2026 on Crossref

Schema 5.5 now available: adding CRediT, new record types for blogs and posters, and more

Patricia Feeney — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Research is rarely limited to a single contributor performing a single role. Behind every research output are people contributing in various ways: software development, data analyses, methodology design, and much more. Often, the same person contributes in several of these ways. Until now, Crossref metadata could only capture part of that picture, but this is changing with Schema 5.5.

Crossref Schema 5.5 includes several improvements across different content types, but its most significant enhancement is the expanded support for contributor roles through the introduction of multiple roles per contributor, option to specify the corresponding author, and compatibility with the CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy): a community-owned taxonomy of 14 contributor roles, which has been adopted and made available in multiple languages.

These enhancements allow members to describe research contributions in much greater detail, creating richer metadata that better reflects how research is actually produced, and supporting greater accountability and more comprehensive research assessment.

If your workflow already distinguishes between different kinds of contributions, Schema 5.5 gives you a way to record that detail more accurately using the CRediT taxonomy values. CRediT can be adopted gradually, where it fits your editorial or production workflow.

Figure 1: Until now, contributors could be assigned a single contributor role using Crossref’s existing contributor role vocabulary. In Schema 5.5, members can indicate that the same contributor was responsible for different roles, such as corresponding author; writing: reviewing and editing; and data curation.

Existing deposits remain fully supported, and members can continue using the current contributor role attribute while planning implementation of the new repeatable role type element. For our members, who have been using CRediT in their workflows already, as ever – we encourage updating your metadata when practicable.

Why this update is kind of a big deal

This update gives more accurate credit to all of the people behind research outputs. Crossref vocabulary includes roles that aren’t recognised in CRediT, and vice versa. Capturing richer contributor metadata recognises contributions that may not be visible in a single author line and improves transparency around how research is produced, thereby enabling downstream systems to interpret that information more reliably. The update also offers better interoperability with CRediT, which is well recognised across the scholarly ecosystem.

Figure 2: Schema 5.5 is an expansion of Crossref contributor metadata. Members can describe contributors using Crossref’s existing contributor role vocabulary, as well as the internationally recognised CRediT taxonomy.

In turn, this strengthens metadata reuse across repositories, discovery services, funders, institutions and other infrastructure providers; and supports evaluation, reporting and discovery workflows. Better contributor metadata strengthens the connections that make up the Research Nexus.

What else is included in Schema 5.5?

Beyond the expanded contributor support, Schema 5.5 includes several additional enhancements across the metadata schema.

1. Updates to report series metadata

Support has been added for metadata elements that were previously missing from report series records, including Crossmark, funding, and licence information.

2. Posted content improvements: now including blogs and posters

Posted content includes preprints, eprints, and other types of content that have been posted to a stewarded host platform. We’re all about persistence, so it’s vital that everything registered with us be maintained. Note that accepted manuscripts are not considered posted content. Schema 5.5 refreshes posted content sub-types by introducing blog and poster.

At the same time, we are “retiring” working paper, dissertation, and report from posted-content sub-types. Over time, these have been developed into separate record types that benefit from richer, dedicated schemas.

Finally, archive locations can now also be included for posted content records.

3. Expanded archive support

A new archive location, CINES, has been added to the list of supported archive providers.

4. Clinical trial metadata across more record types

Clinical trial information is no longer limited to journal articles and conference papers. Schema 5.5 extends support across additional content types, including books, datasets, dissertations, reports, posted content, standards, and pending publications.

Schema adoption

Taken together, the updates in our latest schema support more holistic recognition of contributions to the research and its communication, as well as greater accountability and integrity in related processes.

To support gradual adoption, Schema 5.5 maintains backwards compatibility with existing deposits. Members can continue using the current contributor_role attribute while preparing to implement the new repeatable role element. We have prepared a migration guide to help members transition to Schema 5.5.

As you prepare to adopt Schema 5.5, we encourage members to include contributor roles whenever they are available from editorial workflows and to use recognised vocabularies consistently, including CRediT roles where appropriate.

Take part in UX Research at Crossref

Leandro Contreras — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Through user experience research (UXR) initiatives that take into account our diverse membership and community, we can have a continuous, deeper understanding of the role of metadata in our members’ workflows, and ensure that our work continues to meet our community’s needs. Your support is the key to this process, and will positively impact the wider community - and if you’d like to start today, you can take part in our latest initiative: help us improve our Events page by sharing your thoughts on the page’s feedback form.

Hi, everyone! I’m Leandro Contreras, UX Researcher here at Crossref, since February 2026. In previous roles, I helped to design, build and manage digital products and workflows for universities and academic publishers, and now I’m dedicated to bridging the gap between our community’s needs and the tools we build together.

At Crossref, we’re committed to collecting diverse community input, and ensuring our system is representative and useful for everyone that interacts with it. In this blog post, I’d like to introduce you to how we’re kickstarting a more systematic approach to user research processes at Crossref, and invite you to take part in a new research initiative. First, let’s quickly revise some key concepts:

What is user experience?

User experience (UX) is the exploration of how we, as humans, interact with products and services: whether that’s a physical tool or, in our case, the invisible systems holding our metadata, or the visible interfaces that support our community - for example, our Participation Reports.

Good user experience can positively affect people’s day-to-day lives, produce quality results, and champion inclusion: we are more likely to return to a product or a service if it’s tailor-made for us, for our advantages and shortcomings.

What is user experience research?

User experience research (UXR) is the methodical study of users of a product, service or system, using methods to learn about their behaviours, needs, and preferences. While user experience is the design of the experience, UXR is the evidence-based study used to inform those designs and prove they actually work.

In practice, user experience researchers gather this evidence through a variety of methods that seek to capture quantitative and qualitative data. But what are these methods? And how do they apply in the context of an organisation like Crossref, with a growing membership building the research nexus with rich metadata using many different technologies?

How is user experience research taking shape at Crossref?

To understand the role and the impact of metadata across our vast community, we are currently mixing qualitative and quantitative research methods to help us get the right answers:

We use qualitative UX research methods to understand the why and how behind user behaviours, providing descriptive insights - interviewing our members, or observing them while using our services;
We use quantitative UX research methods to obtain measurable evidence that helps us track performance and identify patterns at scale - by sharing surveys and feedback forms with our members, or tracking success/failure metrics in unmoderated testing sessions.

In 2026, we’ve already put these methods to work:

We have collected insights to improve our current website information architecture, through surveys and usability testing at our 2026 Metadata Sprint in São Paulo;
We launched surveys across our membership to understand the value of selected research integrity tools, as part of our integrity of the scholarly record program;
And we conducted a series of usability testing sessions for our upcoming Book deposit flow in the new Metadata Manager tool.

Looking ahead, we’ll continue setting up usability testing sessions, open quick feedback channels on our website, and investigate the impact of research integrity across our membership through surveys. However, these initiatives are only as effective as the community behind them! When you engage in our UXR initiatives, you actively shape current and future Crossref experiences, ensuring they fit your needs.

If you are curious about participating, we’ve just launched a new feedback form on our Events page to detect new improvement opportunities, and we invite you to be part of it. This is a great opportunity to see how our initiatives work in practice, so we hope you’ll jump in!

Over time, you will see the impact of your participation come to life in future improvements to our tools and services through future project updates on our blog, and in the community forum as well. We welcome everyone to join the conversation there. If you have any further questions, suggestions, or collaboration ideas, you can also get in touch via email.

Launching new UX research initiatives at Crossref has been a wonderful way to get to know our community on a deeper level. I’m looking forward to bringing you closer to more initiatives in the future, and learning more from your feedback!

Building, refining, and connecting: summary of our May 2026 community update

Rosa Morais Clark — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Our 2026 Community Update took place on 13 May. Two calls, one for the eastern and one for the western time zone, highlighted how our global community is growing, how we’re refining the metadata that supports trust in the scholarly record, and connecting records more effectively through our latest tools.

Operations, governance, and a growing membership

Our Chief Operating Officer, Lucy Ofiesh and Executive Director, Ed Pentz, opened each session with an update on operations and governance, starting with the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI). We adopted POSI in 2020. Recently, the Principles were updated by a group of adopters, following a community consultation, and four new principles were added: periodic review of purpose and community value; transparent operations as a distinct principle; refined guidance on financial reserves; and attention to volunteer labour and transition planning. Recordings and slides are also available.

Infrastructure organisations can use POSI to assess themselves and demonstrate to the community how they’re adhering to the principles, which support forkability, long-term sustainability, open assets, and transparent, community-led governance. We published a biannual report on how we measure up against them, so we’ll publish our next self-audit against the new set at the end of 2026.

Financially, we’re in good shape. With so many new members joining every month, our revenue grew 8% last year, while expenses came in 3% under budget, and Content Registration was up 13% year-on-year at the end of March, well above our long-term average of around 7%. We’ve used our operating surplus to build up and maintain a reserve fund of 12-months of operating expenses, which matters for long-term sustainability. We use additional surplus funds beyond our reserves to reinvest in our mission and community.

We had our call for board nominiations in May. Seven seats are up this year, one large and six small, and any member can stand. Voting runs for around five weeks, one vote per member, regardless of size. Last year, just 6% of members voted, and we’d like to see that increase. The call for expressions of interest is now closed for 2026, and candidates will be announced by our Nominating Committee in the coming months in advance of the election and annual meeting, which will be held on 22nd October 2026.

Robbykha Rosalien and Maryna Kovalyova from our membership team then took us through the membership picture. We’re now 25,000 organisational members from 167 countries, with around 51% based in Asia. The majority of our new members are universities, scholar-led publishers, societies, small journal publishers, and government agencies. We have help from 140 sponsoring organisations and 42 ambassadors, and we’re grateful for all the support they offer our members.

The metadata corpus and its use have grown alongside the community

Turning to new members, over 3,000 have joined from 142 countries since the last community update. 54% are from Asia, with Indonesia accounting for 17.5% of the total and India next at 9.5%. We continue to have members joining from the US and the UK, and we also have over 100 new members from Türkiye, with strong growth in Brazil and Pakistan as well.

January 2026 brought a major change with the introduction of a new fee tier for members with annual revenue or expenses (whichever is higher) of under USD 1,000. Since then, 40% of the new members joined under this new tier. 40% of our new members identify themselves as publishers and 40% as universities or scholarly organisations, with plenty of societies (13%), governmental agencies or NGOs (4%), and others, such as hospitals. The most popular publishing platform choice among the new members remains Open Journal Systems by PKP at 55%, with 30% saying they have no platform, and WordPress (4%) and Scholastica (2%) following. Notably, we’re working with PKP this year to help members transition to OJS 3.5, which supports richer metadata.

We also extended our Global Equitable Membership (GEM) program at the start of the year to include 18 additional countries. GEM offers Crossref membership and Content Registration without any fees. Since the last community update, we’ve gained our first members in Haiti, South Sudan, and Niger, and 20% of all independent members who have joined since then are GEM-eligible.

Introducing the Member Practices Working Group

Our Membership Director, Amanda Bartell, introduced our new Member Practices Working Group with a reminder of Crossref’s role in preserving the Integrity of the Scholarly Record (ISR). We’ve always aimed to keep barriers to membership as low as possible, because the best way to support a healthy scholarly ecosystem is to make metadata about published content as open and transparent as possible. That openness lets members demonstrate their practices through metadata, signalling trustworthiness to the scientific community as a whole, and when practices fall short, the metadata itself can surface those issues. Our member terms already make the importance of accurate metadata clear: if the community identifies inaccurate metadata, we can suspend or revoke membership. That is a last resort, and our first approach is always to contact the member, explain the problem, and work with them to get the metadata record corrected.

But what if the reports we receive from the community don’t relate to metadata, and instead to the member’s broader practices? This is an increasing issue, and it has been unclear how and when we should respond.

In consultation with our board, we updated our member terms last year and added an obligation for members to comply with a set of published member practices. The role of the working group is to draft this set of practices and provide clear guidelines on what we expect of Crossref members. In rare situations where issues can’t be resolved, the Member Practices will provide the basis for acting decisively, including suspending or revoking membership.

The Crossref Member Practices Working Group brings together differently sized members from different regions, metadata users, bibliometricians, and scholarly sleuths. Once drafted, we’ll take the Member Practices out for community consultation, with a board vote expected at their November meeting. It’s particularly important to us that the practices are achievable for all types of members, and we don’t want to create any extra barriers to entry or to continue membership for less experienced or less well-resourced members.

To seek feedback from the community on emerging themes, Amanda ran two live polls during the call. One of her questions was: for the records you register with Crossref, are you the journal owner, the nominated publisher, or a bit of both? 45% of respondents said a bit of both, with the journal owner as the next most popular response, and the nominated publisher after that. The second poll asked whether the phrase “nominated publisher” accurately describes what those of you in that role do. The result suggested it is broadly acceptable, though we’d still like to hear how you’d phrase it if not.

Metadata schema

Patricia Feeney and Helena Cousijn from our programs and services team walked us through a year of schema work and what’s coming next. Schema 5.4 was released in March 2025 with three key features: typed citations, version numbers, and preprint status.

Typed citations give members the chance to indicate in the metadata what type of citation it is, so when an article cites a dataset, it’s now possible to explicitly say so. So far 23 DOI prefixes are using typed citations, so adoption is starting, and we’d really like to see it grow. If this is something you think is useful for you, please take a look, or reach out, and we’ll help you get started.

Version numbers, which 25 DOI prefixes now use and mostly for preprints, let you indicate different versions. We’re not yet seeing much use for articles or other record types, which we’d like to encourage. Notably, when you’re registering new versions of the same record, there’s no separate content registration fee, as long as you include the relationship in the metadata.

Preprint status lets you indicate that a preprint has been retracted or withdrawn, for example.

Earlier this year, we added the ability to include grant DOIs in funding metadata. When you register metadata for any research output, you can now include the persistent identifier to indicate which grant funded the work. The number of grants registered as part of the Grant Linking System by our funder members grows (with now over 200,000 grant DOIs in existence). This dedicated new field provides an opportunity for members registering works to unambiguously identify the grants that funded the work. The grant DOI links to a full grant record, including funding type, project information, investigator details, funder and program/schema details, and institutional relationships.

We’re working on Schema 5.5. The main thing we know many of you have been waiting for is support for the CRediT taxonomy and its 14 contributor roles. We’re also enabling multiple roles for a single contributor, and within the Crossref vocabulary, which we still support, it will be possible to specify the corresponding author.

After 5.5 comes the update to our dedicated grant schema. Grant Schema 0.3.0 adds the ability to indicate that a grant was awarded to an institution (via a ROR affiliation ID), reflects that roles can change over time, and adds support for a persistent project identifiers, RAiD – a service that functions as a project identifier to indicate how a grant relates to one or more projects.

We’re also deprecating older schema versions. We’re supporting over 27 at the moment, which is too many and not helpful to members. The fundamental structures need updating, and we also need to tighten some of our requirements to obtain better and more complete metadata. We started the project at the end of last year, and we’ll be saying goodbye to a set of versions at the end of this year. Everyone using those versions has already been contacted, so if this concerns you, you should have heard from us. The project continues over the coming years, and we’ll work on deprecating other Schema 4 versions, so that by the end, we’ll only be supporting the different Schema 5 versions and the upcoming Schema 6. We’ll notify everyone impacted and let you know how to transition.

Once 5.5 and the grant schema are out, we’ll start working on remodelling contributor names, which is a really big project. A proposed model was circulated for feedback in May. The same update will also work on statements, currently for funding, acknowledgments, ethics, accessibility, AI use, data availability, copyright, and conflict of interest.

Tools and demos

Funder matching, rebuilt around ROR

Dominika Tkaczyk and Jason Portenoy from our technology and data science team gave an update on the Metadata Matching work, framed around the vision of the Research Nexus: a rich and open network of relationships connecting organisations, people, outputs, and activities within the scholarly record. First up for the project is funder matching, and Dominika and Jason took us through the new methodology and progress on implementing the work.

Funding metadata involves three main entities: funders, grants, and research outputs. Organisations are identified by Open Funder Registry (OFR) IDs or ROR IDs, and research grants and outputs have DOIs. These entities should be linked in order for provenance and attribution to be determined, which is important for evidence but also for things like research assessment and compliance.

The three entities: Funding and academic organisations→recipients are awarded grants→ repositories and publishers support outputs.

In practice, many of those relationships are missing when metadata is deposited. The new Crossref funder matching identifies the funding organisation from the name in the metadata and, when successful, inserts the correct organisation identifier, disambiguating the relation between the research output and its funder. Applying matching over the years has added around 2.8 million funder identifiers to records, shrinking the gap.

So why rebuild what we already have? Two reasons. We’re committed to supporting ROR more deeply across our services, and as part of that, we want to switch to ROR IDs as the main identifier for funders. Second, our current funder matching is part of our legacy system, which lacks transparency, thorough evaluation, or flexibility.

The new strategy is part of our metadata matching project. The core architecture is built, and the new strategy has been tested; we’re now adding features such as sending redeposits, with more testing later this quarter and a release aimed for around the middle of the year. After that, we’ll move on to a grant-matching workflow to link outputs to grant records where that link is missing.

They closed with a live demo covering four cases. Starting with a simple example of Wellcome, which matched cleanly because the input name matched the official organisation name exactly, they then moved on to more complex examples, showing increasing discrepancies between the input and the name variant in ROR, yet the strategy still resolved it. However, some names are not possible to match in this way, such as the “Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences,” which is a very generic name that many organisations might use as part of their structure. That matters too: the strategy recognises when no match should be returned, limiting the level of incorrect information that might be introduced into the metadata.

Data citations API endpoint

Martyn Rittman who heads up our Research Nexus development, and Panos Pandis from our technology team introduced the new data citations API endpoint. It exposes data citations from deposited metadata, with over 700,000 included so far. Among all the reference information we hold, individual data citations are difficult to pick out, and there’s a specific community interest in them, so we’ve put them together and made them available through a dedicated API.

Data citations can be included in two parts of a metadata record: references and relationships. We look for links to datasets registered with a Crossref DOI or a DataCite DOI. Documentation can be found here.

Through March 2026, we typically collected 400 to 600 data citations per day, with some variation, especially on weekends. The new endpoint is still in beta, and we invite feedback: is it useful, what would make it more useful, and what should we do next? Let us know on the forum.

