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 organizations, people, things, and actions, dubbed the Research Nexus, our schemas need to change to accommodate the evolving landscape of research processes and communications.
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.
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.
Sponsors make Crossref membership accessible to organizations 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.
The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) provides a set of guidelines for operating open infrastructure in service to the scholarly community. It sets out 16 points to ensure that the infrastructure on which the scholarly and research communities rely is openly governed, sustainable, and replicable. Each POSI adopter regularly reviews progress, conducts periodic audits, and self-reports how they’re working towards each of the principles.
In 2020, Crossref’s board voted to adopt the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure, and we completed our first self-audit. We published our next review in 2022.
The POSI adopters have continued to review the principles, reflecting on the effects of adopting them and providing a revision to the principles in late 2023. We use the revised principles for this latest review.
Key
We use a traffic light system to indicate where we believe we stand against each of the 16 principles. Now with up/down arrows to show any significant movement, and an ‘i’ where there is something of note with narrative.
red indicates we are not fulfilling the principle.
yellow indicates we are making progress towards meeting the principle.
green indicates we are fulfilling the principle.
or
means this is a new change, where we’ve moved ‘up’ the traffic lights, in comparison to the previous audit. We would use the same if ‘down’ ever happens too.
or
means that something has changed of note and in comparison to the previous audit.
GOVERNANCE
Coverage across the scholarly enterprise
Stakeholder governed
Non-discriminatory participation or membership
Transparent governance
Cannot lobby
Living will
Formal incentives to fulfil mission & wind-down
What’s changed with governance
Stakeholder governed
We’ve been yellow and we’re still yellow, but it has been improving. In the past, we’ve reported that we are working towards this but we’re not there yet because we didn’t have representation on the board from certain types of members, specifically research funders and research institutions. In the incoming 2025 board class, we have both. Six out of our 16 board seats are held by universities, university presses, or libraries. We also look forward to adding a new research funder, the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), to the board in January.
None of this, though, is hardcoded into the structure of the board. We extend an open call for board interest; any active member can apply for consideration. The Nominating Committee prepares a slate with a diverse range of candidates and organizations, and it is then up to the membership to elect board members.
With only 16 board seats and >21,000 members in 160 countries, being fully stakeholder-governed is challenging. Further, there are important contributors to the community that we all rely on who are not eligible for board seats because they are not members, as defined in our by-laws, such as sponsors, service providers, and metadata users.
We don’t consider this principle fulfilled, and that’s a good thing to keep note of; we must keep aspiring to have a broader, more comprehensive representation of our evolving community. The board continues to discuss stakeholder representation.
SUSTAINABILITY
Time-limited funds are used only for time-limited activities
Goal to generate surplus
Goal to create financial reserves
Mission-consistent revenue generation
Revenue based on services, not data
What’s changed with sustainability
Goal to create financial reserves
This was yellow and is now green. In 2023, we met our goal of maintaining a contingency fund of 12 months of operating costs. We also topped up this fund in 2024 to keep pace with our growing operating expenses. The revisions for POSI 1.1 actually removed the specificity of a 12-month timeline, allowing each adopting organisation to set its own goal; in Crossref’s case, 12 months remains appropriate.
INSURANCE
Open source
Open data (within constraints of privacy laws)
Available data (within constraints of privacy laws)
Patent non-assertion
What’s changed with insurance
Open source
This was yellow and still is, but we’re making improvements. In September of this year we migrated our database off of a closed-source solution and onto PostgreSQL. This has improved the performance of the system and is an important step towards paying down technical debt and moving the system fully into the cloud.
Patent non-assertion
This was yellow and is now green. We confirm that we do not hold any patents, and we have a published policy on it that is available for inspection and reuse by anyone in the community.
In summary
These are the main changes of note for our 2024 POSI update. The summary is that we’ve maintained all our greens, and of the four principles that were yellow last time, two have moved to green (financial reserves; patent non-assertion) and two have remained yellow but seen some progress of note (stakeholder governed; open source).
Please let us have any comments or questions; by commenting here it will add a public record of the discussion on our community forum. Here is an image to share, if needed.
We continue to learn from the POSI adopters group—now numbering 23 organisations—and the group will soon share a draft of POSI v2 for community comment. We look forward to the ongoing discussions with this group, and others, to keep improving and holding ourselves to account.
