 50,000 of them) would be an indication of an improved self-service website, as would lower bounce rates.

Scope and deliverables

At the end of this information architecture review project, we expect to have agreed on a set of recommendations for tackling the problem statements laid out in the appendix of this document, as well as a plan for how the recommendations should be implemented. This plan will form the basis for an implementation project in 2026. We encourage applications both from organisations who would also be comfortable taking on the implementation project and from those who feel their expertise is specific to the review project described herein.

Specifically, we expect the following deliverables:

Assessment of key user needs (through analytics and/or user interviews incl. editors)
Audit and analysis of current site structure and how it serves key user pathways
Recommendations for content re-architecture, navigation and search improvements
Strategy for taxonomy and/or tagging system
Strategy for documentation site setup
Strategy for information pathways between website, docs, community forum, ticketing systems
Recommended roadmap for 2026 implementation project
Nice to have: Wireframes or annotated sitemaps for future site layout

Problem statements

It is difficult to find information about our services. Even Crossref staff often use search engines to find a page on our website rather than navigating to it or using the built-in search on the website. It’s often not clear whether the information you are looking for is on the “Find a service” page or the “Documentation” page for a given service, and there is no consistent cross-linking between the two groups of pages. There is a search bar prominently placed on the home page, but the search currently only looks for direct matches between the search terms and page contents (with some declensions, stopwords, and fuzziness to allow for typos). We have limited tracking available in Algolia, but can see that in a 7-day span in March 2025, a large portion of searches (78%) returned no results.
It is difficult to navigate our website. The home page contains some quick links to key pages, but they are not very visible. In order to navigate the website from the home page, users have to expand a hamburger menu which takes up the whole page, and are then presented with an overwhelming amount of options. Once users have left the home page, the way they navigate depends on which section of the website a user finds themselves in: all pages have breadcrumbs going back to Home, while only Documentation pages have a hierarchical sidebar. In order to switch between the basic groups of pages (Get involved, Find a service, Documentation, About us), users have to use the global hamburger menu.
Our home page doesn’t do a very good job of explaining who we are and what we do. A lot of real estate is taken up by images and recent news items without much context. Bounce rates from the home page are high (65% as of March 2025).
Our user interfaces and reports are not easily accessible from our website. While we are not a SaaS organisation, there is an established pattern of being able to access an organisation’s services directly from its website (often via a login button at the top right). This is complicated by the fact that we don’t have one single frontend “platform”. In fact we don’t have a single page linking out to the various frontends and interfaces, nor do we have a consistent pattern of linking out to an interface from the documentation page describing how to use it.
Some of the pages and grouping of pages are outdated and don’t reflect our current priorities or ways of working anymore. For example, the Get involved section still features Special programs and Service providers quite prominently, but the cross-functional programs that shape most of our strategic work now (Co-creation and Community Trends, Contributing to the Research Nexus, Open and Sustainable Operations, Metadata Development) are not represented. Find a service strongly suggests we’re a service provider, whereas most of our services are enabling infrastructure, requiring members to build or act on something. Some more recently created pages don’t fit neatly into any of the current groupings: e.g., API Learning Hub can be found under Get involved and in the home page footer, but doesn’t really belong in either. We also have time-limited, special projects or campaigns like the 25th anniversary of Crossref or the Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability project, for which there isn’t a great home. Lastly, we want to host additional content on our website in future, such as our own staff publications; instructions on how to find our codebases and how to contribute to them; how to build technical integrations; how to report bugs; and general best practices in scholarly communications (e.g. in the context of our work on the integrity of the scholarly record), which is not really part of the documentation of our services.

Project budget and timeline

We have a maximum budget of $20,000 allocated to the information architecture review project. The projected timeline is as follows:

RFP issued: April 17, 2025
Final deadline for proposals: May 15, 2025
Shortlisted applicant interviews: May 2025
Appointment made: June 2025
Project kick-off: July 2025
Final deliverables due: October 2025

If you are interested in applying but don’t think this timeline is deliverable for you, please contact us to suggest what would be realistic for you or your organisation before applying.

Proposal submission requirements

Proposals, as well as any questions, should be submitted to Lena Stoll by 15 May 2025.

Please include the following in your proposal:

Company background and relevant experience with open-source static sites and mission-driven communications
Case studies or examples of comparable work
Your approach to the proposed project and how you would structure it
Team bios and roles incl. typical timezones
Timeline and milestone estimates
Proposed budget, including breakdown
Proposed cadence of check-ins, communications, milestones, and deliverables
Contact information

Proposal evaluation criteria

We will evaluate proposals based on:

Demonstrated understanding of our mission and community needs
Proven experience designing for multilingual and multinational audiences
Expertise in mission-driven business-to-business communications and information architecture
Quality of previous work and case studies
Value for money

We look forward to hearing from you!

The programs approach: our experiences during the first quarter of 2025

Helena Cousijn — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

At the end of last year, we were excited to announce our renewed commitment to community and the launch of three cross-functional programs to guide and accelerate our work. We introduced this new approach to work towards better cross-team alignment, shared responsibility, improved communication and learning, and make more progress on the things members need.