Metadata Manager: new content types coming

Lena Stoll, who heads up our community trends program and Patrick Vale from technology took us through Metadata Manager. We retired the legacy interface at the end of last year and replaced it with a more modern and flexible helper tool for record registration. It’s already in use by an increasing number of members for grants and journal article records.

A recent addition is a search field, where you can enter the DOI of any supported record (currently a journal article or a grant) and edit it directly, if you have permissions. We’ve also added fields to the journal article registration form to include relationship metadata, which is key to building the Research Nexus.

Plenty more is coming. The new Metadata Manager will expand to support books and chapters, conference proceedings, reports, dissertations, and post-publication updates over the next few months. The interfaces follow a similar workflow: a page or two of work-level metadata, optionally chapter, or paper, or series metadata if applicable, a review step, and submission. We want to keep them as simple and usable as possible.

We hope that the post-publication update form will be welcomed by our members, as it will enable registration of retractions, corrections, and expressions of concern without any knowledge of XML. Lena and Patrick walked through a live demo of a retraction notice end-to-end. The system checks that the DOI being retracted exists, and any errors surface right away rather than later by email. We’re collecting feedback on the new tools on the forum.

The team also shared an update for institutions that use DSpace – its next version (version 10), will include a Crossref integration that lets you register Crossref metadata and DOIs automatically for content such as dissertations hosted in your DSpace repository.

Looking ahead

A new Service Providers Program

Madhura Amdekar shared our plans to launch a new version of the Crossref Service Providers Program later this year. Service providers are hosting platforms, manuscript submission systems, XML or metadata providers, and general publisher service organisations that work with our members to create, register, or display metadata on their behalf. They’re key partners in promoting metadata best practices, and we’re looking forward to collaborating with these organisations more closely. The program will not charge any fees; it will offer certification in two tiers, depending on the depth of integration with Crossref services.

We’d really like to hear from you: which service providers in this space would you like to see as part of the new program? Drop suggestions on the forum or get in touch with us directly.

Thanks to our speakers and to everyone who joined, asked questions, and voted in the polls. Recordings and slides are available, and the conversation continues on our community forum.

See you at the next one.

From commitment to connection: 200,000 grants in the scholarly record

Rocío Gaudioso Pedraza — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Funding is one of the key enablers of the research lifecycle, but has been one of the hardest parts of the scholarly record to identify, describe and connect. This is slowly changing as we have recently reached a very exciting milestone for Crossref’s Grant Linking System (GLS). What makes it remarkable is not only the numbers reached, but where the data comes from. Research funders, who joined Crossref as members, have actively contributed more than 200,000 grants to the Research Nexus (Figure 1).

Crossref’s GLS was first introduced in 2019, following extensive community consultation with research funders, as a solution to a problem: how to place research funding in the scholarly record as a research entity in its own right, that can be connected with other outputs. Crossref grant DOIs were the first PID that specifically allows for the permanent and unambiguous identification of the support that research funders provide to their grant recipients. It places research funding where it belongs, as a research entity worthy of its own metadata record that can be linked, interpreted, and updated as time goes on. With a funder-designed metadata schema, it facilitates the linking of funding to outputs through relationship metadata, building the Research Nexus, and supporting evidence-driven evaluation.

The active role of funders as owners and stewards of their grants’ description in the metadata, ensuring the records reflect reality, is what makes the resulting links between funding and outputs trustworthy enough to support evidence-driven evaluation, one verifiable data point at a time, as initiatives such as DORA and CoARA are calling on the research community to do.

Reaching 200,000 registered grants with Crossref’s GLS is a milestone that belongs to the entire community. It reflects a strong commitment to open, sustainable and interoperable infrastructure from funders around the world, and a shared conviction that connected metadata makes research more transparent, more accountable and more useful for everyone.

It’s an opportunity to share perspectives from some of our community members helping make this possible.

Fonds de Recherche du Québec

When Fonds de Recherche du Québec first began registering funding metadata and assigning Crossref grant DOIs to its funding through Crossref’s Grant Linking System, our primary driver was straightforward: traceability. We needed a reliable way to link research outputs back to the funding that made them possible. Crossref grant DOIs provided the missing data point in an interconnected identifier and metadata ecosystem, which includes ROR and ORCID. We hope that Crossref grant DOIs will genuinely improve the researcher experience through interoperability.

The journey hasn’t been without complexity. Establishing metadata governance required careful collaboration with our legal team to determine what information belongs on landing pages, how to handle updates when grant titles change, and how to protect the integrity of evaluated application data.

Our strategy moving forward centres on two pillars: connecting and tracing. Aligned with our Open Science commitments and guided by frameworks like CoARA and DORA, we want to trace not just publications, but the full spectrum of funded outputs, such as artistic works, exhibitions, patents. We’re not fully there yet, and cultural and technical readiness across the community remains a real challenge.

Reaching 200,000 registered grants signals that the infrastructure is maturing. For Fonds de Recherche du Québec, it’s a motivation to keep contributing to the Research Nexus.

– Antoine Drouin, Analyste en gestion stratégique-Fonds de Recherche du Québec

European Commission

Connecting funding to results at scale is essential for transparent, efficient research. When we began depositing European Commission research grant DOIs with Crossref, we were tackling a practical problem: grant identifiers were used inconsistently across publishers, repositories and reporting tools, making it difficult to trace outputs back to specific EU grants. A persistent, interoperable identifier helps turn fragmented references into durable links.

Grant metadata is central to our open science and open access strategy. Open, machine-readable funding information improves transparency about who funds what, and supports automated monitoring of policy requirements by connecting grants to publications and other outputs across the scholarly ecosystem.

Registering grant DOIs via the Publications Office of the European Union and depositing them with Crossref is now fully integrated into our internal workflows. We have learned that the DOI is just the starting point: long-term value comes from maintaining high-quality, consistent metadata throughout a grant’s lifecycle and updating it as information evolves.

The benefits are clear: improved discoverability of grants, stronger links between funding and outputs, and more robust reporting and analytics. Reaching 200 000 registered grants is a community milestone showing grant identifiers can work at scale and strengthen connections between funding and research results.

– Baya Remaoun, Head of Sector - CORDIS web & data at Publications Office of the European Union

Wellcome

Our motivation to join Crossref’s GLS was 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 are able to implement them throughout the research ecosystem.

Open Research information is a core part of our open science strategy, it is critical to both our ability to operate as a funder and to the translation of the research we fund into health impacts. That’s why Wellcome is a signatory of the Barcelona Declaration of Open Research Information. Grant metadata is core part of our work, as well as helping us to understand the outputs from the work we’ve funded, it is critical in enabling funders like Wellcome to position our portfolio effectively within the global landscape and enable equitable funding partnerships. In addition to linking grants through Crossref, our recent investment in OpenAlex to openly index grants is aiming to rapidly bolster the global visibility of grant metadata.

Internally at Wellcome we’re discussing how we can integrate grant DOIs into other workflows now that we have greater flexibility within our grants management system.

Externally we’ve struggled to see adoption of grant DOIs within the wider ecosystem, probably coming from challenges to surface the Crossref grant DOIs to our researchers but also uneven adoption across the ecosystem. Reaching the 200,000 grants registered with Crossref means that there are still huge opportunities to grow and evolve.

– Hannah Hope, Open Research Lead-Wellcome

As the Barcelona Declaration Call to Action on funding metadata makes clear, a rich and interoperable funding metadata landscape is a shared community endeavor. As grant records in Crossref grow, other members of the scholarly community need to ensure that they are included and reported back on their own record, closing the loop on funding reporting and contributing to a richer, more connected Research Nexus.

New Crossref Service Providers program ready for applications

Madhura Amdekar — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce the re-launch of the Crossref Service Providers program. From today, we are accepting applications from organisations providing tools for metadata registration to Crossref members. Participation in this program is free and the application involves an accreditation process to determine eligibility and the appropriate participation tier.

As a membership organisation, Crossref supports its members to provide rich and complete metadata which facilitates integrity judgements, increases discoverability, linking among scholarly objects and activities, and improves transparency. Service providers are key collaborators in this work because they enable our members to adopt better metadata practices.

We ran an earlier version of this program which was paused in 2022 for review. We are now pleased to reintroduce the program as a new structure for our collaboration with service providers. If you are an organisation that provides tools that enable record registration for Crossref members, we invite you to apply for the program via this application form.

Scope and goals of the program

Crossref service providers have historically included organisations such as hosting platforms, manuscript submission systems, grant management systems, XML and metadata providers, and other general publishing services organisations that work with Crossref members to create, register, and/or display metadata on their behalf. As we re-launch the program, the initial focus will be purely on service providers that enable content registration for Crossref members. In the future, and based on community feedback, the program may expand to include additional types of service providers.

The primary goal of the program is to enable registration and maintenance of high-quality and rich metadata by Crossref members, contributing to a more complete research nexus. We aim to achieve this through a closer collaboration between Crossref and service providers. Participants of the Service Providers program will make reasonable efforts to accommodate any changes made to the Crossref schema, promote best metadata practices as per Crossref Participation Reports, and share information about the services that they are able to integrate and provide to their clients.

Participants of the Service Providers program will commit to:

Staying up to date with Crossref services and policies, including participation in ongoing meetings and communications.
Providing feedback to Crossref on our services.
Giving Crossref information about their client service offerings and workflows, including metadata delivery options and test accounts.
Promoting metadata best practices as represented in Crossref Participation Reports.
Making reasonable efforts to accommodate changes to the Crossref schema and services.
Ensuring that their clients’ content and landing pages are kept up to date (including ensuring that clients’ DOIs resolve to active landing pages at all times).

Participants of the Service Providers program will benefit from learning about changes and new services ahead of time coupled with regular updates about our services and policies. We will also list all accredited service providers on our website, and all participants will receive a digital Crossref badge to display on their website. We look forward to providing participants with credentials to access our test system for testing integrations, and providing training where necessary.

Service Providers program tiers

Better metadata support helps improve discoverability, transparency, and the integrity of the scholarly record. We developed two Service Providers program tiers in order to signal to the community the richness of metadata and support these organisations offer to Crossref members. At the Basic Tier, participants are able to provide members with the core metadata support, while the Advanced Tier includes additional features that enable richer metadata support for Crossref members – the details are laid out below.

Application and accreditation process

Applications to join the program are being accepted via this form. The application form asks for basic organisational information including your contact details and the services you provide to Crossref members. You will then be asked about your organisation’s technical capabilities and workflows, including your ability to support metadata registration, manage multiple client prefixes, and comply with the display guidelines for Crossref DOIs. The form also includes questions about metadata support, such as whether your platform can facilitate the deposit and update of recommended and optional metadata elements, which schema versions you are able to support, and the provision of alternative metadata delivery options.

We recommend reviewing the questions to ensure that the appropriate technical and operational requirements can be met before beginning the application. If you require clarification on any of these questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to us.

Basic Tier requirements and questions

Enable Crossref members to register content and deposit required metadata, as per Crossref’s required, recommended and optional metadata.
Ability to support and display multiple client prefixes.
Ensure continuous resolution of clients’ DOIs following platform migrations.
Provide platform support to members.
Comply with the display guidelines for Crossref DOIs.
Maintain communication channels with Crossref and/or participate in trainings.
Notify Crossref when large-scale metadata updates are planned (i.e. when you are aware of daily updates exceeding 500,000 DOIs updated by a single client (Crossref member)).
Use Crossref members’ credentials to register content on their behalf.
Follow industry best practices for credentials security and account protection.

Advanced Tier requirements and questions

In addition to meeting all the Basic Tier requirements, applicants must confirm whether they:

Provide alternative metadata delivery options.
Support recommended and optional metadata elements.
Support latest schema versions (5.3.1 and above).

Following a review of application forms, we will schedule accreditation calls from August 2026 onward that will involve demonstrations of the required functionality and an assessment of the applicant’s ability to meet the requirements of the program. This process will help determine the appropriate tier.

We ask that participants on the Service Providers program renew their accreditation at the beginning of each calendar year, starting in 2028. This will entail the submission of a re-accreditation form which may contain new requirements such as support for newer schema versions.

We look forward to working more closely with service providers to support richer metadata and seamless infrastructure workflows.

Building better connections: the story of Crossref's metadata development

Patricia Feeney — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Three years ago, we asked our members what they needed from Crossref’s metadata. We received confirmation that we were going in the right direction, as well as some new ideas to explore. This helped set the course for our metadata development work since then, and continues to guide where we’re headed next.

Every metadata update we make is driven by the same set of priorities: supporting metadata that reflects our organizational truths, focusing on what metadata our members can actually provide, and aligning with best practices, vocabularies, and standards that our wider scholarly community has established. More recently our Metadata Advisory Group has helped us explore both the minutia of working with metadata as well as larger ideas around the value and impact of the metadata we support.

What We’ve Accomplished

Our schema 5.4 update included several new or expanded types of metadata. First, citation metadata can now be labelled with a publication type. This means when a work cites an article, a preprint, a dataset, or software, that distinction is clear, helping make citations without an accompanying DOI metadata record easier to identify. Second, version information is now supported across all record types, giving the scholarly record a more precise handle on exactly which version of a work is being described.

We’ve also made two meaningful improvements to how funding relationships are captured. ROR IDs are now supported as funder identifiers in both our standard metadata schema and our grants-specific schema. Also, Grant DOIs can now be explicitly identified within funding metadata, making it possible to draw clearer lines between research outputs and the grants that supported them.

What’s happening now

A significant update is nearly here. Schema 5.5 will expand contributor metadata to support multiple roles per contributor, and will introduce support for CRediT — the ANSI/NISO taxonomy for contributor roles. This means that an individual’s complete contribution to a research output can finally be described in our metadata, rather than flattened into a single role or omitted entirely. The schema isn’t released yet, but the final version of the XML schema is available in our GitLab repository for those who want to get a head start.

We’ll next begin implementation work for a new Grants schema (0.3.0). This update will remodel investigator names to include a new role (beneficiary) as well as an organizational grant recipient, making it possible to include recipient info for grants given to organizations. Grant records include project metadata, so this update will also include support for RAiD, a persistent identifier for projects. The XML schema for this update is also available in a GitLab repository.

What’s up next

Our next planned major update will build substantially on the contributor work in version 5.5. In the next version (6.0) we will remodel names to expand our current limited structure to support a variety of name types as well as alternate names. We’ll also expand the contributor identifiers we collect to include ISNI and Wikidata identifiers, better supporting contributors for whom an ORCID is not possible. Our organizational contributor will be remodelled as well to include organization-level identifiers like ROR.

We’ll also introduce statements to Crossref metadata. Statements will allow members to include free-text statements including funding acknowledgements, ethics declarations, AI usage disclosures, and other important contextual information that doesn’t fit neatly into structured fields.

Other updates include expanding our support for abstracts encoding beyond JATS to include ONIX, BITS, and a generic markup option, and implementing better in-schema validation to avoid surprises at the time of deposit.

Progress means letting go of the past. We’re planning to deprecate all schemas prior to version 5.3.1 by the end of 2027, to be carried out in phases as outlined in our deprecation blog post. This is a necessary step to keep our infrastructure sustainable and to ensure members are working with schemas that reflect current capabilities and standards.

Looking further ahead

Beyond 6.0, we’re exploring further support for provenance in metadata (to establish who is doing what to a metadata record), a rethinking of how we handle dates so that they better capture the lifecycle of a research object, better support for research objects we don’t yet fully support, and making our metadata inputs more consistent. The Metadata Development roadmap has full details on what’s being explored and prioritized.

Each of these updates contributes to Crossref’s research nexus vision: strengthening connections between funders and research, more accurately capturing and recognizing contributor roles in the scholarly record, and collecting free-text content to fill in the gaps that structured metadata alone can’t address. Better metadata means better research integrity and more trustworthy infrastructure for everyone who depends on it.

Collaboration with Knowledge Futures to build support for high-volume DOI registration

Travis Rich — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Cross-posted from the Knowledge Futures blog.

For many years, PubPub has made it possible for communities to assign DOIs to a range of outputs and component Pubs. Knowledge Futures and Crossref are building together to test the limits of what’s possible for high-volume, high-granularity DOI management. That means fast prototypes, real building, and learning through the process.

What this looks like

We’re starting by building. The goal is to get working prototypes in front of real use cases as quickly as we can, and let the technical, UX, operational, and infrastructure questions get answered through that process. What does it take to register and manage DOIs at a level of volume and granularity that goes beyond what most existing tools support? We’ll find out by trying.

A broader orientation for KF

This is also an example of where Knowledge Futures is headed more generally. We’re taking what we’ve learned from building publishing infrastructure and applying it across different parts of the scholarly communication ecosystem. Not siloed within PubPub development, but open to building more broadly and collaborating across organizational lines.

We’ve spent close to a decade learning what it takes to build and maintain reliable infrastructure for knowledge communities. That experience doesn’t have to live inside one product. We think working this way puts us in a stronger position as stewards of the things we maintain, and it opens the door to more collaboration across the ecosystem.

Aligned direction with Crossref

As Crossref adoption has skyrocketed, enabling DOIs for a vast range of research objects and organizations, they are looking to support these objects at scale and further upstream than traditional outputs. Alongside its fee remodelling effort begun in 2023, Crossref is backing this work with a $258k investment, partnering with Knowledge Futures to explore new models for the future of open research infrastructure.

Get involved

We’d love to hear your thoughts about high-volume, high-granularity DOIs. What’s your use case? What would it unlock for your community? Want to be involved in the design process? This collaboration with Crossref is just one piece of where we’re headed. If you’re curious about what we’re up to, or have something you’d like to share with us, get in touch. We’d love to tell you what we’re working on and hear what excites you too.

Co-access deprecation is coming: are you ready?

Sara Bowman — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Last September, we announced we’d be deprecating co-access and encouraging its ~100 users to use our multiple resolution service. We announced that no new DOIs will be placed in co-access from 1st of July 2026 and that the ensuing 6 months should be spent cleaning up records already in co-access and moving them over to multiple resolution.

We’re here with a reminder: co-access is being deprecated…and with an update: To help with the transition to multiple resolution, we offer a tool that simplifies the process and documentation about how to set up multiple resolution.

We’re sure you have questions and we have answers:

What will happen if I need to update metadata about an existing book in co-access after 1 July 2026?

Metadata records about books already in co-access can still be updated, until co-access is fully deprecated in January 2027.

What is multiple resolution and why should I use it instead of co-access?

