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.
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).
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.
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.
The Open Funder Registry (OFR, formerly FundRef) and associated funding metadata allows everyone to have transparency into research funding and its outcomes. It’s an open and unique registry of persistent identifiers for grant-giving organisations around the world.
It is good practice for authors to acknowledge support for and contributions to their research in their published articles. This support may be financial, such as a grant or salary award; or practical, such as the use or loan of specialist facilities and equipment. They do this by listing the funding agency and the grant number somewhere in their article - usually the first or last page, or in the acknowledgments or footnotes section. Members contribute by depositing the funding acknowledgements from their publications as part of their standard metadata, together with the unique funder IDs listed in the OFR. The deposit should include funder names, funder IDs, and associated grant numbers.
This means that anyone can make connections, for example, to identify which funders invest in certain fields of research. Funding data is also used by funders to track the publications that result from their grants.
The Crossref OFR is an open registry of grant-giving organisation names and identifiers, which you use to find funder IDs and include them as part of your metadata deposits. It is a freely-downloadable RDF file. It is CC0-licensed and available to integrate with your own systems. Funder names from acknowledgements should be matched with the corresponding unique funder ID from the registry.
You can search funding metadata manually using our funding data search, or programmatically via our REST API. This data not only clarifies the scholarly record, but makes life easier for researchers who may need to comply with requirements to make their published results publicly available.
Watch the introductory Open Funder Registry animation in your language:
There are many benefits of clear, transparent, and measurable information on who funded research, and where it has been published. The OFR facilitates accurate funding metadata, which in turn enables multiple parties to better understand the research funding landscape:
Readers and researchers can read and assess literature in the context of knowing who funded it;
Research institutions can monitor the published outputs of their researchers;
Publishers can track who is funding their authors, and check if they’re meeting funding mandates;
Service providers can offer integrated time-saving features to their users; and
Funders can easily track the reach and return of the work they have supported.
The registry is donated by Elsevier, and is updated around every 4-6 weeks with new and updated funder records. Existing entries are also reviewed to make sure that they are accurate and up-to-date. We can then make it openly available through our funding data search and our API. If you spot anything that doesn’t look right, please let us know. You can also download a .csv file of the latest registry.
Using the OFR, members can find the unique IDs for these funders, standardize this metadata to send it to us.
Obligations and fees for the Open Funder Registry
The OFR is open to everyone. There are no fees for members depositing funding data. Open Funder Registry search and our API are also freely available.
Members must include the OFR ID for each funder if it is present in the Registry. If a funder is not in the Registry and does not have an ID, include the name of the funder.
How to participate in the Open Funder Registry
To access the OFR, you do not need to be a member, but you need to be a member to include OFR iDs in your Crossref metadata. Anyone who’s interested can simply enter an organisation’s name into the Open Funder Registry search to view content connected to funding sources. The metadata in the registry is also openly available via our API, and as a downloadable RDF file. Learn more about accessing the OFR.
Depositing metadata (members): collect funder names and grant numbers from your authors through your manuscript tracking system (or extract them from acknowledgements sections) and match them with the corresponding Funder IDs from the registry. Once this is done, it’s easy to add these three additional pieces of metadata - funder name, funder id, and grant number - as additional metadata in the regular Crossref content registration service. Learn more about how to collect and register funding data.
Whenever you register content with us, make sure you include funder names and grant numbers in the submission:
If you’re depositing XML with Crossref, include your funding data in your XML.
Retrieving metadata: you can view the content that has cited a particular funding source by entering the organisation’s name into the Open Funder Registry search. If you prefer a machine-readable query, use our REST API. If you have questions about how your organisation appears in the registry then please get in touch. Learn more about the OFR and our other services on our funder community page.