In line with the Crossref strategic agenda, the three programs focus on:

Co-creation and Community Trends (CCT): This program is responsible for interfaces such as reports/dashboards, record registration interfaces, connections and collaborations such as Open Funder Registry, ROR, ORCID auto-update, as well as OJS and other partner integrations. This program also includes the Crossref website and any front-end interfaces to support other programs. It includes initiatives aimed at upholding the integrity of the scholarly record and our tools in this area, such as Crossmark and retraction/correction tooling, and Similarity Check for text comparisons.
Contributing to the Research Nexus (CRN): This program manages and oversees all activities relating to contributing to the Research Nexus. A lot of the work in this program revolves around our REST API, but also includes our other APIs, incorporating external data sources like Retraction Watch and Event Data, building out metadata matching services with the new data science team, supporting the community of metadata users with API sprints and more modern options for retrieving metadata based on usage and need.
Open and Sustainable Operations (OSO): This program manages and oversees all activities related to making our operations more open, transparent, and sustainable. This program focuses on supporting and strengthening the core functions our members rely on and enabling future growth. It includes metadata deposit and processing, most apps for e.g. managing titles, authentication, and architectural and infrastructural projects like moving from the data centre to the AWS cloud service. This program also includes modernising our operations in general, which is not just technology but also finance and human resources, so projects like membership process automation, financial analyses, and business system integrations.

The approach we are taking is to support the work within the programs through (internal) cross-functional steering groups. Led by three program leads (who share updates on their programs below), three program steering groups meet regularly to discuss the topics and work that fall within the scope of each program. The steering groups consist of representatives from all teams within Crossref, which means every steering group has people from the community team, membership team, technical team, data science team, and operations and finance team, bringing all the perspectives and expertise needed to prioritise the next steps for Crossref and fostering broad knowledge sharing and shared responsibility.

Although the whole organisation contributes to these programs, they are coordinated by the Programs and Services team. The team was formed towards the end of 2024, and on the 1st of February, Helena Cousijn joined Crossref in the new role of Director of Programs and Services. Helena has a background in both product management and community engagement and is very excited to help Crossref shape the programs approach and work with all teams across the organisation to drive the strategic agenda forward!

If you’d like to keep an eye on the work that is happening within each program, you can find more information on the Crossref productboard.

Co-creation and Community Trends (CCT)

The mission of the CCT program is to build and foster relationships with our community and other services and organisations within it, so that Crossref can meet and anticipate community needs. Curiosity and listening are at the core of how we co-create to tackle emerging challenges, develop best practices, and explore new ideas for building the Research Nexus. We want our work to benefit all of Crossref’s diverse stakeholders - from our own colleagues and members to underrepresented communities in the wider scholarly ecosystem.

In the first quarter of 2025, our focus areas have been:

Improvements to our new record registration form for journal articles, which already supports grants, and was launched in beta for articles in 2024. For example, the form now has a built-in reference deposit feature. Join the conversation on the community forum for updates and feedback on this new helper tool.
Running a series of multilingual metadata health check webinars. There are more of these coming up throughout Q2, so it’s not too late to sign up for one if you are interested.
Integrating with Rogue Scholar to automate the assignment of DOIs to, and the archiving of, posts on this very blog.
Planning for the inaugural Crossref Metadata Awards - join our upcoming community call on 7 May to find out what this is all about.

In the coming months, we are hoping to tackle the following:

Kick off a project to review the information architecture of this website and look into how we can make our documentation and related information more helpful and easier to navigate.
Expand the record registration form for journal articles to allow easy editing of previously submitted records. This will allow us to sunset the long-deprecated Metadata Manager tool, as was first announced in 2021.
Begin building new record registration forms for more work types. Watch this space.
Explore options for supporting the integration of additional software systems with Crossref, building on our existing approach with OJS plugins, with a focus on open-source tools relied upon by our members for registering metadata.
Restore faceted search on Crossref Metadata Search. This feature was disabled in 2022 following intermittent performance issues. We believe recent improvements to Metadata Search will allow us to bring some filters back, although we will need to start small so as not to overload our systems with these more complex queries.

Contributing to the Research Nexus (CRN)

The research nexus is a rich and reusable open network that represents scholarly activity. It consists of connections between research organisations, people, things, and actions; it’s an evolving model of the scholarly record that the global community can build on forever for the benefit of society.

Our metadata is already a contribution to the research nexus, however, there is much more we would like to do. Our next steps will be to consolidate our existing data and services, and build the technical capacity, partnerships, and knowledge to enhance our contribution with new relationships. Some parts of our data storage and workflows don’t yet have the flexibility to fully capture all types of research objects and how they are connected.

To support this process, the main priorities in the program are:

Collaborate with our community. We want to get to know users of our metadata better and work more collaboratively alongside them. Also, we seek partners to contribute new data sources that will enhance our metadata with additional relationships.
Share the research nexus vision. We know that we aren’t alone in developing the research nexus, so we will reach out to others with a similar vision and identify where we have common goals.
Maintain our technology. We have already identified technical improvements we can make to our REST API, and we need to keep on top of monitoring and fixing bugs. We also need to build capacity for new types of data and relationships. Our other endpoints, such as the XML API and forwardlinks (for citations), need maintenance and are likely to be affected by a planned redesign of our core architecture.
Building a new matching service. Identifying relationships between metadata records is a key part of the research nexus. We have already improved reference matching over the years, and we’re looking to implement funding, affiliations, and version matching next. We’ve carried out research on several types of matching and are looking at building a new service to handle it in production.

