Weâve had a year full of growth and reached a milestone of 60+ team members; letâs 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 Crossrefâs 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, âTo Go Far, Go Together: Advancing Scholarly Communication Across Boundaries and Disruptionsâ truly resonates with Crossrefâs 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 timeâdownwards. 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.
Guide for funders to support FAIR workflows & enable research tracking
Published in August 2023 as part of the Implementing FAIR Workflows project, this Guide is a joint publication by three open scholarly infrastructure organisationsâCrossref, DataCite, and ORCID. It introduces the role of persistent identifiers (PIDs) and open metadata in facilitating open and FAIR research, and walks funders through concrete ways to engage: committing resources, enacting congruent policies, and providing support around grant application, management, and reporting.
Strategists
Understand why funder participation in the PID and metadata infrastructure matters.
Persistent identifiers and open metadata are what connect grants to the research outputs, people, and organisations they supportâenabling assessment, discovery, and long-term stewardship of the record.
Decision-makers
See what policy and resourcing decisions align a funder with the wider ecosystem.
The Guide sets out recommendations funders can adoptâfrom PID and metadata requirements in grant conditions, to committing to the community-owned infrastructure that maintains those records.
Practitioners
Apply the recommendations across grant application, management, and reporting.
Concrete workflow guidance for embedding Crossref grant IDs, DataCite dataset/software IDs, and ORCID researcher IDs across the funder’s own systems and reporting pipelines.
What this guide covers
Why PIDs and metadata matter for fundersâfrom grant lifecycle tracking to open-science impact assessment
The three infrastructure organisations’ complementary rolesâCrossref for scholarly works and grant records, DataCite for data and software, ORCID for researchers and contributors
Policy recommendations funders can adopt to align with the wider open scholarly ecosystem
Practical workflow steps for grant application, management, and reporting
Community investmentâhow funders can support the community-owned infrastructure that makes end-to-end research tracking possible
About the Implementing FAIR Workflows project
Implementing FAIR Workflows is a three-year project delivering exemplar FAIR workflows in cognitive neuroscience research, built on the existing PID and metadata infrastructure. This Guide is one of the project’s community-facing outputs, developed by the DataCite project team in collaboration with Crossref and ORCID.