Multiple resolution 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. Unlike co-access, multiple resolution allows for the creation of a single DOI for each item, regardless of where it might be hosted, which results in more accurate citation counts and usage statistics.

How can I migrate existing content from co-access to multiple resolution?

You and the other entities involved in the co-access relationship need to establish (or, agree on) the DOI of record to be used for that book going forward (i.e., the definitive DOI that should be shared, cited, and used on your landing pages). We propose that the DOI associated with the publisher be used as the definitive DOI for the book and its chapters. All other DOIs should be aliased to that definitive DOI (we also call definitive DOIs primary DOIs in the primary/alias relationship of duplicate DOIs).

Members with co-access DOIs can email a tab-separated list of definitive DOIs and their aliases to us for aliasing to support@crossref.org. From there, members can use our new multiple resolution tool to unlock DOIs for multiple resolution and register secondary URLs for the definitive DOIs in question. Our new tool helps with both. [You will need your Crossref credentials to login to the tool.]

Example tab-separated list of definitive DOIs and aliases

H:email=youremail@address.com;op=force_alias;delim=tab
10.5555/primarybook1 10.9876/alias1book1
10.5555/primarybook1 10.50505/alias2book1
10.5555/primarybook2 10.9876/alias1book2

What will happen if I try to register a duplicate DOI for a book that has been previously registered (i.e., the process that would have previously triggered co-access) after 1 July 2026?

Your deposit will return an error, letting you know co-access has been deprecated. The initial registration of a book will be processed free of errors (thus, the publisher with the rights to publish the book really should be the Crossref member determining and registering the book’s DOI of record). Any registration of a duplicate DOI for that same book will result in a failed submission with an error highlighting the previously registered DOI.

Have more questions that weren’t answered? We’re happy to help. Head over to our community forum to continue the conversation.

Two billion citation links in Crossref help research travel further

Kornelia Korzec — Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve recently reached an important milestone for the research nexus: the works in our metadata corpus are now connected with over 2 billion citation links! This is a great opportunity to share a dedicated dataset and discuss why these are important for science.

The reference metadata is a lifeline of discoverability. Scholars use citations to critique and build on existing research. They acknowledge the contributions of others through references. Our members can then deposit those references as part of metadata with Crossref, and we use those to link the cited and citing objects. This results in complex thematic networks that can be explored by interested researchers. Many tools for research discovery use the linked reference metadata in Crossref to support searches of related content.

The citation links are derived from bibliographic references in the metadata of one work that include DOIs of materials it cites (scholarly works, data, code, etc.). It’s always best if the members can deposit these relationships in full. In a recent post, we shared that nearly half of these links are asserted by our members through metadata deposits, and the other half are created thanks to our automated matching. This form of metadata enrichment happens when members include some information about the references but without the DOI of the cited work, and it’s enough to automatically find and add that DOI. The enrichment supports making data more useful for the community.

The most important impact of citation links is the increased discoverability of connected works. Reference metadata is an important tool for improving visibility and readership of our members’ content. These links are also the foundation of our Cited-by service, which enables implementing members to display citation counts of the work they published on their landing pages.

The chart below shows the cumulative count of citations over time, by the created date of the citing DOI’s record. These include records linked by DOI either through member-submitted metadata or matched by Crossref, as well as records that are unmatched. Unmatched records can include records that we were unable to match with the information we have, but also records that truly have no DOI to link to. You can explore the full citation dataset of all 2 billion citation links between Crossref DOIs available now as a (somewhat hefty) download.

Cumulative count of references deposited to Crossref by created date of citing DOI

The push for open citation data is something that has unfolded over the last few decades, making more and more of these relationships public. Notably, the growth in citation links reflects not just the output of new scholarship, but also a sustained effort to extend coverage of the historical scholarly record. We can see evidence of this playing out over time by looking at our historical data—periodic snapshots of Crossref’s metadata going back to 2019. When comparing successive snapshots and examining the publication dates of citing and cited works, we can classify each newly appearing citation as either a new paper citation, or a retrospective one. A new citation is where the citing work was published since the previous snapshot, representing real growth in the scholarly record. A retrospective citation is where both papers already existed but the link between them had not yet been captured by Crossref, and these represent indexing catchup rather than new publishing activity.

The chart below shows the cumulative count of citations added in each category since 2019. In the early years of our data, retrospective backfill was the dominant source: the blue line climbs steeply from 2019 to 2021 as a large volume of previously uncaptured historical citation relationships entered the corpus. Over time, however, that rate of backfilling has levelled off. New paper citations, meanwhile, have grown steadily throughout the period, and by 2025 they surpassed the cumulative retrospective total. The open citation ecosystem continues recovering historical links, but the citation network’s growth is now increasingly driven by the natural momentum of scholarly publishing itself.

Cumulative citations added to Crossref by type, 2019–2026. Retrospective citations (blue) represent links to and from works that existed before the previous snapshot; new paper citations (green) come from works published since the last snapshot.

Combined with other metadata for more context, reference metadata supports bibliographic and meta-research on different aspects of the scholarly process, and can support judgements about research integrity and conflicts of interest.

Stereotypically, when talking about references, we consider links to published works (whether preprints, journal articles, or books). However all types of records in Crossref can be cited. Thanks to the changes in our latest schema, members can now signal the types of content that is being referenced. And with our new Data citations endpoint, the community can explore specifically links from Crossref-registered records to research data, including citation links to works within Crossref, as well as DataCite’s corpus.

Close to half of all records registered with Crossref still have none or not enough reference information to make such connections. We invite members to regular Metadata health-check webinars to support them in improving completeness of their records for increased transparency and visibility.

Express your interest in joining our Board of Directors

Lucy Ofiesh — Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Crossref Nominating Committee is inviting expressions of interest to join the Board of Directors of Crossref for the term starting in January 2027. 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 22, 2026

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. 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 organization of Crossref has a single vote to elect representatives to the Crossref board. Board terms are for three years, and this year, there are seven 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 one large seat (membership tiers $600 and above) and six small member seats (membership tiers $550 and below). You don’t need to specify which seat you are applying for; we will provide that information to the Nominating Committee.

The board election takes place online and will open in September, with results announced at the annual meeting on October 22nd. New members will begin their term in January 2027.

About the Nominating Committee

The Nominating Committee reviews the expressions of interest and selects a slate of candidates for election. This year’s committee includes:

Nick Lindsay*, MIT Press, chair
Oscar Donde*, Pan Africa Science Journal
Shaharima Parvin, East West University
Nicolas Mejia Torres, Universidad de la Sabana
Amanda Ward*, Taylor & Francis

Staff liaison: Lucy Ofiesh, Crossref

(*) 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 organization, as well as guidance to the Executive Director and the executive team, with the key responsibilities being:

Setting the strategic direction for the organization;
Providing financial oversight; and
Approving new policies and services.

The board is representative 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. Board members attend four meetings each year that typically take place in January, March, July, and November. January, March, and November board meetings are held virtually, and all committee meetings take place virtually. The July meeting is in-person and takes place in a variety of international locations; travel support is provided when needed. Each board member sits 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 organization. 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 organization 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 organizations that produce content, such as academic presses, commercial publishers, standards organizations, and research funders. If you’re considering submitting an expression of interest to serve on our Board of Directors, attend our drop-in session on 17 June at 12:00 UTC.

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 organizations;
Have experience with governance and/or community involvement;
Represent member organizations that are active in the scholarly communications ecosystem;
Demonstrate metadata best practices as shown in the member’s participation report

The committee aims to build a slate that represents a range of professional backgrounds, global diversity, and organizational sizes and types

What does the application evaluation process look like?

Open call for board interest, May 22nd to June 22nd:

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 organization, such as metadata habits, history with Crossref, any previous experience in Crossref working groups or community initiatives.

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.

The goal of the expressions of interest is to get to know the candidates. We will not use AI tools to evaluate your application. We ask that if you use AI tools to assist in writing your application that you please disclose how you’ve used them. We want to hear your original ideas, but understand the tools may be used to refine and polish your statement, provide support for translation, proofread for grammar, and improve readability.

Please contact me with any questions at voting@crossref.org

Mission Accessible: building better user interfaces for everyone

Lena Stoll — Thu, 21 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day, and accessibility has been on our minds lately. We’ve recently completed an internal audit of all our user interfaces, and have added a new accessibility page to our website, where you can find the accessibility documentation that we put together as part of the audit.

Why accessibility matters

Of course we want to keep the barriers to participation in Crossref as low as possible for users with various disabilities. But also, more accessible tools work better for everyone. A person’s access needs can change really quickly: even if you consider yourself to be relatively able-bodied, you are only one minor inconvenience away from at least a temporary disability. All it takes is some dazzling sunlight hitting your eye or your phone screen, or perhaps your dog going after a rabbit in an awkward direction while you are holding the lead (ask me how I know!) - and before you know it, you will be relying on accessibility features to navigate the digital and/or physical world for a while.

An accessible user interface is one that you can navigate and interact with by various methods, including a mouse or touchpad, keyboard, screen reader, voice control, and other assistive technologies. It can be used on various screen sizes and supports zooming in or out without losing any content or functionality. It has sufficient colour contrast, doesn’t flash fast-moving images at you, and has a clear structure that can be understood by both humans and machines.

Where we are today

It is worth mentioning that we didn’t only start thinking about accessibility when we started tackling the full audit of our user interfaces in March 2026. For example, Patrick Vale has previously written in this blog about a browser extension he has created to improve the accessibility of DOI links anywhere on the Internet. And we have known for a long time that there were accessibility gaps in many of our tools, but we didn’t have this centrally documented anywhere.

When we did begin testing all our interfaces for compliance with level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.2) as part of the audit, we knew that some of what we would find was not going to be pretty. In the 26+ years of working with and for the scholarly community, Crossref has built countless tools and reports to offer to members and users, many of which we still maintain today. These are often decades old and have been built in a way that makes it virtually impossible to make them more accessible without rebuilding them entirely. So we know that we will continue to have accessibility gaps for the foreseeable future, but at least now we have a better idea of the scale of the challenge.

It’s also not all doom and gloom: more recently created user interfaces, such our new Metadata Manager, performed much better in the audit than legacy alternatives such as the web deposit form. We found a similar trend when looking at our report interfaces. To illustrate this, compare what happens when running the axe DevTools extension for Google Chrome on a member’s participation report - this is a user interface that was completely re-implemented in 2025. Doing this brings up 26 issues:

Meanwhile, the browsable title list, which has completed a few more trips around the sun, has 254 issues listed:

Beyond WCAG

If you’ve read this far, I hope you are convinced that accessibility is more than just ticking boxes on a conformance report. But especially for a global community like ours, there are other, less technical barriers to participation that we have to consider. For example, language is a major accessibility factor: much of what we as Crossref staff write and say is in English. When we host community events, we enable captions, and we try to leave space for these captions at the bottom of our slides.

We have also started experimenting with simultaneous interpretation during our online events, such as our recent project showcase event for the 2026 metadata sprint in São Paulo. You can find recordings of this event in Spanish, Portuguese, and English on our YouTube channel to see the promising results of these efforts.

What we are working on next

We are currently addressing the accessibility issues identified in our audit of the Crossmark service. Many Crossref members have implemented the Crossmark button and pop-up on their own platforms and websites, so we thought this was a great place to start the remediation efforts following our audit.

We are also in the process of redesigning our main website, www.crossref.org, following an information architecture review completed in 2025. Making changes to the design and navigation of our website will be the perfect opportunity to make our content not just more discoverable and more understandable, but also more accessible.

Clearly there is even more to be done, so watch this space for more updates on our accessibility roadmap and improvements. And if you have first-hand experience of using Crossref services and interfaces with assistive technologies, or you have other input or feedback you’d like to share, leave a comment below or start a discussion in our community forum.

References

Vale, P. (2025). Enhancing DOI Accessibility for All Users. Crossref. https://doi-org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/10.64000/pp4rw-mtv44
World Wide Web Consortium (2024). Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2. Retrieved May 8, 2026, from https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG22/
Montilla, L. & Mahomed, R. (2026). Voices from Crossref Metadata Sprint in São Paulo. Crossref. https://doi-org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/10.64000/a5qzf-k1738
Stoll, L. & Korzec, K. (2025). Request for proposals: Crossref website information architecture review. Crossref. https://doi-org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/10.64000/058mr-k3s56

From 1990 to today: connecting HFSP's grant history to the research nexus

Rocío Gaudioso Pedraza — Thu, 14 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For a funder with over thirty years of funding history, making all of their funding metadata openly available is no small undertaking. In this conversation, I chat with Guntram Bauer, Chief Scientific Officer at the Human Frontiers Science Program (HFSP), about how the organisation is working to register decades of grant data with Crossref, the challenges of linking historical awards to published research outputs, and what open, structured funding metadata means for accountability to member countries and the wider scientific community.

RGP: Why did HFSP join Crossref and decide to share its funding metadata openly?

GB: Accountability starts with openness and transparency. If we are not open as a global funding organisation, we can’t convey that message to our constituents, our grantees, and our community. Before we could share our metadata openly through Crossref, we would share our funding activities through annual reports with a simple list of awardees and projects. In the digital era there are new possibilities to do this better and demonstrate to our member countries what we do with the funds. For us, it is a very helpful way to fulfil our obligations and the due diligence that is expected of us.

We started registering decade-old grant metadata, something we had always wanted to do but that before the current waiver would have meant a big financial undertaking.

– Guntram Bauer, Chief Scientific Officer, Human Frontiers Science Program

RGP: How did you find integrating the Grant Linking System (GLS) within your existing workflows?

GB: It was very straightforward. We work with Proposal Central, through Altum, which also acts as our Crossref sponsor, to help HFSP handle grant operations and related metadata, which makes it all very easy. One thing we did think carefully about was what the grant landing page would look like: what information people would see when they clicked on a grant DOI. Before Altum, we couldn’t even add an ORCID to our workflows, let alone a Crossref grant DOI! Having structured metadata to support transparent reporting to our own supporting member countries has been very valuable.

This step was independent from our funding policies. Registering funding metadata and assigning Crossref grant DOIs was paralleled with informative campaigns and direct information to our awardees to inform them about the new way of acknowledging funding.

RGP: Can you tell us about HFSP’s experience registering historical grant data?

GB: When HFSP started working with Crossref to benefit from the Grant Linking System (GLS) and make our funding metadata openly available, we began by registering data about our fellowships. More recently, in the context of the newly introduced waiver for historical grant data, we started registering decade-old grant metadata, something we had always wanted to do but that before the current waiver would have meant a big financial undertaking.

RGP: Why are you so interested in registering historical grants?

GB: HFSP has been registering funding with Crossref for a while, and the recent announcement of the two-year waiver made us decide to make all our historical data available. That’s going back all the way to 1990! We have been doing it little by little. We are keen to introduce as much funding metadata as possible into the system, to improve our transparency, but also to add to the research nexus and be able to link our funding to outputs, even the decades-old ones.

RGP: Are there any challenges specific to registering historical grants?

GB: There are a couple. When registering a historical grant, from 2005 for example, the publications that came out of that funding couldn’t be linked to the Crossref grant DOI since it didn’t exist when it was published, so the connection is missing. This is one of the key added values to the GLS, which in our view is the ability to track the impact of funding. Additionally, grantees who were awarded their funding many years ago and are only now receiving a Crossref grant DOI may not be as primed as current grantees to use that DOI when acknowledging their outputs.

Encouraging recent grantees of their new Crossref grant DOI so they can start acknowledging their outputs is one thing. However, persuading earlier grantees to go back and inform publishers of a new grant DOI involves a lot of actors and many potential points of failure. How can those connections between grant DOIs and related outputs be established, beyond direct communication with grantees?

RGP: That is indeed a challenge that we are well aware of! What excites us going forward is matching those records back to historical outputs with automated strategies. These will increasingly allow us to match, connect, and insert relationships between published outputs and Crossref grant DOIs. This is only possible when both the output and the grant are registered with Crossref and there is enough funding metadata in the output record to make the match. The more metadata available about an award (such as award number and funder name) in the output’s metadata, the more matches we can make, and the more confident the community can be in them.

RGP: Is the GLS changing how you approach reporting or shifting the culture within the organisation?

GB: For us, it’s an evolving situation. There is definitely a demand from our member countries to be more open and transparent, for the accountability reasons we mentioned. As the only truly globally operating funder supporting basic rather than applied research, demonstrating our impact across such a diverse membership is not always straightforward. If anything, the GLS and Crossref grant DOIs can help us in making our reporting evidence-based and follow the impact of the funding.

We are very grateful to Guntram Bauer for his perspectives and insights.

March 2026 board meeting summary

Lucy Ofiesh — Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We’re providing a summary of the board’s March 2026 meeting. At the meeting, the board reviewed progress in our key programs and initiatives, the strategic outlook for 2026, filled a vacancy on the Board, considered an additional legal entity for Crossref, and reviewed our governance structures. The resolutions are available on the dedicated section of our website, which also lists the members of the Board and offers further information about our governance.

Board business

January board minutes

The board voted unanimously to approve the minutes of the January 2026 board meeting.

March board meeting agenda

The board voted unanimously to approve the agenda for the March 2026 meeting. The board then voted to approve the consent agenda, which includes a package of routine board business items.

Vote to appoint a director to a vacated seat

Lisa Schiff of California Digital Library (CDL) stepped down from the board at the end of February, and CDL decided not to name a replacement. The board voted unanimously to take the most recent member election results and appoint Oscar Donde of Pan Africa Science Journal to fill the seat. Oscar will serve out the remaining years on CDL’s term, which is to the end of 2027.

2025 year in review & framing the strategy for 2026

Ed Pentz and Lucy Ofiesh presented a review of 2025, including our financial performance, member participation, and growth of metadata records, connections, and usage. Crossref ended 2025 in a healthy financial position, exceeding revenue by 6% and saving 3% on expenses as compared to the budget. Member participation and statistics on the metadata records are captured in our State of Research Nexus report.

We then turned the discussion to the strategic issues in focus for 2026. Ed discussed the projects in focus for each of the three program groups: Co-creation and Community Trends, Contributing to the Research Nexus, and Open and Sustainable Operations. Details of these programs can be found on the strategic agenda page and public roadmap.