In the first quarter of 2025, we’ve been working on:

Schema changes, making the first significant updates to our schema for several years, including adding the capacity for depositing ROR IDs for funding organisations in funding metadata.
Delivering Retraction Watch retractions via the REST API, integrated with member-supplied retraction/correction data.
Getting the community involved and understanding needs, planning a sprint and various workshops.
Plenty of under-the-hood updates to the REST API, and more significant upgrades to come later this year.

Next up, we will:

Plan and build out the new matching service.
Improve representation of some metadata in the REST API, including Crossref members, journals, and typed citations such as data citations.
Update the grants schema to extend the award types and respond to new funder member requests
Add contributor roles to the schema, including CRediT.
Ask our community about metadata retrieval, including the various APIs and the Metadata Plus subscription service.
Upgrade elements of the REST API and optimise the underlying technical infrastructure.

Open and Sustainable Operations (OSO)

The OSO program is centered on transparency and sustainability of our technical systems and our business and people operations. We focus on maintaining critical systems and operations and ensuring their security, addressing technical and operational debt, and controlling or reducing costs - to Crossref, our community, or the environment. We’re always keen to tackle projects to automate repetitive and manual tasks – of which we have many – and pay down technical debt, being as open and transparent as possible along the way.

Our most recently completed work includes:

Moving from Oracle to an open-source database, PostgreSQL. This work aligns with the POSI principles and sets us up for a more robust, reliable, and modern infrastructure.
Implementing metadata schema changes for deposit submission and processing, so we can now accept ROR IDs in funding metadata, as well as the changes in latest schema version (5.4.0) which includes the new ability to label references with a type (such as dataset, software, blog post, article, etc.).
Automating parts of the process to keep Sponsor information on our website up to date and make it easier to search, so our community can find relevant and accurate information about our Sponsors and how to work with them, and our membership team spends less time keeping the website current.

Ongoing work in our program includes:

Moving from a physical data center into the cloud (AWS). The PostgreSQL migration was the first step needed to enable our move to the cloud, which will allow us to operate more sustainably and efficiently.
Automating new member setup in our systems, which is largely a manual process now.

And coming up are:

Making changes in our core system to accept the upcoming 5.5 metadata schema version.
Extracting billing code from our main codebase, to set up as its own service. This will allow us to simplify our code and make it easier to maintain. We’ll also be implementing the changes to billing enacted as part of the Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability program (TBD!).
Holding a “systems workshop” in April, to understand how our current system(s) are and aren’t meeting staff, member, and community needs, and how we might go about building the open, sustainable Crossref system of the future.

What have we learned so far?

Internal communication

One of the reasons to implement a programs approach was to improve internal communication across the organisation. With all teams being represented on all steering groups, everyone is in the loop when decisions are taken. We see that this way, people feel more connected to the strategic agenda and, importantly, the ‘why’ is clearer to people. It is easier to get perspectives from across the organisation because contributing to these conversations is now part of people’s day jobs and so it’s easier to ask for their time. We are still looking to improve how we facilitate group discussions and decision-making to ensure we make the most of the program steering groups.

Planning and delivery

Working closely with people from across the organisation has helped with more effective planning. A closer collaboration between program leads and developers makes the delivery of new features and functionality more accurate and predictable. With the community and support teams also being part of the conversation, they can plan related comms and support/documentation efforts in a timely manner. So far, it has also been easier to get more things delivered. We have some big projects coming up this year that will be a good test for the programs approach!

Cross-cutting topics

The implementation of a cross-functional approach facilitates discussions around cross-cutting topics, but also leads to the question of how cross-cutting topics fit within a specific program! Maybe you already noticed that work on metadata schema 5.4 and the planned work on 5.5 is included under both Contributing to the Research Nexus and Open and Sustainable Operations in the update above. Because metadata development impacts many of our systems, work was needed within all programs to enable these changes - the input, the output and the interfaces. Later this year, we’re planning to share some visuals that better explain which projects sit with which program and how we deal with cross-cutting topics.

Alignment

One of the most important things for the approach to be successful is that people are bought in and willing to participate and communicate. For cross-organisational alignment, a culture needs to be in place (or developed) where people are willing to collaborate and be open and transparent about their work. In a practical sense, we are still looking at how we can better align our code bases with the current programs so that it is easier to develop the relevant expertise within the programs.

We hope to see many of you at our upcoming community call on 7 May. Please register to join as we discuss some of the work included in this update.

Version 5.4.0 metadata schema update now available

Patricia Feeney — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This year, metadata development is one of our key priorities and we’re making a start with the release of version 5.4.0 of our input schema with some long-awaited changes. This is the first in what will be a series of metadata schema updates.

What is in this update?

Publication typing for citations

This is fairly simple; we’ve added a ‘type’ attribute to the citations members supply. This means you can identify a journal article citation as a journal article, but more importantly, you can identify a dataset, software, blog post, or other citation that may not have an identifier assigned to it. This makes it easier for the many thousands of metadata users to connect these citations to identifiers. We know many publishers, particularly journal publishers, do collect this information already and will consider making this change to deposit citation types with their records.

Support for version numbering

Members can now supply a version number across all relevant record types, including journal articles, book chapters, conference papers, posted content/preprints, datasets, reports, standards, and dissertations. The versioning update also includes an optional description field.

