We’ve had a year full of growth and reached a milestone of 60+ team members; let’s take a moment to digest what that means for people operations. Hiring staff in 19+ countries is no easy task, but we are up for it, and I can honestly say it is the main reason why our culture is so great. That might sound biased coming from Crossref’s first Head of Human Resources, but hear me out.
You can now register rich metadata for a variety of record types in Metadata Manager using simple, guided workflows. The tool is used by many in our community to register grant and journal article records, and it has now been expanded to support books and chapters, reports, dissertations, and post-publication updates for journal content.
Metadata Manager makes it easier to capture identifiers for contributors and their affiliations, funding information, references, and more. Thanks to automated reference matching by Crossref, this offers greater visibility for the works, while the affiliations and funding information can serve as important trust signals for the community.
This year’s edition of the FORCE11 conference was hosted in June by Singapore Management University. Its title, “To Go Far, Go Together: Advancing Scholarly Communication Across Boundaries and Disruptions” truly resonates with Crossref’s truths; it takes a village! Crossref only works as long as the scholarly research community wants to work together globally, across all disciplines, for integrity and openness of the scientific record. The conversations were influenced by a genuinely diverse mix of librarians, researchers, open infrastructures, and service providers, and that mix shaped almost every interaction we had at the conference.
We have some rather unusual news to share: Crossref fees are going down again. At its meeting in Paris earlier this month, the Crossref Board approved two further recommendations from the Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability (RCFS) project: effective 1st January 2027, we will reduce the majority of Content Registration fees for all 25,000 members, and remove fees for back-year records altogether.
Content Registration fees haven’t increased in around 20 years, and this is the first significant change to them in that time—downwards. Since these fees account for the largest share of Crossref’s revenue (around 60%), and since every member registers DOI records, these changes reach further than anything we’ve announced under the RCFS project so far.
You can now easily search for publications and add them to your ORCID profile in the new beta of Crossref Metadata Search (CRMDS). The user interface is pretty self-explanatory, but if you want to read about it before trying it, here is a summary of how it works.
When you go to to CRMDS, you will see that there is now a small ORCID sign-in button on the top right-hand side of the screen.
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Clicking on this button allows you to connect CRMDS to your ORCID profile and authorises CRMDS to add publications to your profile. First, if you are not already logged into ORCID, CRMDS will ask ORCID to log you in:
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Once you have logged in, ORCID will ask you if you want to allow CRMDS to be able to view and update your ORCID profile:
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After you authorise CRMDS to access your profile, you will be returned to the CRMDS screen and the top right corner of the CRMDS page will indicate that you have connected to your ORCID profile (note, you can always de-authorise CRMDS from accessing your ORCID profile in your ORCID settings):
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Once you are logged in, you can enter search terms that are likely to return records of your publications:
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Each search result will show an icon telling you whether that particular item is visible in your ORCID profile. If the item is not in your ORCID profile, you see an icon like this:
And if the item is already in your ORCID profile, you will see an icon like this:
In the following search results you can see that 1 item is already in Josiah Carberry’s profile, and 2 items are not:
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Clicking on the “Add to Profile” button will confirm that you want to add the specified publication to your ORCID profile:
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After clicking on “Yes” to add the publication to your profile, the search results will refresh to reflect that the item has been added.
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You can then just continue searching for and adding any publications that are not in your ORCID profile.
Note that, occasionally, you may see an orange icon that says that an item is “Not Visible”
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This only occurs when you have previously added an item to your profile using CRMDS and then either:
Set the ORCID privacy for that particular work item to “Private” in your ORCID profile.
Deleted the work from your ORCID profile.
Unfortunately, CRMDS has no way to determine which of these two events occurred However, If you click on the “Not Visible” icon, you will be prompted with two ways to resolve this issue. Either you can:
Reset the privacy settings on the specified work to “Public” or “Limited”
Confirm to CRMDS that you have deleted the item from your profile.
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If the issue was your privacy settings, then once you have changed the privacy settings to public/limited you can simply click on the “Refresh” button and CRMDS will reflect the correct status of the work.
The best way to avoid this kind of confusion is to go to your ORCID settings and set the default privacy level for “works” to either “limited” or “public.”
Crossref Metadata Search is still a “Crossref Labs” project and, as such, we are very interested to hear feedback on this new ORCID functionality for CRMDS. Please send comments, etc. to:
Related reading
Blog
Crossref & the Art of Cartography: an Open Map for Scholarly Communications