The board discussed the ongoing work of the project known as Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability (RCFS). This multi-year effort, which began in 2023, aims to make our fees more accessible, equitable, and simpler to understand and operate. In January 2026, we rolled out a new, lower membership fee, removed little-used discounts that contributed to fee complexity, extended our GEM program to include zero-fee membership and content registration for 18 additional countries, and introduced a two-year fee waiver on back-year grants. In 2026, we are monitoring the effects of these changes and initiating the review of content registration fees.

We provided an update on community investments we’ve made in line with the use-of-surplus funds framework that the board adopted in November 2025. To date, Crossref has committed USD $447,000 to several organisations and initiatives that share our mission.

Establishing an additional legal entity in Europe

The board discussed the decision to broaden our operations by setting up an entity in Europe, specifically an AISBL (International Non-Profit Association) in Belgium. This entity will sit alongside our existing organization and share the same name, mission, and services. They will be connected through a managed agreement. This will help build organisational resiliency, create the capacity for future operations if needed, and reflect the global nature of our membership.

The board discussed the structure of the entities. The entity will be organized so that it may conduct business in the future in a way that maintains equal governance with the primary entity. Concurrently, the team is reviewing storing a back up of the system in the EU for redundancy purposes. A board discussion ensued, followed by a vote.

The board voted unanimously to approve proceeding with establishing a Crossref AISBL to sit alongside the primary entity and serve the goals described above.

Governance review

Periodically, the board conducts a review of the organization’s stakeholder governance. The board discussed the strengths and areas for improvement in the current board structure and options to adjust it in the future. Discussions were preliminary to scope the review and will continue in more detail at the July board meeting.

There being no other business, the meeting was adjourned.

Matching funders in scholarly metadata: linking names to ROR IDs

Jason Portenoy — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In April 2025, we launched the metadata matching project, in order to add missing relationships to the scholarly metadata. We will do this by consolidating all existing and planned matching workflows, which enrich member-deposited metadata in Crossref. This unified service will result in a more complete research nexus. In this blog post, we share our latest milestone: developing and evaluating a strategy for matching funder metadata to Research Organization Registry (ROR) identifiers.

Key takeaways

Funder matching links funding organisation names to persistent identifiers, helping us understand how research outputs are funded and supported.
We built a new strategy to automatically match funder names in Crossref metadata to ROR identifiers.
Evaluated on a manually labeled dataset of 3,505 funder names, the strategy achieves 99% precision and 81% recall.
This is the first production deployment of Crossref’s new metadata matching framework, paving the way for future matching tasks across affiliations, references, grants, and more.

We did a brief demonstration of the funder matching process at our Community Update Call on 13th May 2026. You can watch a recording thereof on Youtube.

Introduction

In our recent blog post on metadata enrichment, we described the different ways that Crossref metadata can be enriched after its initial deposit, leading to a more complete research nexus. In this model, we can think of the metadata records served through the Crossref API as a result of several layers of enrichment applied on top of the initial deposit from a Crossref member. These layers may include member updates, community feedback, automated matching, and third-party datasets.

Metadata matching (layer 3) is when we use automated strategies to find missing relationships between entities within the scholarly record, such as relationships between research outputs, funding organisations, and grants, based on the unstructured information already present in the metadata. Our matching project aims to create a dedicated, consolidated metadata matching workflow that will eventually replace all existing production matching processes, with results made available through the REST API. We have identified the first six matching tasks that we’d like to tackle: funder name matching, bibliographic reference matching, preprint matching, affiliation matching, grant matching, and title matching.

Funder matching is a task of automatically finding an identifier of a funding organisation based on its name. Funder matching, when done well, improves the coverage and reliability of funding metadata, and the relationships between funding organisations and research outputs in particular. These relationships are critical for understanding how research is supported, tracking compliance with funder mandates, and enabling analyses of research investment.

Funder matching, as any type of matching, is not trivial because data can be noisy: the same organisation may appear under many variants, abbreviations, or translations, and some names are genuinely ambiguous. Our goal was to develop a matching strategy that results in a lot of additional identifiers while maintaining high quality of the results.

As part of this project, we will be switching the target identifier set for funder matching from the Funder Registry to the ROR registry, in line with our long-term plan to replace the Funder Registry with ROR. ROR provides an open, community-governed identifier system that is already used for affiliations and research institutions. It has become a well curated and widely-trusted catalog of organisations around the world involved in research, and it is very well suited to be the primary identifier for funders in Crossref. We are taking this opportunity to make a major move toward using ROR IDs.

This blog post describes the funder matching strategy we’ve developed and presents an evaluation of its performance, along with a new evaluation data set.

Overview of the funder matching strategy

At a high level, the funder matching strategy takes a funder name string from Crossref metadata as input and returns zero or one ROR IDs. While funder strings can occasionally map to more than one ROR ID, this strategy can only return at most one match per input string. Future versions of the strategy will allow for multiple matches.

The new matching strategy is based on the “single search” strategy previously developed at Crossref to match affiliation strings to ROR IDs, which is currently implemented in ROR’s API and which we plan to use to enrich affiliation metadata for works in Crossref. Funder matching and affiliation matching are similar tasks—they share the same target identifier set (ROR IDs), and they both use free-form text strings as their primary inputs. Most of these text strings are in English, so the strategy is optimized for English text; but the matching still works well on text in other languages, thanks in large part to ROR’s comprehensive catalog of multilingual alternate names.

However, there are also some differences in the way that these input strings tend to look across the two different tasks, so the strategy was adapted and refined specifically for funder matching. For example, affiliation strings are often much longer and contain information such as academic department and city/country in addition to the name of the institution; funder strings are usually more concise, which can often make it easy to identify an exact match in ROR, but requires more extensive exclusion criteria to prevent incorrect matches for generic names.

The flow chart diagram shows the basic steps that each funder name goes through when a match is attempted:

Flow chart diagram of the matching strategy’s steps to evaluate a funder name against potential ROR matches

After normalization, the name is compared to a list of country names and identifiers to identify if there is any country information. The name is then passed to a search engine—an indexed text-based search system such as Elasticsearch or OpenSearch—to retrieve a set of 15-20 possible candidates of ROR organisations with similar names. At this point, we use a set of filters to discard any name matches that are unlikely to be correct (i.e., they tend to produce false positives). Some examples include matches for very short names, or names that are very generic (think “Department of Education,” without any other indication of which larger entity it may be a department of).

At this point, we have a set of candidate ROR IDs, with a corresponding set of organization names that may match our funder name. We score these names by their similarity to the input name (using a fuzzy matching algorithm), then select the best candidate based on this score and a few other heuristic measures. As a final step, we ensure that, if we identified any country information in the early stages of the matching, the ROR ID that we matched is consistent—while developing the strategy, we learned that failure to do this would be a significant source of false positives.

A core principle of the matching strategy is that it is relatively conservative: at several points in the pipeline, the strategy can explicitly abstain and return no match. This prioritizes precision over recall; we consider incorrect matches to be more harmful than missing ones. Nevertheless, this strategy will be able to fill in large gaps in the funder data, and we can be confident that we will not be making widespread mistakes. To verify this, we use an evaluation dataset, which is described in the next section.

Evaluation dataset for funder matching

To evaluate the funder matching strategy, we manually labeled an evaluation dataset that maps funder name strings from Crossref metadata to zero, one, or multiple ROR IDs. The funder names were extracted from a July 2025 snapshot of Crossref works metadata, which contains 25.7 million funder entries across 12.4 million works, representing just over 3 million unique funder name strings.

The distribution of funder names is highly skewed: a small number of names appear very frequently, while most appear only a handful of times. Because correct handling of common funders has a disproportionate impact on overall metadata quality, the evaluation dataset is a weighted sample, where each name is weighted by how often it appears without an asserted funder ID.

The final evaluation dataset contains 3,505 funder names, with a total weight of just over 2.1 million funder entries. Each name was manually labeled against the ROR registry, resulting in at least one ROR match for 1,895 names. In addition, for some cases, alternate matches were recorded to support “relaxed” evaluation in ambiguous scenarios.

Evaluation methodology

Evaluation is done by running the matching strategy on all names in the dataset and comparing the results to the manual annotations. The primary metrics are precision, recall, and the F0.5 score, which combines precision and recall while weighting precision more heavily. This reflects the project’s preference to avoid incorrect metadata assertions, even at the cost of lower recall.

In addition to standard (strict) evaluation, the framework supports relaxed evaluation using alternate matches. This is meant to address cases where funder strings might be ambiguous even for a human evaluator, or a matching strategy might identify a parent organisation of a target, which is not an entirely incorrect match.

Evaluation is performed along two independent dimensions. First, results can be calculated in an unweighted mode, where each funder name is treated as equally important, or in a weighted mode, where names are weighted by how frequently they appear without an asserted identifier in Crossref metadata. Second, evaluation can be strict or relaxed, depending on whether only the primary annotated ROR ID is considered correct or whether alternate, manually annotated matches are also accepted. Together, these dimensions produce four possible evaluation modes.

Results

Under relaxed, weighted evaluation, the funder matching strategy achieves a precision of 0.99, recall of 0.81, and an F0.5 score of 0.95.

The table below compares the performance of the matching strategy across four evaluation modes. The Relaxed Weighted mode represents the headline performance (Precision: 0.9897) as it accounts for both the frequency of names in the metadata (weighting) and valid metadata ambiguity (alternates). In practical terms, the results mean that when the strategy produces a match, it is correct (or acceptably close, in cases of genuine ambiguity) roughly 99% of the time.

Evaluation Mode	Precision	Recall	F0.5 Score	False Positives	False Negatives
Unweighted	0.9365	0.6024	0.8430	81	788
Weighted	0.9776	0.7948	0.9346	81	788
Relaxed Unweighted	0.9707	0.6445	0.8815	37	675
Relaxed Weighted	0.9897	0.8094	0.9475	37	675

While precision and recall are essential for understanding matching performance, there are other important considerations that also matter in practice. This strategy also scores high marks in some of these other criteria that we’ve identified:

Openness — The strategy is open source—source code here—and built on open source methods, in accordance with our commitment to POSI.
Explainability/Flexibility — This is not a black box machine-learning model; the steps, detailed in the overview I’ve given earlier, are fairly easy to understand, update, and apply to new data.
Resources/Speed — The strategy is very quick (averaging a matter of milliseconds per match), and does not require large amounts of intense computation or data storage.

From evaluation to production

This work represents more than an isolated matching experiment: it is intended to be the first production deployment of the new metadata matching framework. Bringing funder matching into production will involve not only implementing the strategy described here, but also standing up shared infrastructure for monitoring, iteration, and reuse across future matching tasks. Applying this new matching system across all of Crossref’s current and future funder data will be our next milestone in the project. Beyond that, we will move on to grants, affiliations, references, and more. The work we’re doing now of setting up infrastructure, refining evaluation methods, and working out any kinks as they arise, will all contribute to the momentum of the project. We’re very excited about all the enrichment of the research nexus that lies ahead!

Why metadata matters for research integrity: a new joint guide from Crossref and DataCite

Madhura Amdekar — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Preserving the integrity of the scholarly record is an important component of the overall endeavour to protect research integrity. Open scholarly infrastructure enables persistent recording of research objects and associated metadata, which provides an evidence trail for these objects for all in the research community. Crossref and DataCite – as providers of essential infrastructure for preservation of the scholarly record – we share our joint expertise in the new guide on “Why metadata matters for research integrity and how to contribute”.

Both our organisations enable our members to share metadata about the research outputs, resources, and activities that they produce and steward. That metadata about scholarly outputs provides important information about them, which can help evidence integrity. To highlight how and which elements in the Crossref and DataCite metadata schemas support this endeavour, we are excited to make our new guide, available at https://doi-org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/10.5281/zenodo19695957.

This joint guide offers practical information for all stakeholders in the scholarly ecosystem about the different metadata elements supported by Crossref and DataCite that can help in assessing the integrity of the scholarly record. With growth in the type and complexity of research outputs over the years, there is also a growing need to be able to ascertain the trustworthiness of research outputs. Metadata directly supports this function. Creators and stewards of research outputs can provide metadata about the content that they produce, including information on who authored the work, who funded it, which other works it cites, whether it was updated after publication, how it relates to other items in the research ecosystem, and more. This guide lists the metadata elements that capture this information in the Crossref and DataCite metadata schemas and the important role played by each of them in assessing integrity and rigour. We hope that by knowing more about the applications of metadata for preserving the integrity of the scholarly record, prospective authors, researchers, publishers, repositories, integrators, and funders will be encouraged to contribute rich and accurate metadata when registering DOI records.

This information can also be leveraged by researchers and users of metadata who are looking to incorporate open metadata into their tools and analyses. All of the metadata in Crossref and DataCite can be accessed via open APIs and public data files. This guide contains details of what each of the metadata elements can be used for, helping you to identify the right data that you need for your analyses of interest, such as looking at citation patterns, network analysis, and other research integrity trends.

As you read through this guide, please share your feedback and any questions that you may have via the Crossref community forum.

Strengthening community connections in São Paulo

Susan Collins — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Versão em português

As our global community continues to grow, it is important for us to build and maintain our connections within it. In March this year, we had the opportunity to visit São Paulo for a community event at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas. The content of our presentations is available online. Events such as this provide an opportunity for us to update our members on Crossref fundamentals and developments, and help us better tune in to the varied needs of our communities and learn how we can work together more effectively. This was our third visit to Brazil, with previous events held in Campinas and São Paulo in 2016, and Goiânia and Fortaleza in 2018.

Our membership in Latin America has grown steadily in the meantime. We currently work with more than 3,300 members across the region; and the largest number is based in Brazil, with over 1,900 members. The majority of these represent universities, societies, and government organisations, followed by libraries and foundations that also register their works with us. In total, our members in Brazil have contributed over 2 million open metadata records to the Research Nexus.

On March 3, we welcomed 60 attendees, which included members, sponsors, service providers, and researchers. Each of these groups contribute unique perspectives and experiences, and use our services in a variety of ways. We were also joined by four Crossref ambassadors - Pedro López Casique from Mexico, Juan Felipe Vargas, Nicolás Mejía Torres from Colombia, Edilson Damasio from Brazil, as well as colleagues from SciELO Brazil.

Photo: Crossref staff and ambassadors: Leandro Contreras, Pablo López Casique, Nicolás Mejía Torres, Luis Montilla, Susan Collins, Juan Felipe Vargas, Jason Portenoy, and Isaac Farley

We started the day with an emphasis on metadata quality, the role of Crossref DOIs, and content registration best practices. We offered an overview of our helper tools: the updated Metadata Manager for record registration and Participation Reports for reviewing metadata completeness. Pedro, who is also a Publication Support Specialist with Public Knowledge Project (PKP), gave an overview of working with the Open Journals Systems (OJS) platform, which is widely used by our members throughout Brazil.

Photo: PKP’s Pedro López Casique highlighting Brazil as the second highest user of OJS-hosted journals globally.

Later in the day we shifted to more technical topics including metadata retrieval, the use of metadata for discoverability and research integrity, and common metadata errors in the registration process. Roberta Takenaka, systems developer at SciELO, discussed an overview and challenges of the adoption of DOIs in the SciELO network.

This was a tri-lingual event with presentations delivered in English, Portuguese, and Spanish, with live interpretation available for participants and presenters.

Photo: Isaac Farley discussing metadata updates

During the session, we asked attendees to share their feedback on both the value of Crossref to their organisation and the challenges they face when working with us. Participants noted persistence, the commitment to scientific development, metadata standardisation, interoperability, and increasing content visibility as important benefits. The most common challenge reported was language - the majority of our documentation is in English, which makes it difficult for many to fully utilise the available resources. Several mentioned that costs can be a challenge for some organisations, and others noted that more training opportunities, held in Brazilian Portuguese, would be appreciated.

Photo: Participants chatting during the morning coffee break

The question and answer sessions covered a wide range of technical topics, including OJS integrations, interpreting monthly resolution reports, updating metadata in bulk, and implementing Crossmark. During the coffee breaks, discussions continued as participants shared their thoughts, additional questions, and feedback with us.

Following the presentations, we held small group sessions with participants to gather feedback on two ongoing projects. Leandro Contreras, our new UX researcher, met with a group to gather information on how users interact with our website, as part of our website architecture improvement project. Luis Montilla, Technical Community Manager, led a group discussion with editors to learn more about editorial workflows and how they interact with scholarly metadata.

Many of the participants also joined us for our Metadata Sprint, which took place in the days following, exploring the uses of open scholarly metadata in creating new tools and solutions. These events were an opportunity to reconnect with the community, gather feedback to create additional training and support materials, share developments and resources, and strengthen our connections with members and key collaborators. Ana Marlene Freitas de Morais, former vice-president of the Associacao Brasileira de Editores Cientificos do Brasil (ABEC Brasil), our largest Sponsor in Brazil, stressed the importance of face-to-face collaborations, such as this event, for engagement in Brazil. Through our Ambassadors, Sponsors, and other partners, we aim to continue building lasting relationships and supporting our growing community in Brazil.

With special thanks to our hosts at Fundação Getúlio Vargas for the generous use of their venue and support personnel.

Português version

À medida que nossa comunidade global continua a crescer, é importante para nós construir e manter nossos laços dentro dela. Em março deste ano, tivemos a oportunidade de visitar a nossa comunidade em São Paulo num evento na Fundação Getúlio Vargas. O conteúdo das apresentações está disponível online. Eventos como este nos proporcionam uma oportunidade de atualizar nossos membros sobre os fundamentos e desenvolvimentos da Crossref, além de nos ajudar a nos sintonizar melhor com as diversas necessidades de nossas comunidades, e aprender como podemos trabalhar juntos eficazmente. Esta foi a nossa terceira visita ao Brasil, com eventos anteriores realizados em Campinas e São Paulo em 2016, e em Goiânia e Fortaleza em 2018.

Nosso conjunto de membros na América Latina tem crescido de forma constante ao longo do tempo. Atualmente, trabalhamos com mais de 3.300 membros em toda a região; e o maior número está concentrado no Brasil, com mais de 1.900 membros. A maioria deles representa universidades, sociedades e organizações governamentais, seguidas por bibliotecas e fundações que também registram seus trabalhos conosco. No total, nossos membros no Brasil já contribuíram com mais de 2 milhões de registros de metadados abertos para o Research Nexus.