Members who version content are encouraged to register a new DOI with each version and supply the isVersionOf’ relationship to connect versions to each other, facilitating the Research Nexus and allowing members to avoid additional content registration fees, which don’t apply for versions.

Preprint status

This is specific to the ‘posted content’ record type and comes as a result of the recommendations of the Preprints Advisory Group. The new status field allows repositories to flag a preprint as ‘withdrawn’ or ‘removed,’ a situation specific to posted content.

There are some other minor updates as well, including:

An expansion of the language codes supported by a language attribute.
Additions to the archive locations we collect. Our membership terms ask members to archive their content where possible, ensuring their DOIs are able to resolve to the content persistently, and we ask that the archive(s) they use are identified in the metadata records registered with us.
We’ve increased the number of ISBNs supported per item from 6 to 100.

If you would like to begin using this schema, a brief transition guide is here. A full set of schema files are in our GitLab repository, and more information is available in our website documentation for schema 5.4.0.

What’s next?

We’ve already begun working on our next update, which will be an expansion of contributor roles. We’ll allow multiple contributor roles instead of the single role we currently support, we’ll add ‘corresponding author’ and ‘other’ to the Crossref role vocabulary. We will be also adding full support for CRediT.

We’re also hoping to fit in a remodeling of our group contributor (currently labeled ‘organisation’ in our input schema) in the next update, and I would appreciate feedback on this planned update.

More changes are planned, including an update to our grants schema, and expanded support for abstracts. We’ll be circulating details about those updates soon.

Join us for the Mid-year Community Call on 7th May to hear more!

2025 public data file now available

Martyn Rittman — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Every year we release metadata for the full corpus of records registered with us, which can be downloaded for free in a single compressed file. This is one way in which we fulfil our mission to make metadata freely and widely available. By including the metadata of over 165 million research outputs from over 22,000 members worldwide and making them available in a standard format, we streamline access to metadata about scholarly objects such as journal articles, books, conference papers, preprints, research grants, standards, datasets, reports, blogs, and more.

Our metadata is used by thousands of services, researchers, and other organisations. We make it openly available through our APIs, which can be used to obtain a subset of records. If you want to work with our full corpus, the best way is to get a copy of the public data file and update it via the REST API with any new records created or changed since its release.

By providing an annual copy of the full corpus, we also expand the ways in which the metadata can be used and interrogated. It is ideal for groups using large samples of the scholarly record, such as metaresearchers or research integrity experts. You can find examples of the public data file used in research on journal editorial practices and in projects investigating gaps in the scholarly record.

How to access the public data file

The total size of the file is 197 GB and it is available in JSON-lines format. We also provide an experimental tool to convert the file to an Sqlite database. Before downloading the full dataset, you may wish to download the sample dataset containing 100 files (with 100 records in each, around 24 MB). This is a randomly sampled subset of metadata records and can be used for prototyping and development.

To get a copy of the annual data file you can access it directly via https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.13003/87bfgcee6g, or get the sample dataset and previous public data files from Academic Torrents. We make a donation to Academic Torrents to support their work, which allows the data to be accessible in this way. Some organisations have reported policies that prevent access to torrents, so we provide a copy that can be downloaded from AWS, which requires an AWS account and a small payment to cover the data transfer costs. You can find the details about access here.

We have some tips for working with the public data file. If you would like to have access to monthly snapshots of the whole corpus, along with higher API rate limits and other benefits, you can subscribe to Metadata Plus.

What’s different this year?

This year’s public data file contains an additional 9 million records, and many updates to previously deposited records. The formats and method of access are the same as last year, except that it uses JSON lines, meaning that each metadata record is on a single line and the file suffix is jsonl instead of json. The records have been sorted by DOI, meaning it should be easier to navigate.

A change this year is that the file does not contain aliased DOIs, which are DOI that are redirected to another DOI. Aliasing is necessary on rare occasions, for example when two DOIs are registered for the same content. Previously we haven’t indicated aliasing in the REST API and public data files; this year only the prime DOIs (the ones to which they are redirected) are included. This makes statistical analysis of the metadata more accurate, but beware that it may give different results in cases where many aliased DOIs were previously counted. See this community forum post for more details.

The file also contains retractions from the Retraction Watch database, which was acquired by Crossref in September 2023 and recently integrated into the REST API.

If you have questions, want to let us know how you will use the metadata, or want to discuss anything on the topic of retrieving Crossref metadata, head to our community forum. From there, you can also keep updated about changes to our schema and APIs.

Come ROR with us: Using ROR IDs in place of Funder IDs

Patricia Feeney — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Today, we’re delighted to let you know that Crossref members can now use ROR IDs to identify funders in any place where you currently use Funder IDs in your metadata. Funder IDs remain available, but this change allows publishers, service providers, and funders to streamline workflows and introduce efficiencies by using a single open identifier for both researcher affiliations and funding organisations.

As you probably know, the Research Organization Registry (ROR) is a global, community-led, carefully curated registry of open persistent identifiers for research organisations, including funding organisations. It’s a joint initiative led by the California Digital Library, Datacite and Crossref launched in 2019 that fulfills the long-standing need for an open organisation identifier.

In 2023, we shared our plan to transition the Open Funder Registry into ROR. More recently, we announced that we were planning to update our schema so that it is possible to collect ROR IDs where we currently collect Funder IDs such as in the funding metadata section for works and funder section for grants. Now that we have completed this work, Crossref members can start depositing ROR IDs where they would normally deposit Funder IDs. This update also means that the community, including funders, service providers, researchers, and data scientists can retrieve this metadata via our API.

So come and ROR with us and start depositing ROR IDs for both researcher affiliations and funding organisations.

Open Funder Registry-ROR transition

This is of course a significant first step in the Open Funder Registry to ROR transition.

We’ve always said that we would continue supporting Funder IDs in our schema and in our tools and services until the community is ready to transition - and we will. In the last year, Crossref and ROR conducted a series of Open Funder Registry user interviews to help us understand how it was being used and identify practical challenges to this transition in our members’ workflow (thank you to those who took part, it was incredibly useful!).

One major takeaway from this consultation was around the pivotal role that peer review management systems played in the Open Funder Registry-ROR transition. We look forward to seeing more service providers integrating with ROR in the future. If you are a service provider and are ready to integrate with ROR, drop support@ror.org an email.

Including ROR IDs in Crossref metadata

If you are ready to begin including ROR IDs in your funding metadata, you only need to include the ROR itself to identify a funder.

For example:

<fr:program name="fundref">
 <fr:assertion name="ror">https://ror.org/00fq5cm18</fr:assertion>
 <fr:assertion name="award_number">10.3030/725840</fr:assertion>
</fr:program>

Examples of more complex combinations of funding information are available in our documentation. This update has been made across all schema that support funding metadata.

Our grants schema has recently been updated to version 0.2.0 to support ROR IDs in place of funder identifiers as well. As with funding metadata, only the ROR ID needs to be supplied within the record:

<funding amount="750" currency="USD" funding-percentage="75" funding-type="APC">
 <ROR>https://ror.org/02twcfp32https://ror.org/02twcfp32</ROR>
 <funding-scheme>Sofa Lending Programme</funding-scheme>
</funding>

Although previously a funder name was collected with the funder identifier, for both grants records and funding data in an attempt to avoid redundant, incorrect or conflicting metadata, now we’re accepting an identifier only as the ROR ID has an existing metadata record. The organisation name exists within the record in the ROR registry and the ROR record is the authoritative source of the name.

ROR IDs in JSON outputs

We have an existing legacy practice of representing Open Funder Registry IDs as just a DOI, but ROR IDs are represented in the JSON outputs as a full URL with id-type “ROR”, for example:

Funding metadata


 "funder": [
 {
 "award": [
 "10.3030/725840"
 ],
 "id": [
 {
 "id": "https://ror.org/02twcfp32",
 "id-type": "ROR",
 "asserted-by": "publisher"
 }
 ]
 }
 ],

Grant funder information


"funding": [
 {
 "type": "infrastructure",
 "award-amount": {
 "amount": 750.0,
 "currency": "USD",
 "percentage": 75
 },
 "funder": {
 "id": [
 {
 "id": "https://ror.org/02twcfp32",
 "id-type": "ROR",
 "asserted-by": "publisher"
 }
 ]
 }
 }
 ]
 }
 ],

If you have any questions or feedback, get in touch with us support@crossref.org !

The GEM program - Year Two 2024

Susan Collins — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We began our Global Equitable Membership (GEM) Program to provide greater membership equitability and accessibility to organisations in the world’s least economically advantaged countries. Eligibility for the program is based on a member’s country; our list of countries is predominantly based on the International Development Association (IDA). Eligible members pay no membership or content registration fees. The list undergoes periodic reviews, as countries may be added or removed over time as economic situations change.

The program began in January 2023 with 214 existing members; and 131 more joined throughout the year. In 2024, we saw 127 organisations joining via the GEM program, bringing the total number of participants to 458. We welcomed our first-ever members from Sierra Leone and Honduras, as well as our first Sponsor in Bangladesh (Sponsors are organisations that work with us to provide administrative, billing, technical, and local language support to the members they work with).

Of 458 organisations participating in the GEM program, 380 are independent members, 77 are sponsored, and there is one sponsoring organisation. To date, these members have contributed over 279,000 works to the Research Nexus, our concept of a fully connected global scholarly ecosystem.

Though we have Sponsors based elsewhere, working with members who are in GEM countries (e.g. PKP), we will continue to consult with our ambassadors and other partners to identify potential new sponsors that are based in GEM countries.

Number of Crossref GEM members by country:

GEM Country (Alphabetically)	Total No. of Members
Afghanistan	17
Bangladesh	120
Benin	5
Bhutan	6
Burkina Faso	4
Burundi	2
Cambodia	8
Central African Republic	1
Congo, Democratic Republic	15
Ethiopia	13
Ghana	27
Guyana	2
Haiti	1
Honduras	1
Kosovo	8
Kyrgyz Republic	23
Lao, People’s Democratic Republic	2
Madagascar	4
Malawi	2

GEM Country (Alphabetically)	Total No. of Members
Maldives	3
Mali	3
Mauritania	1
Mozambique	2
Myanmar	1
Nepal	50
Nicaragua	2
Rwanda	7
Senegal	7
Sierra Leone	1
Somalia	9
Sri Lanka	14
Sudan	19
Tajikistan	4
Tanzania, United Republic of	21
Togo	1
Uganda	17
Yemen	30
Zambia	5

Number of Crossref members in GEM Program Countries

We are excited about our in-person event taking place in a few weeks in Accra, Ghana, as a direct result of the increasing participation and interest in Crossref from the region.