No dia 3 de março, recebemos 60 participantes, entre os quais membros, patrocinadores, prestadores de serviços e pesquisadores. Cada um desses grupos traz perspectivas e experiências únicas, e utilizam nossos serviços de diversas maneiras. Também contamos com a presença de quatro embaixadores da Crossref: Pedro López Casique, do México; Juan Felipe Vargas e Nicolás Mejía Torres, da Colômbia; e Edilson Damasio, do Brasil, e também colegas da SciELO Brasil.

Foto: Equipe e embaixadores da Crossref: Leandro Contreras, Pablo López Casique, Nicolás Mejía Torres, Luis Montilla, Susan Collins, Juan Felipe Vargas, Jason Portenoy e Isaac Farley

Começamos o dia com ênfase na qualidade dos metadados, no papel dos DOIs da Crossref e nas boas práticas de registro de conteúdo. Apresentamos uma visão geral das nossas ferramentas: Metadata Manager, atualizado para registro de registros e os Participation Reports para verificar a integridade dos metadados. Pedro, que também é especialista em suporte a publicações no Public Knowledge Project (PKP), apresentou uma visão geral do trabalho com a plataforma Open Journals Systems (OJS), amplamente utilizada por nossos membros em todo o Brasil.

Foto: Pedro López Casique, da PKP, destacando o Brasil como o segundo maior usuário de revistas hospedadas no OJS em todo o mundo.

No decorrer do dia, passamos a abordar temas mais técnicos, incluindo a recuperação de metadados, o uso de metadados para a visibilidade e a integridade da pesquisa, e erros comuns de metadados no processo de registro. Roberta Takenaka, desenvolvedora de sistemas da SciELO, apresentou uma visão geral e discutiu os desafios da adoção de DOIs na rede SciELO.

Este foi um evento trilíngue, com apresentações em inglês, português e espanhol, com interpretação simultânea disponível para participantes e palestrantes.

Photo: Isaac Farley discussing metadata updates.

Durante a sessão, pedimos aos participantes que compartilhassem comentários sobre o valor da Crossref para suas organizações, e sobre os desafios que enfrentam ao trabalhar conosco. Os participantes destacaram a persistência, o compromisso com o desenvolvimento científico, a padronização de metadados, a interoperabilidade e o aumento da visibilidade do conteúdo como benefícios importantes. O desafio mais comum relatado foi o idioma - a maior parte da nossa documentação está em inglês, o que dificulta para muitos a utilização plena dos recursos disponíveis. Vários mencionaram que os custos podem ser um desafio para algumas organizações, e outros observaram que mais oportunidades de treino, ministradas em português do Brasil, seriam bem-vindas.

Foto: Participantes conversando durante o intervalo da manhã.

As sessões de perguntas e respostas abordaram uma ampla variedade de tópicos técnicos, incluindo integrações com o OJS, interpretação de relatórios mensais de resolução, atualização em massa de metadados e implementação do Crossmark. Durante os intervalos para o café, as discussões continuaram enquanto os participantes compartilhavam suas ideias, perguntas adicionais e comentários conosco.

Após as apresentações, realizamos sessões em pequenos grupos com os participantes para coletar feedback sobre dois projetos em andamento. Leandro Contreras, nosso novo pesquisador de experiência do usuário (UX), reuniu-se com um grupo para coletar informações sobre como os usuários interagem com nosso site, como parte do nosso projeto de melhoria da arquitetura do site. Luis Montilla, gerente da comunidade técnica, conduziu uma discussão em grupo com editores para aprender mais sobre os fluxos de trabalho editoriais e como eles interagem com metadados acadêmicos.

Muitos dos participantes também se juntaram a nós no nosso Metadata Sprint, realizado nos dias seguintes, para explorar os usos de metadados acadêmicos abertos na criação de novas ferramentas e soluções.

Esses eventos foram uma oportunidade para nos reconectarmos com a comunidade, coletar feedback para criar materiais adicionais de treinamento e apoio, compartilhar desenvolvimentos e recursos, e fortalecer nossos laços com os membros e principais colaboradores. Ana Marlene Freitas de Morais, ex-vice-presidente da Associação Brasileira de Editores Científicos (ABEC Brasil), nosso maior patrocinador no Brasil, destacou a importância das colaborações presenciais, como este evento, para o engajamento no Brasil. Por meio de nossos Embaixadores, Patrocinadores e outros parceiros, nosso objetivo é continuar construindo relacionamentos duradouros e apoiando nossa crescente comunidade no Brasil.

Agradecemos especialmente aos nossos anfitriões da Fundação Getúlio Vargas pelo generoso uso de suas instalações e pela equipe de apoio.

Reflections from Bangkok

Amanda Bartell — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Each organization in the global community of Crossref members (that’s currently over 25k organizations in 166 different countries) plays a key role in building the Research Nexus. Any opportunity we have to meet with our members in person is a highlight and a way for us to learn more from each other. The month of January saw three of us travel to Bangkok to attend the first-ever Charleston Conference organised in Asia and to meet with our growing community in Thailand.

The Charleston Conference is a meeting for librarians and publishers that is held annually in the USA. This year, the conference was held for the first time in Asia, and attending the event allowed us to connect with the library publishing community from the region and others, who had travelled from around the world to meet in picturesque Bangkok. Half of Crossref members are now based in Asia, so visiting Thailand gave us a great opportunity to meet members and colleagues from the continent in person.

At the conference, Robbykha moderated a panel discussion on “the importance of metadata for Asian scholarship”, capturing voices from across Asia on how open metadata is being used for discoverability, integrity, and assessment by different scholarly communities in the region.

Our visit to Bangkok culminated with a one-day Crossref Bangkok event that we had organised to meet with Crossref members in Thailand. We were also able to visit The Thailand National Library, who are the Thai ISSN Centre and stewards of so much of Thailand’s cultural heritage.

We were very grateful to our colleagues in Thailand for their warm welcome, particularly during the official mourning period for Her Majesty Queen Sirikit The Queen Mother.

Left hand photo: Madhura Amdekar (Crossref), Guo Xiaofeng (Crossref Ambassador and Crossref sponsors Sin-Chn Scientific Press Pte. Ltd (Singapore)), Robbykha Rosalien (Crossref), Mochammad Tanzil Multazam (Crossref sponsors Relawan Jurnal Indonesia), Prof. Dr. Namtip Wipawin (Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University and Crossref sponsors National Research Council of Thailand), Amanda Bartell (Crossref). Right hand photo: Members discussing challenges and opportunities for Thai scholarship.

Charleston Asia conference - a reminder of the importance of infrastructure

The three-day Charleston Asia conference gave us a great opportunity to meet with members and colleagues based in Asia, and hear about areas of focus and concern. It was refreshing to hear about the global challenges of access to knowledge, AI, and preserving research integrity, within the context of Asia’s institutional, linguistic, and economic environment. And it was wonderful to hear about so many projects (many at national level) integrating Crossref data to lead their strategies and even shape policy decisions.

Three inspiring keynotes covered many of the challenges of scholarship in Asia, covering local, national, and regional approaches.

Distinguished Professor Joyashree Roy (Asian Institute of Technology) presented her work on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change at the United Nations. She highlighted how those in Asia are the most likely to be impacted by climate change, but underrepresented in the research due to structural, linguistic, and financial barriers. She explained how publishers and librarians can remove some of these barriers.

Professor Devika Madalli (Director of INFLIBNET Centre) talked about the various services that her team has created at a national level in India to reduce country and institution-wide inequalities. INFLIBNET subscribes to Crossref’s Metadata Plus service, and it’s great to see our community’s metadata being part of such useful services.

Professor Bin Zhang (Library Director, Renmin University of China) talked about the challenges of access to scholarship across different regions in China, and how investment in infrastructure is making a difference here.

There were many other fascinating sessions during the three days, including our panel discussion, moderated by Robbykha Rosalien.

The importance of metadata for Asian scholarship - our panel at Charleston Asia

Metadata isn’t just a technical detail—it’s the backbone of discoverability, credibility, trust, and impact in scholarly communication. In our panel session, we explored metadata trends across Asia and discussed how open metadata is shaping research visibility, integrity, and assessment in the region. Our panel brought together diverse voices: Mochammad Tanzil Multazam from Relawan Jurnal Indonesia, Ms. Guo Xiaofeng, Crossref Ambassador in Asia and Director at Sin-Chn Scientific Press (Singapore), and Prof. Dr. Namtip Wipawin from the Department of Information Science, School of Liberal Arts, Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University in Thailand. Each shared experiences of challenges and solutions in adopting open metadata practices and leveraging metadata effectively.

Photo: panel session - Ms. Guo Xiaofeng, Prof. Dr. Namtip Wipawin, Mochammad Tanzil Multazam

The session opened with Robbykha presenting a striking graph: Crossref now has more than 14,000 members from Asia, representing over half of its global membership. As of January 19th, 2026, there are 13.8 million registered DOI records from Asia. Indonesia leads with 3.02 million registered DOIs, followed by Japan with 2.73 million, India with 2.52 million, South Korea with 1.28 million, and Türkiye rounding out the top five with 793,198. These numbers highlight Asia’s growing role in global scholarly communication.

Photo: Robbykha presenting the Asian metadata coverage from Crossref data

Mochammad Tanzil Multazam shared how government support for persistent identifiers and metadata in Indonesia has fueled one of the largest and fastest‑growing open‑access journal ecosystems worldwide. Of 27,807 national journals, nearly half already register DOIs and metadata records (SINTA, 13 January 2026). Prof. Dr. Namtip Wipawin provided an overview of the metadata landscape in Thai academia, highlighting both progress and ongoing challenges. Meanwhile, Ms. Guo Xiaofeng presented a case study on open metadata utilization across Asia, showing practical examples of how metadata strengthens discoverability and trust.

Participants emphasized the importance of metadata for Asian scholarship: enhancing discoverability, accessibility, and providing rich, accurate data. Yet challenges remain. One of the most pressing issues is multilingual content, and the best way to reflect this in the metadata. For our current advice on multilingual metadata, take a look at our documentation and this interesting discussion on our forum. Our Metadata Advisory Group currently has a working group of members and metadata users discussing this further, to help ensure our future schema updates help to accurately reflect multilingual metadata.

Poll results from the panel audience on key challenges to the adoption of rich metadata

Crossref Bangkok - a reminder of the importance of visibility

The day after the Charleston Asia conference, around 75 attendees joined us for our Crossref Bangkok event. The event reinforced how valuable opportunities to interact directly with our members are for learning about the challenges that they face in scholarly publishing and to explore together how those can be overcome. We were supported during the event by our ambassadors Guo Xiaofeng, Amber Osman and Prof. MI Subhani, and by Prof. Dr. Namtip Wipawin and her team, who lead the sponsor organization from National Research Council of Thailand. We were also grateful to Mark Husskison from PKP for attending and helping attendees with some of their knottier OJS questions.

Most of the event attendees were from universities, which are our existing members in Thailand, and we were also joined by a team from the National Library of Thailand.

Photo: Participants from across Thailand’s research and publishing landscape

We started the day by hearing more about who was in attendance, where they had travelled from, and what they hoped to get out of the day. We moved on to an introduction to Crossref and DOI metadata records, which provided a refresher on the benefits and obligations of Crossref membership and highlighted the importance of rich metadata for discoverability and research integrity. Next up, we split up into small groups to discuss and share the challenges and opportunities in scholarly publishing in Thailand. From across the discussion groups, there was one word that kept coming up again and again: visibility. Attendees shared how visibility is both a challenge and an opportunity. They appreciate that registering rich metadata records with Crossref - which are then shared with the global scholarly ecosystem - provides them with a way to make their content more visible, but agreed that this isn’t without challenges. Attendees welcomed the in-person meeting, and asked for more training and support from Crossref, particularly in registering content. (We shared details of our regular “Getting Started at Crossref” webinars for new members, and our regular “Metadata Health Checks” for longer term members, and we’ll be thinking about how to support members in Asia with more training).

During the afternoon, we heard more from Prof. Dr. Namtip Wipawin on the importance of metadata for raising the visibility of Thai research. We then ran a practical session, explaining how to add (and update) metadata records for those using our new Metadata Manager, and those using the OJS platform. These were followed by a practical session, with participants exploring their own Participation Reports, and discussing how to fill in any gaps in their metadata. The new CSV download for metadata gaps was particularly useful. It was great to support members in adding in their missing references through the OJS platform live, by properly activating the OJS references plugin.

Attending the Crossref Bangkok Workshop made it clear that being a part of Crossref goes far beyond simply assigning DOIs, it is about contributing to a global research community. The sessions highlighted how rich metadata, such as references, abstracts, ORCID iDs, and funding information, play a vital role in making Thai research more visible and accessible worldwide. There was also a strong emphasis on the importance of English metadata and standard identifiers in overcoming language and name-related challenges. Overall, the workshop showed how high-quality metadata can help bring Thai research onto the global stage and strengthen its international recognition.

– Prof. Dr. Namtip Wipawin on behalf of the National Research Council of Thailand.

Visiting the National Library of Thailand - a reminder of the importance of stewardship

The warm welcome from National Library of Thailand team: Ms. Thanachcha Suwannavach (Librarian, Practitioner Level), Ms. Thitima Kumkhun (Librarian, Professional Level), Ms. Linda Puechsee (Librarian, Professional Level), Madhura Amdekar (Crossref), Robbykha Rosalien (Crossref), Amanda Bartell (Crossref), Ms. Bubphar Chuchat (Director of the National Library of Thailand), Dr. Prasittichai Lertratanakehakarn (Director of Information Resources Service Group), Ms. Rawiwan Putsorn (Director of Library Research and Development Group), Mrs. Atchara Jaruwan (Director of Information Resources Development Group), Mr. Jung Dippracone (Director of Manuscripts and Inscriptions Group), and Ms. Samachaya Dadrung (Librarian, Professional Level)

On our final day in Bangkok, we were lucky enough to visit with the team at the National Library of Thailand. They have a key role to play in scholarly publishing in Thailand as they run the National ISSN Centre. They are also stewards of much of Thailand’s cultural heritage, and we were honoured to view some of the artifacts that they look after.

Staff showcasing the digitization efforts at the National Library of Thailand — preserving knowledge and making it accessible for the future.

The role of DOI metadata in enhancing the visibility and accessibility of digital resources is vital. This experience has provided the National Library with a clearer strategic roadmap for establishing a DOI Center dedicated to rare materials and digital ancient manuscripts. This initiative aims to broaden the reach of these invaluable heritage resources, ensuring they are easily discoverable and accessible to a global audience.

– Ms. Bubphar Chuchat, Director of the National Library of Thailand

Wrapping up our visit, we left the National Library of Thailand feeling inspired. The team’s passion for preserving rare manuscripts while embracing digital tools shows how heritage and innovation can go hand in hand. It was a reminder that stewardship isn’t only about looking after the past; it’s about making sure knowledge and culture continue to thrive for the future.

Voices from Crossref Metadata Sprint in São Paulo

Luis Montilla — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This year, we placed a spotlight on the Latin American community, hosting the second Crossref Metadata Sprint in São Paulo, Brazil from 4 - 6 March 2026. In our first tri-lingual event, we brought together 31 participants from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico. Our goal was to foster community co-creation using the open scholarly metadata. The Sprint was an opportunity to pose questions, share ideas, collaborate on research, and propose innovative solutions that enhance the use of metadata in scholarly communication and beyond.

Read on for more details about the content of the Sprint, and the resulting projects. You can also register to join our Sprint Showcase call on 22nd April to hear directly from the team about their creations.

We were excited to receive more than 100 expressions of interest for this sprint. We’re excited to see the growing enthusiasm in this space and will find new ways to channel it (watch the space!). We sought to balance that interest with ensuring a productive size of the group for the sprint. Our participants included librarians, researchers, grad students, developers, journal editors, and scholarly communications professionals. They engaged in rich, multilingual conversations about the different editorial practices across the region - dynamically jumping between Spanish, Portuguese, and English.

We coordinated our activities and ideas with the SciELO Brazil team, who also participated in the Sprint. SciELO is one of the most recognized scholarly organizations in the region and an important source of open scholarly content and metadata; articles, books, preprints, and datasets published in different languages.

Some of the participants of the 2nd Crossref Metadata Sprint, and Crossref Staff

Susan Collins, Luis Montilla, Isaac Farley, Jason Portenoy, and Leandro Contreras from Crossref acted as facilitators, providing general support, answering questions, and clarifying the ins and outs of Crossref tools and interfaces.

Using the key learning from our first Metadata Sprint, we created opportunities for the group to interact and get acquainted remotely, before the event, to help them hit the ground running and maximise the value of the time we spent together. It really paid off in terms of quality and progress of the sprint projects.

Projects summary

The projects developed also have their own mini stories. When we opened the call for expressions of interest, we invited individual pitches for projects that make creative use of Crossref metadata to answer questions and support solutions to problems faced by our communities locally. During the preparations to the event, participants refined their proposals and coalesced into project teams. This is the list of the projects they progressed during our Sprint:

Crossref Metadata Refiner: A tool that queries the Crossref API for any publisher prefix or ISSN and computes a Crossref Health Score for each DOI, crossing citation count with metadata completeness. The result is a prioritized action list for the member: fix the most-cited papers with the worst metadata first.
Improving Error Messages in Crossref Submission Details: A proposal for the redesign of the presentation of error messages in the Crossref Submission Details interface. Instead of showing only raw XML diagnostics, display structured and human-readable messages.
Scholarly Retractions and Corrections Tool: The development of a user-friendly form for Crossref members to fill in correction and retraction metadata.
Best practices for metadata journals in OJS, according Crossref schema: A guide that shows the correct completion of metadata fields in order to avoid errors already seen in everyday work, and facilitate the correct registration of metadata with the necessary quality to avoid errors in XML export.
Metrics for publishers using the Crossref API: A Power BI dashboard that summarises members’ metrics and indicators based on metadata retrieved from the REST API.
Metadata Integrity Check: A proposal for the implementation of a second stage of XML integrity verification after using the XML parser. This additional step would allow preliminary verification of the presence of mandatory metadata elements and encourage the inclusion of recommended metadata, such as institutional affiliations and references.
Integration OJS / OPS - Crossmark: This project advanced the development of a plugin for the current versions of OJS (3.4 and 3.5), so that when an article receives a correction, update, or new version after publication, each published version of the same work receives its own DOI, while maintaining structured relationships between these versions.
Automated Detection of Reference Rot in Scholarly Web Citations: An automated evaluation pipeline to retrieve citations containing URLs, then traces redirect behavior, and records HTTP status codes and final page locations. It also extracts evidence from both the citation data and the webpage itself, including titles, creators, identifiers, and other metadata.