We can see a clear connection between outreach activities conducted by us and our Ambassadors and the increase in awareness and the number of members joining from related countries. These were Bangladesh, Nepal, Uganda, and Tanzania in 2023, and Ghana, Zambia, Sri Lanka, and Tanzania in 2024.

From our Ambassadors’ activities in the GEM countries, some recurring questions emerged highlighting barriers to joining Crossref. It’s important to recognise that many institutions struggle with funding and technical expertise. It’s no surprise that they are often concerned with the maintenance of their membership over the long term. We emphasize that GEM is a sustained measure to accommodate knowledge-sharing organisations from the regions of financial strain. Whilst the program addresses the costs of membership and content registration, our Ambassadors can assist further, offering technical support with record registration, metadata best practices, and integrating Crossref services with existing systems, including Open Journal Systems (OJS); and discuss how registering metadata improves research visibility.

We are grateful to our Ambassadors for directly supporting the GEM program within their countries through webinars and presenting in person at conferences: Shaharima Parvin and MD Jahangir in Bangladesh, Richard Bruce Lamptey in Ghana, Niranjan Koirala in Nepal, Oumy Ndiaye in Senegal, Lasith Gunawardena in Sri Lanka, and Baraka Manjale Ngussa in Tanzania.

Retraction Watch retractions now in the Crossref API

Martyn Rittman — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Retractions and corrections from Retraction Watch are now available in Crossref’s REST API. Back in September 2023, we announced the acquisition of the Retraction Watch database with an ongoing shared service. Since then, they have sent us regular updates, which are publicly available as a csv file. Our aim has always been to better integrate these retractions with our existing metadata, and today we’ve met that goal.

This is the first time we have supplemented our metadata with a third-party data source. Until now, our APIs have included metadata provided by Crossref members along with outputs from our internal enrichment workflows, such as matches found for bibliographic reference matching and funders. Third party metadata has been gathered in Event Data, but this has been stored and delivered separately.

Knowing when work has been retracted is critical for assessing the integrity of research, and this enhancement of the data will be a great benefit to the community.

Where does the data come from?

Retraction Watch carefully curates retractions, pulling them from several non-Crossref sources, including PubMed and publisher websites. Each entry is manually checked and annotated before being added to the database. The high level of curation and broad coverage is what made a partnership between Crossref and Retraction Watch attractive, and our shared goal of making changes to metadata more visible.

“Our goal with the Retraction Watch Database has always been for it to be as useful to as many people as possible, and available from as many sources as possible,” says Ivan Oransky, co-founder of Retraction Watch and executive director of The Center For Scientific Integrity, its parent nonprofit organisation. “Integration with Crossref’s REST API is a huge step in that direction.”

Where can I see the retractions?

If you use a service that collects Crossref metadata, you will start to see the Retraction Watch retractions as they are picked up. To access the data directly, you can find retractions from both Crossref members and Retraction Watch in our REST API, for example with the following request for all retractions:

https://api-crossref-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/v1/works?filter=update-type:retraction

Or for an individual record:

https://api-crossref-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/v1/works/10.1177/17588359231172420

In the results here you will see an update-to field:

"update-to": [
{
"updated": {
"date-parts": [
[2023,4,22]
],
"date-time": "2023-04-22T00:00:00Z",
"timestamp": 1682121600000
},
"DOI": "10.1177/1758835920922055",
"type": "retraction",
"source": "publisher",
"label": "Retraction"
},
{
"updated": {
"date-parts": [
[2023,4,22]
],
"date-time": "2023-04-22T00:00:00Z",
"timestamp": 1682121600000
},
"DOI": 10.1177/17588359231172420",
"type": "retraction",
"source": "retraction-watch",
"label": "Retraction",
"record-id": 44124
}
]

The source field states where the retraction came from. Currently, it can have two values: publisher or retraction-watch. Note that the same retraction may be included multiple times from different sources.

Retraction Watch retractions will remain available on Gitlab in csv format and be updated on working days. The record-id refers to the entry in the csv file with further details, such as the reason for retraction.

There is full documentation available for the Crossref REST API and if you are new to REST APIs, see our learning hub to get started which includes a tutorial about accessing retractions.

What can I do with the retractions?

Like the rest of our metadata, the retractions are freely available. If you use or operate a tool that ingests retractions, the new entries will start to be picked up immediately. The Retraction Watch database includes a larger number of retractions than the Crossref database, so you should see an increase in the total.

We have heard from organisations that would like to build new research integrity tools based on this data. We look forward to seeing the benefits brought by wider availability of the Retraction Watch retractions, and how they can provide better context to research outputs.

While Crossref metadata is freely available to reuse without a license, if you make use of the Retraction Watch retraction metadata in a published work, we kindly request that you provide a citation to the source.

If you have questions or comments, please head over to the section of our forum dedicated to integrity of the scholarly record.

POSI 2.0 feedback

Ed Pentz — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As a provider of foundational open scholarly infrastructure, Crossref is an adopter of the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI). In December 2024 we posted our updated POSI self-assessment. POSI provides an invaluable framework for transparency, accountability, susatinability and community alignment. There are 21 other POSI adopters.