We will hold a community call where the teams will showcase their projects. If anything here caught your eye and you would like to learn more – join us on 22nd of April (or register to receive the recording). In the spirit of the São Paulo Sprint, we will hold the call in three languages again! Register now to join our Sprint Showcase call.

I am still in awe at what our community achieved in such a short time in the Sprint: dashboards, clever API integrations, best practices manuals… all of these projects are sure to make a mark. The Metadata Sprint in São Paulo is a testament to my belief that great ideas are everywhere, and I’m happy to have taken part in amplifying them!

Said Leandro Contreras, User Experience Researcher

Like many in attendance, this was my first Crossref Metadata Sprint. I went into the event hoping to make connections, help where I could, and learn from those in attendance. Thanks to Susan and Luis for all their planning and thoughtful leadership and the collaborative spirit of everyone participating in São Paulo, the sprint was three days full of rich co-creating, thoughtful shared problem solving, and lots of fun. It exceeded my expectations! I learned a lot and am eager for the next steps with the projects completed there. I hope to be able to participate in another Crossref sprint again very soon (and, encourage everyone reading to get to one in the future)!

Said Isaac Farley, Head of Support

Voices from the Sprint

During and after the Sprint, participants were actively sharing their experiences online. Here are a few highlights from across the community:

Being in this collaborative space allows us to deepen knowledge, exchange experiences with professionals from different countries and, above all, improve the quality of the metadata of our articles. This technical work, often invisible to the reader, is essential to ensure greater visibility, traceability and scientific impact to RBC’s publications.

Carina Munhoz de Lima - Librarian at Revista Brasileira de Cancerologia, on Linkedin, 5 March 2026.

The session was a valuable opportunity to exchange knowledge, strengthen professional ties and reflect on the current challenges around metadata management and scholarly communication.

Sandra Gisela Martín - Library System Director at the Catholic University of Córdoba, on Linkedin, 10 March 2026.

The best experience of the Sprint was recognizing the potential of combining open infrastructure, reusable data and collaboration, with the accompaniment of Crossref experts.

Sofia E. Calle Pesántez - Research Impact and Scholarly Publishing Consultant, On Linkedin, 10 March 2026.

I am grateful to see Crossref’s concern in personally listening to the demands of the Latin American scientific community!

Alex Mendonça - Client Solutions Manager at ScholarOne, on Linkedin, 5 March 2026.

Its been an absolute privilege representing Galoá at the Crossref metadata Sprint in Brazil… our specific focus during this Sprint has been clear: rolling up our sleeves to elevate the quality of metadata for Brazilian and Latin American scientific publications.

Fabiano Sant’Ana - Founder at Galoá, on Linkedin, 6 March 2026

It was wonderful to connect with so many people working to strengthen scholarly communication in the region, and to meet the Crossref staff who organised such a thoughtful and engaging program.

Zach Coble - Graduate Research Assistant, University of Missouri-Columbia, on Linkedin, 7 March 2026

We developed a free tool for registering retractions in the Crossref metadata Sprint… the motivation for the project was to develop a solution that would make the Crossmark registration process easier and more user-friendly.

Eugênio Telles, Genius Design blog, also on Crossref’s community forum. Browse Eugênio’s gallery of photos on Instagram, 8 March 2026

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 second Metadata Sprint:

Name	Affiliation
Julia Bottesini	Data-PASS Journal Editors Discussion Interface
Pedro Cacique	Public Knowledge Project
Sofia Calle	Red Iberoamericana de estudios científicos de la edición, evaluación y circulación del libro
Zach Coble	University of Missouri
Edilson Damasio	Universidade Estadual de Maringá
Ana Claudia Ribeiro	Editora E-papers
Eugênio Fernandes Telles	GeniusDesign
Jhonathan de Seixas Miranda	Lepidus Tecnologia
Juan Felipe Vargas Martinez	Journals & Authors
Mariana Garroux Montezuma	Sabesp
Nicolas Mejia Torres	Universidad de La Sabana
Juliana Aaparecida Bolzan	Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina
Deise Katiuscia Xavier Kaisa Oliveira	Centro Universitário de Mineiros
Glicélia Pereira Silva	Centro Universitário de Mineiros
Carolina Tanigushi	SciELO
Amanda de Souza Ramalho	SciELO
Karolayne Costa Rodrigues de Lima	Universidade Federal do Paraná
Sara Jaqueline Santos da Silva	Universidade Federal de Uberlândia
Diego Abadan M. Melgarejo	Lepidus Tecnologia
Natalino Perovano Filho	Universidade Estadual do Sudoeste da Bahia
Sandra Gisela Martin	Universidad Católica de Córdoba
Roberta Takenaka	SciELO
Amélia Galdino Monteiro Amâncio	Instituto de Física Gleb Wataghin
Quele Pinheiro Valença	Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz
Rafael Dias Da Silva Campos	Universidade Federal do Triângulo Mineiro
Igor Moura Danieleviz e Silva	Lepidus Tecnologia
Heytor Diniz Teixeira	Universidade de São Paulo
María Eduarda Dos Santos Puga	Universidade Federal de São Paulo
Fabiano Sant’Ana	Galoá Science
Flaviane Cristina Rocha Cesar	Centro Universitário de Mineiros
David Antonio Da Costa	Universidade Federal de São Paulo

The second Crossref Metadata Sprint in a nutshell

DOI resolution and deposit outage on 17 March 2026

Dominika Tkaczyk — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On 17 March 2026, we experienced an outage that affected DOI resolution for Crossref DOIs and the deposit of metadata records by Crossref members. In this summary, we outline what happened, the impact on our community, and the steps we are taking to strengthen our systems and processes as a result.

Starting around 06:30 UTC, a surge of traffic to the Handle System, governed by the DOI Foundation and operated by CNRI, caused instability across several handle servers. As a result, users couldn’t resolve Crossref DOIs. Because the Crossref system relies on the Handle System to register new DOIs and update resolution information for existing ones, metadata deposits by Crossref members were also failing.

Although the handle service was restored by 09:30 UTC, the Crossref system held onto stale authentication sessions and did not automatically recover. Once we restarted the affected servers, deposit processing returned to normal around 10:18 UTC. We later reprocessed the failed submissions to ensure that members did not need to take any action.

While incidents like this are disruptive for our community, several aspects of our response worked well. Our support and technology teams reacted quickly, and we were able to restore the deposit workflow promptly. We were also able to reach CNRI through established communication channels, and they responded out of hours to begin mitigation.

The incident also highlighted areas where we can improve our processes and resilience. In addition to the changes made by CNRI (more backend handle servers and tighter rate limiting), Crossref is taking the following actions:

Knowledge sharing and documentation: Crossref, like all Registration Agencies, relies on the Handle System. We are reviewing the technical documentation describing how the Crossref system integrates with the Handle System, and we will continue working with CNRI to stay informed as the handle infrastructure evolves.
Improving handle session management: We are reviewing how our system manages handle sessions to explore how recovery could occur automatically after connection disruptions.
Submission rerun process improvements: We will review, clarify, and document the workflow for identifying and rerunning affected member submissions after disruptions to deposit processing.

Reliable DOI resolution and deposit processing are central to the research ecosystem. We’re committed to continuously improving the resilience of our systems and we will continue to learn from incidents like this one to strengthen them further.

If you have any questions, we are always happy to hear from you.

You can stay informed about the status of our services by subscribing to updates at status.crossref.org

Strengthening support for data citations and saying goodbye to Event Data

Martyn Rittman — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We’re excited to announce a new data citation API endpoint and are seeking your feedback. The new service makes existing data citation relationships in our metadata available, thereby surfacing this part of the research nexus. At the same time, we’ve decided that it’s time to move on from Event Data.

Time to say goodbye

Metadata about published scholarly research has evolved, and continues to evolve in exciting ways. A published article, book, or conference paper is only a single piece of the puzzle. A host of digital identifiers and items can be put together to form a more complete picture of a research project. This is what forms the basis of the research nexus—a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organisations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society.

Ten years ago, we launched Event Data to surface mentions of research around the Internet. What were people saying about published research? Could this discourse contribute to post-publication review and validation? We set up Event Data to capture use of Crossref DOIs in the online world from a variety of sources, including blog posts, social media, websites, and annotations. The idea was that diverse mentions (or “events”) could supplement traditional citation counts as a way to capture the value of research.

Today, the focus is increasingly on transparency, research integrity, and the completeness of outputs. Trust in research is shaped by knowing who the funder was, being able to reanalyse the original data, or checking for bugs in the analysis code. There are also more identifiers for objects within the research space and they are used more widely. This shift is evident in the relatively low usage of Event Data. We can no longer justify the resources and cost that goes into maintaining it as a service. Instead, we will focus on enabling and surfacing relationships between different types of research outputs, starting with links to datasets.

For these reasons, we have decided to sunset the Event Data API and from 23 April 2026 it will no longer be available (although historical data will still be available). In its place, we’re making available an API endpoint for data citations.

Visibility for data citations

The new API endpoint focuses solely on data citations and uses references and relationships deposited by Crossref members, including Crossref articles referencing datasets with either Crossref or DataCite DOIs. While our metadata contains many data citations, and some of them are labelled as data citations, it is often difficult to find them because they are swamped in number by other citations. If you are trying to get data citations directly from our REST API, it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. This new endpoint makes connections easier to find, enabling organisations to track when research is reused, cited, and built upon. By putting this metadata into a dedicated service, we are making it easier for interested organisations to track and find data citations. Our goal is to make existing sets of connections easier to access, giving clarity to how scholarly works link to the data that supports them.

This beta version will allow us the opportunity to incorporate feedback from the community and make changes to improve delivery. We received early positive feedback from a number of interested organisations. Later this year we will assess whether it is ready for production, needs more work, or if insufficient interest from the community suggests we should pursue a different solution.

Anyone interested in data citations is invited to try the new endpoint. Please let us know your feedback via the community forum. You can find supporting documentation on our website and Swagger documentation, including the opportunity to try out features.

Edited 15 June 2026: link to historical Event Data added.

On metadata enrichment

Dominika Tkaczyk — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Metadata is communication; it can tell a story about research and paint a picture for others to respond to and learn from, across the world and throughout the forthcoming generations. Metadata can feel technical with words like ‘infrastructure’ and ‘schema’, and sometimes, like tech in general, it comes with hyperbole. But metadata really is part art (storytelling and pictures) and part science (structured models and standards) with both aspects being equally important, and requiring people as well as systems. That necessary combination of human and machine involvement also makes metadata challenging.

Crossref, as the earliest adopter of DOIs specialising in scholarly research, became synonymous with DOIs in this community. However, not everyone realises that DOIs can be registered with any one of nine different agencies, which are all separate organisations with entirely separate systems that do not at present integrate or connect. And what’s more – there isn’t a central or shared “DOI schema” – each agency develops the metadata for the purposes of their organisation or community. In Crossref’s case, with our vision to create the research nexus as a complete and robust network of relationships between objects, people, and institutions of scholarship – that community encompasses the whole of the research enterprise.

The immense 180 million records of research outputs in Crossref are maintained in a system that 24,000 member organisations have already invested in. Those records benefit from rich and format-appropriate metadata schema, developed in close collaboration with the community, which makes it possible for our members to offer contextual information about each object they register. We have a long history of working with our members on recording that context, creating tools, and providing support to adopt standard metadata, enriching the context for the benefit of the scholarly community, and society at large.

Of course, those metadata records are not perfect, both in terms of quality and completeness, and the frustration around gaps in metadata is particularly strong. We are working to improve the quality and completeness of the metadata from many angles: by working with the community to understand their needs and obstacles, by identifying and analysing potential sources for additional metadata, by maintaining and adopting the existing system to changing environment, and by planning a new flexible system that will allow third-party assertions and automated enrichment workflows.

In 2020, we published a paper for the inaugural issue of Quantitative Science Studies on Crossref: The Sustainable Source of Community-Owned Scholarly Metadata and blogged an introduction to it under Crossref Metadata for Bibliometrics. One of the things our analyses in 2019 showed was that over 80% of records between 2013-2016 had been updated. Reviewing the numbers recently, we continue to see this stewardship and maintenance of metadata, amounting to almost 70% of records from the past decade being updated at least once. On the dawn of reaching 2 billion citation links, we’d like to share our experience, plans, and views on this ubiquitous activity of updating and connecting metadata – by our members and by automations built into the system by us. Altogether, these constitute the enrichment process to improve the usability of the information for the community.

Metadata available through Crossref

Crossref collects, processes, stores, and shares metadata records for a wide range of research outputs. While each record describes an individual research output, it also mentions other entities and their attributes - and, most importantly, the relationships between them. Two works identified by DOIs, for example, may be linked by a citation relationship. A person identified by an ORCID may be connected to an institution identified by a ROR ID through an affiliation relationship. A preprint and its corresponding journal article, each with its own DOI, can be linked by an “is preprint of” relationship. A research output may be associated with a grant through a “financed by” relationship. Together, these entities and relationships form the foundational building blocks of the research nexus.

As of March 14, 2026, the Crossref database contains 180,034,490 metadata records describing research outputs. You can download all the records and examine them yourself in the latest public data file. The plot below illustrates how the number of works has changed over time, showing that the rate of growth is accelerating.

The metadata records describe research outputs of various types, including:

journal articles
books and book chapters
conference proceedings
peer reviews
reports
datasets
preprints
dissertations
grants
and more

The majority of works in the Crossref database (67%) are journal articles. However, the distribution of record types has changed considerably over time. Newer types, such as components, datasets, and posted content, are growing more quickly than more traditional ways of communicating research:

Research outputs in the Crossref database are represented by rich metadata records, which may include:

basic bibliographic metadata (title, publication dates, contributors, journal title, conference name, volume and issue numbers)
authors’ affiliations and ORCID identifiers
abstracts and links to full text
funding metadata, including funders and grant details
license metadata
bibliographic reference lists
clinical trial numbers
updates such as corrections or retractions
relationships between works and other entities, such as “is translation of”, “is review of”, “is preprint of”, or “is version of”
components associated with the work, such as figures, tables, and supplemental materials

All metadata is freely available through the Crossref REST API, and additional services, such as Crossref Search, are also provided.

A natural question is: where does all this metadata come from? This is important for two main reasons. First, it helps address the question of trust, as understanding the origin of the metadata allows users to better assess its reliability. Second, it points us to the right place when investigating or addressing issues or gaps in the data.

At first glance, the answer might seem straightforward: from Crossref members. Crossref members, such as publishers, research institutions, universities, funders, museums, libraries, data and subject repositories, and conference providers, register metadata for the outputs they publish. Crossref stores this metadata and makes it available to the community.

In reality, however, the story is more complicated.

Metadata enrichment layers

The initial metadata deposit is only the beginning of what can become a long and rather fascinating journey. What users can see in our REST API is often the result of a series of updates and additions that occur over time, sometimes coming from multiple sources and happening in different ways. We can think of these ways as enrichment layers.

Each enrichment layer offers opportunities to improve the metadata while also introducing its own considerations and challenges. Rather than forming a sequence of clearly separated stages, these layers intertwine, overlap, and affect one another, collectively shaping how a research output is represented within the research nexus.

Enrichment layers are essential for completeness of the research nexus. If we relied solely on the original, one-off deposits from members, the metadata would be full of gaps, limiting the usefulness of any analysis or assessment based on it. While the scholarly metadata will never be perfectly complete, applying these enrichment layers is how we gradually and collectively build a fuller, more accurate picture of the research nexus.

One important caveat is that more metadata doesn’t magically equal better metadata. In fact, there’s often a delicate tradeoff between completeness and quality: the harder one pushes to fill every gap, the greater the chance of introducing errors. At Crossref, we believe quality comes first. We recognise that no dataset will ever be perfect, but we’re equally unwilling to apply enrichment processes without quality control. Any enrichment we introduce must meet a high bar for accuracy — no exceptions, no shortcuts.

The order of the enrichment layers discussed here loosely reflects how established they are within the scholarly ecosystem. There also might be a correlation, or at least a perceived one, between this ordering and the reliability of the underlying processes. That said, one must tread carefully when making such interpretations: perceived reliability is not the same as actual reliability.

Layer 1: Member updates

Crossref members not only deposit metadata, but also update it over time. This is an essential part of the system for several reasons. There may be errors in the originally deposited metadata that need to be corrected. Also, the initial record may contain gaps that can be filled later as more information becomes available. In addition, many changes naturally occur: landing page URLs may change, works may be archived in new locations, or identifiers for affiliated organisations may become available. Those situations also ideally result in an update.

This update process is well established. Over 24,000 Crossref members form a large global community that operates under shared membership terms. As part of these terms, members are responsible for maintaining and updating their metadata records. In this governance framework it is clearly defined who owns and stewards the metadata associated with each record, and who is responsible for the quality level and issues.

Member updates are very common. As an example, over 80% of works deposited between 2013 and 2020 were updated at least once. This demonstrates the community’s commitment to improving completeness and quality of the scholarly record. The plot below shows the percentage of works created in a given month that were updated at least once.

However, this layer also comes with challenges. It relies on members actively meeting their obligations to maintain and improve their metadata. As a result, gaps and inconsistencies can remain, and overall metadata quality is never perfect.

Our plans for the future in this area largely build on what is already happening. This includes developing and maintaining effective user interfaces for updating metadata, evolving the input metadata schema to keep pace with changes in the scholarly landscape, offering regular workshops on metadata improvements, and collaboratively establishing best practices while educating members on how to apply them.

Layer 2: Community feedback loop

Crossref metadata is widely used and examined by a large community of consumers. As a result, issues with metadata are sometimes identified by community members and reported back to us. When this happens, Crossref does not directly correct the metadata records. Instead, we contact the relevant member responsible for the record and able to deposit an update.

In this layer, the stewardship of metadata remains with the member, while responsibility for metadata quality broadens to include other actors in the community. This creates significant potential for scaling by involving a large community in identifying and reporting metadata issues.

At present, however, this process is not automated. Crossref staff effectively act as intermediaries between those reporting issues and the responsible member. As a result, the process has limited scalability. It also depends on the willingness of members to act on the reports they receive, as they are not obligated to respond to such reports.

In the future, we may explore automating portions of this workflow to handle community feedback more efficiently and lighten the load on everyone involved.

Layer 3: Metadata matching

Metadata matching is the task of finding an identifier for an item based on a structured or unstructured description of it. Matching strategies run as fully automated processes that analyse information deposited and updated by members and add identifiers, filling gaps in the metadata.

There are many instances of metadata matching problems, for example:

bibliographic reference matching: finding a DOI for a cited paper based on a bibliographic reference,
funder matching: finding the ROR ID for a funder based on its name,
affiliation matching: finding the ROR ID for an organisation based on an affiliation string,
preprint matching: finding the DOI for a preprint that precedes a given journal article,
grant matching: finding the grant DOI based on an award number and a funder name.

This layer is unique, as it focuses on a crucial type of gap in the scholarly record: the missing relationships between entities. Indeed, adding an identifier for an entity mentioned within a metadata record of a research output is typically an equivalent of asserting a relationship between that output and the matched entity. For example, bibliographic reference matching inserts citation relationships, and funder name matching - funding relationships between a research output and a funding organisation. These relationships form the foundation of the research nexus.

Currently, at Crossref, we perform two types of matching. We match bibliographic references to the DOIs of cited outputs, and funder names to Funder IDs. Both processes rely on fuzzy comparisons and other heuristic approaches to identify likely matches.

In the case of bibliographic reference matching, as it turns out, more than half of the cited DOIs (1 billion) available in the Crossref database originate from automated metadata matching:

In the case of funder name matching, the distribution is very different, but the matching strategy was still able to fill in some of the gap:

Metadata matching is a particularly valuable form of enrichment for several reasons. Matching strategies can often achieve high levels of accuracy while working in a fully automated way. This makes them highly scalable and drastically reduces the need for human oversight. Their focus on relationships also strengthens the foundations of the research nexus.

At the same time, this enrichment layer presents a number of challenges.

Its most fundamental limitation to remember is that metadata matching can only fill gaps when there is at least some useful information to work with. For example, it can identify a cited document only using structured or unstructured citation data, and the funding organisation can only be identified if some funding information is available. But if citation information, or funding information, is completely absent, as is the case for 101M (56%) records and 166M (92%) records respectively, then matching simply isn’t possible.

Matching strategies can also be complex and time-consuming to research, develop, and maintain. They require additional considerations of issues such as openness, explainability, complexity, flexibility, and cost.

Perhaps most importantly, in the case of matching, it becomes less clear who is responsible for the information introduced through the matching process. This is particularly important because matching results are never perfect, meaning there is always a risk of introducing errors. The risk is further amplified by the fact that matching strategies typically operate in a fully automated, unsupervised manner. As a result, careful evaluation of matching performance, as well as maintaining accurate provenance records, becomes increasingly important.

At Crossref, we have ambitious plans in this area. We intend to rebuild Crossref’s metadata matching workflows using modern software development and data science practices. The goal is to create a dedicated, consolidated matching service that will eventually replace all existing production matching processes, with results made available through the REST API. This project will cover six matching tasks: bibliographic reference matching, funder name matching, preprint matching, affiliation matching, grant matching, and title matching. You can learn more about metadata matching at Crossref at a dedicated project page.

Layer 4: Third-party datasets

There are many databases containing scholarly data, and one way to fill gaps in Crossref member-provided metadata is to incorporate additional metadata from those external sources.

We already have one example of this. Crossref ingests data from the Retraction Watch database to supplement information about retractions and other updates to records:

This layer has several advantages. It draws on subject-specific and metadata-specific expertise, avoids reinventing work that has already been done elsewhere, and reflects a collaborative community-driven approach to improving the scholarly record.

However, there are also important challenges to consider. Integrating external data often involves multiple data licenses or acquisition arrangements, and there may be less control over data quality compared to metadata that comes directly from members. There is also a risk that relying too heavily on external sources could shift responsibility away from the member stewards of the metadata. Finally, it can be difficult to determine which external datasets provide sufficient value and longevity to justify long-term integration.

Looking ahead, we plan to explore further opportunities to incorporate third-party datasets, carefully considering the value they bring, as well as issues of licensing, sustainability, and data quality.

Layer 5: Unstructured content scraping

A significant amount of scholarly information still exists in fully unstructured forms, such as full-text PDF documents and web pages. In principle, extracting information from these sources could help fill many gaps in existing metadata.

In a lighter-touch approach, analysing full-text documents can also help verify existing metadata elements. If such a check fails, the unverified element may be removed from the record — which, perhaps counterintuitively, can also count as enrichment, since improving accuracy is every bit as important as adding new information.

There are also important challenges to consider. Extracting metadata directly from unstructured sources could substantially shift responsibility away from the original data stewards or owners, weakening the current stewardship model. The results of automated extraction may also be inconsistent or of relatively low quality. In addition, there are potential legal and rights-related concerns, particularly when processing full-text materials. Finally, developing reliable extraction methods would require substantial research and engineering effort.

For all these reasons, the practical usefulness of this approach remains uncertain, and Crossref currently has no plans to run such processes in production. We will, however, keep a close eye on emerging extraction technologies and may consider adopting them in some form if future evaluations show clear value.

Summary

Metadata is far more than a technical afterthought of the publishing process. It is the connective tissue of the scholarly ecosystem, linking research objects, people, and institutions into a coherent, navigable network. At Crossref, this takes the form of a vast and continually evolving corpus of more than 180 million metadata records, all contributing to the emerging research nexus, being built through collective community effort to help the global research community discover, interpret, and reuse knowledge effectively.

The initial metadata record deposited by members is only the beginning. Its quality and completeness can improve over time through multiple enrichment layers: member-driven updates, community feedback, automated metadata matching, and the incorporation of third-party datasets. These processes help fill gaps and strengthen the reliability of the scholarly record, all while upholding a firm commitment to accuracy and stewardship.

Taken together, these layers reflect a long-term, collaborative effort across technology developments, community participation, and responsible automation, to ensure that scholarly metadata becomes richer, more interconnected, and more useful for everyone who relies on it.

2026 public data file now available

Martyn Rittman — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Once a year we release all metadata records for content registered with Crossref in a public data file. This year’s version, containing nearly 180 million records, is now available. It includes metadata associated with all Crossref-registered DOIs in JSON-lines format.

All our metadata is openly available via our REST API at all time and this file provides the same information all in one place for those who find that format useful for their tools and analysis. You can access the file via Academic Torrents at https://doi-org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/10.13003/nggf-vt1j or directly from AWS. For further guidance and tips, see our documentation. The complete, compressed files are 208 GB.

Our metadata has several sources:

Primarily, it comes from records deposited by over 24,000 members spread across over 160 countries. This year, we are pleased to have added a number of new countries by expanding our GEM program, which supports participation in the Crossref community from those in the most economically disadvantaged regions.
Second, we enrich the data by adding automated matches, for example by adding DOIs to deposited references, and organisation identifiers to funders. We are undertaking a renewal of our matching processes, starting later this year with matching funders to ROR identifiers.
Finally, we use selected third party sources to enrich the metadata. Currently we include retractions from the Retraction Watch database.

Most of the data can be freely reused and is not subject to copyright. Some limitations are applied to abstracts. See our documentation for more details about licensing.

Why do we do this?

The community is key to everything we do. Without the thousands of members depositing metadata, we would have nothing to share. And without countless organisations and individuals making use of the metadata, it would have no impact or value. Our mission is to serve our community, and making metadata publicly and openly available is one of our key values. The public data file is just one of a number of ways in which we enable metadata retrieval.

Over the last year, there have been over 600 downloads of the public data file. In addition, we see around 2 billion hits to our public APIs each month. We are always excited to hear about the diverse and interesting ways in which metadata can be used.

What’s different this year?

Thanks to the rich metadata, the records deposited with Crossref are interconnected with many types of relationships between works, people, and organisations, that tell the story of the research endeavor. The latest public data file reflects the current status of the research nexus as we know it and we’re delighted to share it with the community.

This year’s dataset contains 12.7 million new records (a 7.6% increase since last year). Across the board, we’re also seeing richer metadata records, with more abstracts (up 15%), ORCID identifiers for authors (up 20%), ROR identifiers for organisations (up 250%), and links to grant identifiers for funding (reaching 50,000 records).

Research integrity is a current theme in our community. We can see that members increasingly look to leverage metadata in service of asserting trust in their works. An additional 27% more records have Crossmark enabled, meaning that the member responsible is open about research integrity practices, and committed to communicating corrections, retractions, and other post-publication changes. In addition, this year’s snapshot contains retractions from the Retraction Watch database. If you have any questions or feedback about the public data file, or would like to discuss how you can use it, head over to our community forum and join the conversation.

Reflections from the Crossref Ambassador Community

Johanssen Obanda — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Crossref Ambassadors act as local points of contact, meeting editors, librarians, researchers, and institutions to help them navigate Crossref services and understand how strong metadata supports visibility, integrity, and trust in research. They explain how to participate in our rich network of connections between works, people, and institutions, in ways that make sense in their own contexts. And last year, being our 25th anniversary, Ambassadors also massively contributed to our celebrations!

In 2025, the Crossref Ambassador Programme continued to grow globally with 51 volunteers from 41 countries. We were delighted to welcome five new Ambassadors: Ahmet Anıl Müngen (Turkey), Mokheseng Richard Buti (South Africa), Richard Risasi (Democratic Republic of the Congo), Pedro López Casique (Mexico), and Nadia Boutaleb (Morocco).

During the year, Ambassadors promoted the value of robust metadata through webinars, including Metadata Health Check sessions in Arabic, Bahasa, French and Turkish, alongside conference participation and institutional visits across their regions. While others were more active in the Crossref Community Forum, bringing questions from their communities and contributing to discussions that helped others learn and problem-solve together.

ABEC Conference 2025 in Brazil and the 5th Latin American Scientific Journal Editors and Researchers Congress in Colombia, with Crossref Ambassadors engaging editors and researchers.

Highlights

We endeavour to stay in touch with our communities locally, and Ambassadors play a critical role in these efforts. Ambassadors joined the first Metadata Sprint in Spain, supported engagement at the Beijing International Book Fair, and co-organised local Crossref events, such as Crossref Quito and Crossref Accra. Others played active roles in the Global Equitable Membership (GEM) program, engaging communities in Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Ghana, and Senegal.

Ambassadors connecting with the scholarly community at the Beijing International Book Fair (China)(upper left), Crossref Quito (Ecuador)(upper right), and Crossref Accra (Ghana).

Dr. Lasith Gunawardena leading a GEM programme workshop at the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Some Ambassadors delivered metadata health check sessions in French, Turkish, Bahasa, and Spanish. Several institutions supported by Ambassadors went on to become new Crossref members, while others began conversations about improving their metadata completeness.

Crossref Ambassador Ahmet Anıl Müngen hosting a Metadata Health Check webinar in Turkish.

Ambassadors contribute their understanding of the industry and local contexts, and their communities’ feedback into Crossref, too. Nicolás Mejía Torres, Juan Felipe Vargas, Ahmed Moustafa, Sandra Gisela Martín and Guo Xiaofeng have recently joined our new Metadata Advisory Group, where they support us to craft our metadata for the future in tune with the community’s needs, and in particular, helping us shape how we reflect global scholarship through multilingual metadata.

To mark Crossref’s 25th anniversary, a celebratory series of Ambassador-led satellite events was hosted to coincide with the Annual Meeting. These events, held in Nairobi (Kenya), Bogotá (Colombia), and Medan (Indonesia), featured workshops, presentations, and a watch party, allowing attendees to synchronously join the main live annual meeting program.

Crossref satellite events bringing local communities together in Bogotá (top), Medan (center), and Nairobi (bottom).

Many of our Ambassadors routinely organise virtual meetings and webinars. Recognising the growing need for effective online engagement, we partnered with the Centre for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement (CSCCE) to deliver a targeted training program focused on the advanced skills of convening and facilitating highly engaging and interactive online events. This intensive training was designed to provide our Ambassadors with practical techniques and resources for maximising participant involvement, fostering dynamic discussions, and ensuring that their online gatherings are both productive and stimulating. Equipping Ambassadors in this way ultimately strengthens the overall effectiveness of their outreach and community-building efforts.

Challenges & lessons learned

Alongside successes in their roles as Crossref Ambassadors, many balanced the role alongside demanding professional responsibilities, while others encountered language gaps or uneven awareness of Crossref across their regions. In some contexts, limited institutional readiness or infrastructure meant that engagement required more foundational work and patience.

These experiences offered valuable lessons, including the importance of demonstrations, translated reference and training materials, and more regionally tailored support.

The impact of the programme was also reflected through Ambassador feedback. In the annual survey, most reported feeling that their work had significantly increased their community’s capacity to understand and use Crossref services. Similarly, Ambassadors reported that their role helped Crossref reach new people and institutions that were previously unaware of Crossref.

Survey results showing how Ambassadors increased community capacity around Crossref services and helped reach new institutions (40 of 51 responses).

In 2025, Ambassadors delivered 43 activities, including training sessions, webinars, events, translations, and feedback on tools and services both individually and collaboratively, reaching more than 1,200 people worldwide.

In 2026, the priority for the program includes strengthening regional and multilingual outreach, increasing visibility of the Ambassador role, expanding access to up-to-date resources and tools, and creating more opportunities to connect with Crossref staff.

Renewed partnership: DOAJ and Crossref focus on equitable scholarly metadata and global support

Reyhana Mahomed — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We have renewed our partnership with DOAJ to focus on a new set of objectives that reflect both organisations’ commitment to improving sustainable and equitable services and infrastructure. This renewed collaboration focuses on improving the quality of scholarly metadata while expanding support for journals in low- and middle income- countries.

We have worked together since 2021, primarily to encourage the dissemination and use of scholarly research using online technologies, and regional and international networks, partners and communities. This partnership has helped to build local institutional capacity and sustainability within the global scholarly communication ecosystem. A continued partnership also reflects that we have a shared community; currently almost 90% of DOAJ journals are represented in Crossref.

Our renewed collaboration will support:

Article Metadata Enhancements: DOAJ will improve the ingestion, processing, storage, and display of article-level metadata. Improvements include:

Author affiliations and persistent identifiers
Open references
Expanded metadata harvesting

These enhancements are expected to benefit both direct users of DOAJ and downstream discovery, aggregation, and research analytics services that rely on DOAJ metadata.

Ambassador Programme: Our collaboration with DOAJ will support the continued development of DOAJ’s Ambassador programme. This global network of ambassadors primarily based in low- and middle-income countries:

Support journal editors in understanding and applying good practices in open access publishing
Organise and deliver workshops, webinars, and local events
Collaborate with regional partners and policymakers
Raise awareness of DOAJ and publishing standards within local scholarly communities

Crossref’s contribution will support ambassador travel and the organisation of workshops and events.

We value our longstanding collaboration with Crossref. As fellow open scholarly infrastructures, we share a commitment to strengthening the systems that support trusted, global research discovery. This new partnership enables DOAJ to move forward with important work around interoperability. Improving how infrastructures connect and exchange information is a priority for us, and this support helps ensure we can continue to serve the community in line with the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure—with openness, collaboration, and long-term sustainability at the centre.

– Joanna Ball, Managing Director of DOAJ

The collaborations with DOAJ so far only reaffirmed our shared goal to help make the global scholarly communications system more equitable wherever we can. Our joint projects aim to seek out and devise support for resource-constrained journals in multiple ways. DOAJ’s work is essential in helping journals to adopt good practice, while Crossref offers an open infrastructure to ensure all journals can be included and discoverable in the global scholarly record.

– Ginny Hendricks, Chief Program Officer at Crossref

About DOAJ

DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer reviewed journals. DOAJ deploys around one hundred carefully selected volunteers from the community of library and other academic disciplines to assist in curating open access journals. This independent database contains over 20,400 peer-reviewed open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts and humanities. DOAJ is financially supported worldwide by libraries, publishers and other like-minded organizations. DOAJ services (including the evaluation of journals) are free for all, and all data provided by DOAJ are harvestable via OAI/PMH and the API. See https://doaj.org/ for more information.

Contact: DOAJ - Joanna Ball, Managing Director - joanna@doaj.org.

About Crossref

Crossref is a non-profit organisation that 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 24,000 members in 166 countries, Crossref drives metadata exchange and supports nearly 2 billion monthly API queries, facilitating global research communication, for the benefit of society.

Contact: Crossref - Kora Korzec, Director of Community – kkorzec@crossref.org.

Hit refresh: redesigning our technical infrastructure

Paul Davis — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

With key milestones achieved in 2025, including the appointment of new Directors of Technology and Programs, a move to the cloud, and some key schema updates, we now have a firm foundation for our next challenge: a redesign of our core technical systems to make them more modern, robust, and easier to maintain and scale.

At a high level, our systems serve our community well. The deposit system handles over 107,000 DOI deposits and updates per day, and the REST API responds to 2 billion requests per month, serving up nearly 180 million open metadata records. These systems are reliable: since December 2025, the REST API pools exceeded 99.94% uptime, and the submission queue, since January 2024, has had an uptime of 99.90%.

Uptime for REST API pools and the submission queue, with minimal service interruption since January 2024.

It’s this reliability, we think, that has kept us from tackling this redesign earlier. But the reality is that when these systems were first built, some as long ago as 2005, Crossref and our community looked very different. In 2005, we had 318 members, and were creating DOIs and depositing metadata exclusively for journal articles, all supported by 5 Crossref staff. Today, we have 24,000+ members, representing publishers, societies, funders, universities, service providers, sponsors, and sponsored members; and we are assigning DOIs to >17 content types, from journal articles to book chapters, grants, conference proceedings, dissertations, and more. All supported by 50+ Crossref staff.

Like a stone monolith, a tightly coupled system can be solid, but hard to adapt.

Over the years, we’ve accumulated quite a bit of technical debt building support for new features and functions into one monolithic codebase.

We haven’t always been great at paying down that technical debt (because, as some say, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it), but we have made big strides in the last 18 months. Our main database moved to Postgres from Oracle and we migrated from a physical data centre to the cloud.

But still, the codebase has become hard to maintain; it’s not always clear that fixing something in one place won’t break something else. A more modern approach, breaking apart the monolith into separate, smaller services, will enable us to seamlessly maintain services, identify and debug issues efficiently, and build new features to support the ever-changing needs of our growing community.