Together, we are now undertaking a public consultation on proposed revisions for a version 2.0 release of the principles, which would update the current version 1.1 of the principles, released in November 2023.

This is a crucial step in ensuring that POSI evolves to meet the needs of the community. Whether you are part of an organisation that has adopted POSI, is considering adoption, interacts with POSI-aligned groups, or you have a personal interest in open scholarly infrastructure, your perspective is invaluable.

Some additional context about POSI

POSI is not an organisation; POSI adopters are an informal group of those that have conducted self-assessments.
The POSI principles are not rules or a checklist; organisations or groups can adopt or interpret them to fit many different circumstances.
Our goal is for POSI self-assessments to be made publicly available and for interested communities to assess and monitor updates and progress.

How to Participate

If your organisation has adopted POSI, is considering adoption, interacts with POSI-aligned groups, or you have a personal interest in open scholarly infrastructure, your perspective is invaluable.

Review the Proposed POSI 2.0 Revisions.
Share your thoughts via our short survey.

Deadline: March 5, 2025

Together, we can shape the future of open scholarly infrastructure. Join the conversation and make your voice heard!

Metadata matching: beyond correctness

Dominika Tkaczyk — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In our previous entry, we explained that thorough evaluation is key to understanding a matching strategy’s performance. While evaluation is what allows us to assess the correctness of matching, choosing the best matching strategy is, unfortunately, not as simple as selecting the one that yields the best matches. Instead, these decisions usually depend on weighing multiple factors based on your particular circumstances. This is true not only for metadata matching, but for many technical choices that require navigating trade-offs. In this blog post, the last one in the metadata matching series, we outline a subjective set of criteria we would recommend you consider when making decisions about matching.

Openness

Matching tools come in many different shapes and sizes: web applications, APIs, command-line tools, sometimes even enchanted crystal balls showing matched identifiers emerging from a mysterious mist! No matter what form they take, an important consideration is whether the source code and all the related resources for the matching are openly available.

Matching strategies that are either closed-source, or rely on closed-source services for their matching logic, make it difficult to fully understand and explain matching processes. This lack of transparency also makes it impossible to adjust or improve the matching logic, since we cannot understand or improve code we cannot see.

Users are similarly impeded from identifying flaws or suggesting improvements to processes they are unable to examine. By blocking this community participation, we also lose the proven cycle of real-world testing, refinement, and validation that has strengthened myriad of open source projects. The cumulative impact of both minor and major community-driven refinements over time is incredibly valuable and should not be underestimated.

Using open source matching will also help build trust in the matching workflows and results. This is one reason why open source is one of the tenets of the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure, adopted by Crossref, DataCite, ROR, and other organisations who build and maintain open scholarly infrastructure.

When evaluating matching strategies, we strongly recommend prioritizing those that are fully open source. This not only ensures their transparency and trustworthiness, but also allows for the kind of continuous improvement that results from this visibility and community engagement.

Explainability

In terms of our ability to understand and improve a matching strategy, using an open source model is only the first step. What typically matters most in the context of building and maintaining matching services is that we are able to understand their underlying code and have a clear model of how matches are derived from their corresponding inputs. Even if the matching code itself and all of the resources used in the matching are open, if they are poorly documented, lack reproducibility or tests, or are otherwise opaque, there is no guarantee that it will be possible to understand or improve the strategy. Striving for a high level of interpretability in our matching plays a determinative role in how well we can understand and modify our strategies in the future.

Being able to explain the behaviour of the matching will also help you to respond to and incorporate user feedback. When users encounter errors, you will be able to do things like advise them on how to modify or clean their inputs so that the results are better. Conversely, examining the behaviour of the strategy relative to user inputs and feedback can provide you with ideas for improving the matching.

Typically, heuristic-based strategies, such as those that use forms of search or string similarity measures, like edit distance, are easier to explain than, say, machine learning models. If a strategy uses machine learning, at least some internal decisions might be made by passing data through a complex network of algebraic equations. Those can be mysterious, non-deterministic, and are famous for being hard to interpret. This doesn’t mean they should be avoided entirely - we have built and use many machine-learning based tools ourselves! Instead, it is a good idea to weigh how their inherent lack of explainability could affect your ability to continue work on the strategy and respond to user needs, relative to all the available options.

Complexity

Complexity is another aspect that can greatly affect how easy it is to maintain the strategy. Complexity is related to how many different components the strategy has and how difficult they are to use and maintain. When a strategy has multiple interconnected parts, each component becomes a potential failure point that requires discrete assessment and maintenance.

Consider, for example, two different approaches to a matching strategy: one that uses a single machine learning model versus another that uses an ensemble of models. A single model requires maintaining one set of training data, a single training pipeline, and one deployment process. If the model’s performance unexpectedly deteriorates, whether because of an issue with the training data, a configuration error, or the need for additional input sanitization, the source of the problem is easier to isolate and fix.

The ensemble, by contrast, combines multiple, specialized models, each requiring its own training data, tests, updates, and deployments. If one model in the ensemble is found to reduce the performance of the strategy, the interdependence between models can cause this degradation to cascade through the entire system and undermine its overall reliability. Correcting for these errors becomes more challenging. If fixing one model’s performance requires retraining or adjusting its outputs, this could require recalibrating the entire ensemble to maintain the balance between models, identify regressions, and prevent new errors from emerging.

In general, preferring simpler strategies not only reduces operational overhead, but also makes it easier to diagnose issues, test changes, and iterate on user feedback. When problems arise, having fewer moving parts means less places to look for the root cause and fewer components that could be affected by any fixes.

Flexibility

The metadata to which we match grows and changes over time. New records are created, existing ones are updated, with schemas changing and evolving alongside. The resources that underlie our matching are also not static. The libraries we depend on may deprecate features between versions or the taxonomies we used to categorize results might undergo significant revisions. We thus rarely have the luxury of deploying a matching strategy once and using it forever without any changes. A good strategy has to be flexible enough to adapt to such changes, with this adaptation also being both technically feasible and practical to implement.

Much of this flexibility is also determined by a matching strategy’s ability to incorporate new data. Strategies that use continuously updated databases or indices can immediately match against new metadata as it appears in the system. By contrast, some machine learning-based approaches require training on target matches and can thus be limited in flexibility and face more constraints. While some models can be incrementally updated to recognize new matches, others require retraining from scratch to incorporate these changes - a process that can be both time-consuming and resource-intensive.

Paying close attention to a strategy’s flexibility and favoring this aspect, when possible, can significantly impact its long-term viability. When comparing different matching strategies, flexibility should thus be a primary concern in your decision-making process.

Resources

Matching strategies can vary significantly in their resource requirements, including things like CPU and GPU utilization, memory consumption, storage capacity, and network bandwidth. These requirements are directly related to infrastructure costs and energy consumption, so when evaluating a matching strategy, it is necessary to assess its resource demands across all phases of the matching lifecycle. This includes things like initial model training, re-training, index construction, updates and management for all aspects of the strategy, as well as the real-world processing of matching requests. It is a good idea to measure and monitor resource usage carefully in considering which strategies to use, as the best performing strategy may also be too resource intensive to run as a service or might grow to this state over time with additional utilization.

Speed

Matching strategies can operate at a wide range of speeds, from milliseconds to minutes per match. Since the overall response time of a strategy can affect both system scalability and user experience, we should always assess the strategy’s performance for different usage scenarios and scales of data. While some strategies might perform adequately with small datasets, they can also exhibit exponential slowdowns as data volume and complexity increases or as concurrent requests grow in number. We should therefore consider carefully how requirements for matching speed might evolve with increased usage, data complexity, and total anticipated growth. The fastest matching strategy might not always be the best choice if it comes at the cost of reduced accuracy or requires large amounts of resources, but unacceptable latency can make an otherwise excellent strategy unusable in practice for many use cases.

Putting it all together

The typical life cycle of developing a metadata matching strategy is as follows:

Scoping: we define the matching task, along with its inputs and outputs.
Research: we research what existing strategies are available for our task and/or we develop our own.
Evaluation: we evaluate all available strategies, internally or externally-developed, exploring all of the aspects described above.
Decision: we choose which strategy (if any) we want to use in our production system.
Production setup: we prepare the production models, indexes, and other resources needed for the matching.
Maintenance: we monitor and adapt the strategy relative to changing data, user feedback, and new resource requirements.

In practice, these phases do not happen all at once, nor in this strict order. Often we need to proceed through multiple iterations of them to arrive at the best strategy. For example, if initial evaluation of a strategy yields poor results, we might return to the research phase to investigate other strategies or refine our understanding of the task. Often, during the maintenance phase, we receive feedback from users that indicates potential areas of improvement and then pursue them with a new round of research and evaluation.

As we cycle through these phases, ideally all the aspects described in this entry, along with the results of the evaluation, would be taken into account. Of course, this means that these decisions have to be based on multiple criteria and by making trade-offs between their performance and all other considerations. In making these complex and difficult choices, it is useful to consider two primary questions:

Are any of the considered matching strategies good enough for our use case?
Out of all the considered strategies that are sufficient for our use case, which would be the best?

The first question requires us to create clear and quantifiable criteria that allow for eliminating some of the potential strategies. As we have indicated, these could include things like the strategy being open source, minimum performance baselines using measures like precision or recall, and operational thresholds, like the strategy being able to return results quickly, relative to user expectations or the volume of data to be processed. It should be fairly easy to test these requirements and eliminate any strategies that fall short of them. If the strategies are difficult to assess, that is likely a mark against them.

If no strategies meet these criteria, we have two options: either to abandon matching entirely or to reassess and relax our criteria to align with the available options. While the former is always an option, adopting a more pragmatic lens, framing in terms of potential value (or harm) to the users, might be beneficial. Sometimes we approach matching tasks with too high expectations and a dose of realism helps us to re-center our perspectives. After more consideration, you might decide that your criteria were too stringent or realize that you need to better define and decompose the tasks to fit the available options.

When multiple strategies appear viable, the selection process becomes more nuanced. When evaluating strategies across these various dimensions, we should try to avoid placing undue weight on minor performance differences. Evaluation metrics are useful estimates of performance, but do not always translate to real-world applications and changing data. In cases where a more complex strategy offers only marginal improvements over a simpler alternative, the maintenance and operational benefits of the simpler solution often outweigh small performance gains.

This concludes our series on metadata matching, where we described the conceptual, product, and technical aspects of matching and its applications. We hope this overview was instructive and helps you to make better decisions about the use of matching in your own tools and services!