Paul has recently started a new role at Crossref as the Product Manager for the Open and Sustainable Operations Program and will play a big role in this cross-functional effort. Having moved over from the technical support team, he brings a wealth of experience with all of our systems, how they work in detail, and where the pain points exist for internal users as well as members. We will rely on this experience to bring a better suited system to our members and colleagues.

Oh, the things he’s seen (and heard!). Here’s what rises to the top of his pain points list:

Our authentication service is difficult to administer with manual processes still in place for change requests
Title management causes headaches for our members and staff: members can’t modify or transfer titles between each other in our system themselves and rely on manual intervention from the Support team.
Members don’t have access to all of the details about their own records that we have in our system. This creates unnecessary barriers to stewarding their metadata.
Members can’t currently programmatically check the status of their submission in the system to learn in real-time whether it has been deposited or remains in the queue, which would be really useful.

How are we going to do this?

This won’t be one big bang – the scale is way too big, and it’s far too risky. We will instead break the work into a series of (many!) smaller projects, chipping away at the large monolith of Crossref code and building smaller, free-standing components which will be easier to maintain. We also don’t see this work as a separate project with a cleanly defined beginning and end - rather, gradually replacing parts of the system with more modern, better-designed components is simply part of ongoing maintenance.

We’ve already taken a hard look at what our system does (and it’s a lot!) and developed a list of ~14 core “functions” it serves, things like authentication and authorization, metadata deposit and validation, metadata distribution, and so on. We’ll work on replacing those functions with free-standing services, then pull out the (then-unnecessary!) code from the codebase. At each step, the monolith gets smaller and less complex.

We’ve already started doing this, and it feels great! Most recently, we rebuilt a component we lovingly call the ‘Pusher.’ Its function is to push the XML our members deposit to the REST API, where it can be distributed to users, and to keep citation counts updated. We deployed the new Pusher in two phases, in October 2025 and February 2026. It uses modern code libraries, is open source, and runs independently rather than being tangled up with the rest of the core system.

Another project that is currently underway is rebuilding of our metadata matching workflows using modern software development and data science practices. The goal is to create a dedicated, consolidated matching service that will eventually replace all existing matching processes, with results made available through the REST API. This project will start with matching funder names to ROR IDs, and eventually cover also bibliographic reference matching, preprint matching, affiliation matching, grant matching, and title matching.

We have yet to decide on the exact order of things, but that will likely be determined by the complex dependencies we touched on earlier. We’ll also consider urgency and risk - is something falling over too often and causing too much work to maintain it and keep it stable? That’s the reason we bumped up the priority on the Pusher work and rewrote it when we did. We’ll also consider benefits: quicker upgrades which will help both ourselves and our members will naturally have a higher priority than less impactful projects.

We do know that the top priority is the authentication service. The current one was not meant to be permanent, but rather a bridge until we build a permanent solution. It’s now beyond its useful life: it’s quite confusing, it doesn’t scale (and we are scaling), and it’s painful for sponsors, members, and Crossref staff. Tackling this piece of work first unblocks a lot of other important things we want to get done. It’s a big undertaking that we are excited to get started on to improve the user experience for everyone. Importantly, we will be consulting with the community along the way so that we get this right.

Dominika Tkaczyk, Crossref Director of Technology, emphasized the importance of maintaining open scholarly infrastructure at the Crossref annual meeting in October 2025. She said that, just as we maintain roads and bridges to make sure they’re safe, we must maintain scholarly infrastructure so it continues to serve the community far into the future.

This is a long road, but it’s one we’re excited to be on. We’ll have periodic updates on our progress as this work goes forward: what we’re getting done, where we need input, and what we’re tackling next. We’ll need a lot of feedback from you, our community, about what’s working well and where we might make improvements.

Introducing board meeting summaries, starting with the January 2026 meeting

Lucy Ofiesh — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In an ongoing effort to make more of our operations transparent, we have decided to start sharing summaries of our board meetings on the blog. We already post our board resolutions, but the summaries will give a bit more information on what the board discusses that may or may not show up on the list of resolutions.

We do observe the Chatham House Rule for our board discussions, so we won’t disclose who says what, and there will still be executive sessions that discuss confidential matters that we can’t share. But those discussions constitute a minority of the time we spend together, so the summaries will cover much of what the board discusses.

Let’s start with our recent meeting in January, which is online and lasts one hour.

Crossref Board of Directors Meeting Executive Summary, January 22nd, 2026

The January meeting is held primarily to conduct board business at the start of the board term.

Board business

The board conducted elections for this year’s board leadership, and approved each of the following positions:

Board Chair: Marin Dacos
Board Treasurer: James Phillpotts
Executive Committee members (3 seats): Rose L’Huillier; Rebecca Wambua; and Aaron Wood
Board Secretary and Assistant Secretary: Lucy Ofiesh, Ed Pentz
Audit Committee Chair: Ashley Towne
Nominating Committee Chair: Nick Lindsay

The board then turned to review and adopt the minutes from the November board meeting, December board meeting, and October executive committee meeting.

The board discussed a proposal to update the financial authorization approval levels, a set of guidelines established by the board to define the limits on the approval of expenses that are part of Crossref’s Financial and Accounting Operating Policies. The board adopted changes to the policy that would bring it in line with the scale of Crossref’s business operations.

Looking ahead to 2026

Ed Pentz gave a brief overview of what the board can expect at the 2026 board meetings and reviewed topics that will be discussed at each meeting.

The board next meets in early March.

Innovation in scientific publishing and its implications for Crossref DOI registration practices - MetaROR’s approach

Ludo Waltman — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A couple of months ago, Ludo Waltman and André Brasil raised some questions about good practices for Crossref DOI registration, asking for input from the scholarly communication community. In this post, Ludo and André reflect on the input received and discuss the approach to DOI registration that the MetaROR publish-review-curate platform is going to take.

Practices for assigning DOIs and structuring the associated metadata are not merely technical details. They shape how scholarly outputs are discovered, cited, evaluated, indexed, and preserved over time. As new models of publishing emerge, especially those that decouple dissemination from evaluation, these infrastructural choices increasingly influence what counts as a scholarly object, as well as how credit and accountability mechanisms are organized.

As editors of MetaROR (MetaResearch Open Review), a platform launched in 2024 and operating under the publish-review-curate model, we are interested in good practices for Crossref DOI registration in the context of innovative new approaches to scientific publishing. In the earlier blog post, we invited members of the broader scholarly communication community to share their perspective on the following two questions:

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 ‘journal-article’ or the type ‘preprint’ in their Crossref metadata, or something else entirely?

We were pleasantly surprised by the level of interest in these two questions. We received about 15 responses from colleagues in the scholarly communication community. Some colleagues posted a reply at the bottom of our blog post. Others responded on social media (Bluesky, LinkedIn) or shared their perspective by email.

Below we reflect on the responses received and we outline the approach to Crossref DOI registration that MetaROR is going to take.

DOI registration for articles on the MetaROR platform

Colleagues offered mixed opinions on the question of whether articles on the MetaROR platform should have their own DOI, in addition to the DOI these articles have on the preprint server on which they were originally published. Some colleagues argued there is no good reason for registering DOIs for articles on the MetaROR platform and suggested this may cause confusion. One colleague reasoned that “if we want peer review to be something more ongoing and evolve beyond a single point in time judgment”, our approach should be to “better map the connections between events” rather than registering a new DOI each time an article has been peer-reviewed.

However, other colleagues expressed support for registering DOIs for articles on the MetaROR platform. One colleague pointed out that this “allows the user to reference the exact artefact they have consulted”. This colleague also reminded us that in the past “people were worried about having a different DOI for a preprint and another for a VoR (version of record)”, while nowadays this is a generally accepted practice. Another colleague emphasized the value of decentralization and suggested to “let a thousand DOIs bloom”. Authors of an article peer-reviewed by MetaROR argued in favor of “an overarching DOI for the full package (preprint, reviews, author response and link to updated preprint)”, which in their view would make MetaROR’s “process more coherent”.

Having considered the various arguments in favor of or against registering DOIs for articles on the MetaROR platform, we feel the arguments in favor are more compelling. Our perspective is 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 an evaluation by peer reviewers and editors. MetaROR provides a carefully curated package that includes not only the article itself, but also review reports and an editorial assessment. In our view, this justifies registering DOIs for articles on the MetaROR platform. We also see DOI registration for articles on the MetaROR platform as a way to promote appropriate recognition for authors of articles peer-reviewed by MetaROR, similar to the way authors get recognition for articles published in traditional peer-reviewed journals.

Of course, when an article has multiple versions, each with their own DOI, it is important to establish a link between the different DOIs, indicating that the DOIs are associated with the same work. This is important for articles published first on a preprint server and then on a platform such as MetaROR just like it is important for articles published first on a preprint server and then in a peer-reviewed journal. In practice, we establish these links by registering relationships between DOIs in the associated metadata. In this way, we ensure that indexing services, discovery systems, and research analytics tools are able to recognize that the DOIs refer to different manifestations of the same work rather than independent outputs.

Record type for articles on the MetaROR platform

Our second question is about the record type to be used when registering a Crossref DOI for an article on the MetaROR platform. Many colleagues who provided input on this question argued there is a need for a new Crossref record type for ‘reviewed preprints’.

We feel the idea of such a new record type is interesting and its pros and cons deserve further consideration. However, any solution that requires changes in Crossref’s metadata schema will take time to realize, while for MetaROR we need a solution in the short term. At the moment, the most obvious options for MetaROR therefore seem to be to use either the record type ‘journal-article’ or the record type ‘preprint’ (which is in fact a subtype of the record type ‘posted-content’).

The use of the record type ‘preprint’ seems somewhat problematic to us, because preprints are typically understood to be articles that have not yet been formally peer-reviewed. In a way, articles on the MetaROR platform are the opposite of this, since these articles have undergone formal peer review. An article on the MetaROR platform is part of a package that also includes review reports and an editorial assessment. Such a package provides readers with a more informed understanding of an article than what they get from reading only the article itself. For this reason, we do not consider the record type ‘preprint’ to be suitable for articles on the MetaROR platform.

Instead of the record type ‘preprint’, we have decided to use the record type ‘journal-article’ for articles on the MetaROR platform. The record type ‘journal-article’ is intended for articles published in journals. To be clear, MetaROR considers itself a ‘platform’, not a ‘journal’. However, the distinction between ‘platforms’ and ‘journals’ is not very well defined and the choice of terminology therefore involves a certain degree of arbitrariness. Moreover, articles on the MetaROR platform have been formally evaluated, and in that sense they resemble articles in traditional peer-reviewed journals. Although the nature of the evaluation is different (i.e., MetaROR provides a narrative assessment, while traditional journals provide a ‘stamp of approval’), we feel the resemblance justifies the use of the record type ‘journal-article’. We also hope that the use of this record type will help to ensure that articles evaluated by publish-review-curate (PRC) platforms are treated similarly to articles evaluated by traditional journals, advancing beyond more conservative ways of dealing with articles on PRC platforms.

There is a precedent for using the Crossref record type ‘journal-article’ for articles evaluated by PRC platforms. For over a decade, this approach has been used by platforms operated by F1000, such as F1000Research, Gates Open Research, Open Research Europe, and Wellcome Open Research. The approach we are taking at MetaROR is similar to the approach taken by these platforms. At the same time, our approach is different from the approach of eLife, another prominent PRC platform. eLife uses the record type ‘preprint’ for all versions of an article on its platform except for the version that the authors consider to be final and that they choose to designate as the ‘version of record’. This version has the record type ‘journal-article’.

Summary of MetaROR’s approach to Crossref DOI registration

Figure 1 summarizes MetaROR’s approach to Crossref DOI registration. The figure considers the situation in which an article went through two rounds of peer review by MetaROR. Both rounds of peer review involved two reviewers. After two rounds of peer review by MetaROR, the article was published in a journal. We emphasize that journal publication is optional in MetaROR’s PRC approach. It is included in Figure 1 for the sake of completeness.

Figure 1: MetaROR’s approach to Crossref DOI registration

Each element in Figure 1 represents an item that has its own Crossref DOI. The shape of an element indicates the Crossref record type of an item (‘preprint’, ‘journal-article’, ‘peer-review’). MetaROR is responsible for the blue elements in the figure. The gray elements are the responsibility of other actors, either a preprint server or a journal. Arrows represent relationships between items. These relationships are captured in the Crossref metadata of the various items.

Figure 1 shows how MetaROR treats articles, review reports, editorial assessments, and author responses as first-class research objects. Each object has its own DOI, while the objects are linked through structured metadata. Assigning DOIs to review reports, editorial assessments, and author responses is central to our commitment to transparency, recognition, and reuse of evaluative contributions.

We note that Figure 1 assumes each version of an article on a preprint server has its own DOI. This is indeed how DOI registration is handled by many preprint servers, such as the OSF servers (e.g., MetaArXiv, PsyArXiv, SocArXiv), ChemRxiv, Research Square, and Preprints.org. However, some preprint servers use a single DOI for all versions of an article. This is the case for bioRxiv and medRxiv and also for arXiv, which registers DOIs with DataCite rather than Crossref. In the future, we hope these preprint servers will also adopt versioned DOIs.

Outlook

Over the past 25 years, practices for registering DOIs and associated metadata have evolved along with broader developments in the scholarly communication landscape. Inevitably, DOI registration practices will always be lagging behind the most recent developments in scholarly communication. From this point of view, the lack of agreement on good practices for DOI registration in the context of PRC platforms is not surprising. This lack of agreement can in fact be seen as part of a larger discussion about the pros and cons of different infrastructural approaches for handling ‘preprint review metadata’, including for instance the COAR Notify approach and the DocMaps approach.

MetaROR’s approach to DOI registration demonstrates both the power and richness of Crossref’s metadata schema and its limitations. As discussed above, several colleagues who responded to our earlier blog post consider the lack of a record type for ‘reviewed preprints’ to be a significant limitation. With the growing interest in PRC models for scientific publishing, there appears to be a need to systematically evaluate possible improvements that can be made to Crossref’s metadata schema to offer better support for new approaches to scientific publishing.

We see this not only as a technical challenge but also as an issue of infrastructure governance. We therefore invite further dialogue between DOI registration agencies, other metadata infrastructures, preprint servers, PRC platforms, and indexing services to explore pathways for improving metadata standards, whether through new record types, extended relationship vocabularies, or shared best practices. We hope our experiences with MetaROR will contribute to the collective effort needed to ensure that emerging models of scholarly communication are represented accurately, transparently, and responsibly in the scholarly record.

Crossref note: This discussion chimes with related plans for extending our schemas: more granular vocabulary for items within journal articles, preprints, reviews, and others; clearer relationship types; and support for the forthcoming NISO JAV recommendations. Our Preprint Advisory Group will discuss the topic this year, and our Metadata Advisory Group has both ‘journal article type vocab’ and ‘relationships’ on its radar for 2026. We look forward to engaging further on this topic as we work towards more flexible schemas in support of the Research Nexus.

A spotlight on our community in Indonesia

Susan Collins — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Click here for the translation in Bahasa Indonesia

As Crossref celebrated its 25th anniversary last year, we are highlighting some of the most active and engaged regions in our global community.

Over the past 25 years, the makeup of Crossref membership has evolved significantly; founded by a handful of large publishers, we now have more than 24,000 members representing 165 countries. Nearly two-thirds of them self-identify as universities, libraries, government agencies, foundations, scholar publishers, and research institutions.

The Crossref community in Indonesia is by far the most dynamically growing region. Each year since 2017, we’ve seen the highest number of new members joining from the country. There are now over 4,400 members based in Indonesia who have registered the metadata for more than 2.6 million works, connecting their research to the global community.

Indonesia also happens to be the largest user of OJS globally, with close to 20,000 journals publishing on the platform. Most journals are published by universities, research institutions, and government agencies.

There is a strong emphasis on publishing as part of completing a university degree. The Ministry of National Education policy requires all students to publish their research before graduation. To provide opportunities and accessible platforms for publication, Indonesian universities and faculties have established journals to help their students meet these requirements for graduation.

Most journals in Indonesia are indexed in SINTA (Science and Technology Index), which is managed by the Ministry of Higher Education, Science, and Technology (MoHEST). The aim of SINTA is to improve journal quality, facilitate assessment, and increase the competitiveness of Indonesian journals. The use of DOIs is a requirement for indexing on the platform.

Members know the value of persistent identifiers for their content, but many also realise the value of Crossref’s commitment to open metadata and the open scholarly record. Being a member of Crossref means being part of a larger community. While DOIs may be required for national indexing, organisations have various reasons for becoming Crossref members. One of the most important factors is to increase the global visibility of their content and, therefore, increase the impact of their publications.

“We feel like we’re part of the Crossref community because we don’t just use your service; we contribute to it. By providing DOIs and metadata, we’re helping to build the open scholarly record that benefits everyone. Being a part of the Crossref network is more than just being a member—it’s about a shared vision. We see ourselves as active contributors. Every time we register a DOI and provide metadata, we add a new link to the global chain of knowledge. This helps ensure our research can be easily found, cited, and connected to other works, which benefits everyone.” — Nita Nurdiana, Universitas PGRI Palembang

We have very dedicated ambassadors based in Indonesia who advocate for Crossref’s mission, Fauji Nurdin ST. Mudo and Zulidyana Rusnalasari. Each has been instrumental in organising in-person events and webinars for members, as well as in representing Crossref at events throughout the region.

In October, as part of our 25th Anniversary celebration, the ambassadors, with the support of our Sponsor Relawan Jurnal Indonesia (RJI), held a satellite event in Medan, which brought together participants from universities, publishers, government agencies, research institutes, non-governmental organisations, libraries, and museums. It provided a forum for dialogue around key topics in scholarly publishing.

Crossref 25th Anniversary Satellite Event, Medan, October 2025

The majority of members in Indonesia work through one of our regional sponsors. Sponsors provide support to smaller organisations that often face financial, technical, and language barriers, making membership challenging. Their knowledge of the unique needs of their local publishing community and extensive networks help organisations learn more about Crossref in a more accessible way.

Our first sponsor in Indonesia, Relawan Jurnal Indonesia (RJI), joined in 2017; we now have eight sponsors that together support over 3,900 members in Indonesia.

Our sponsors are also key partners in helping us engage with the community, facilitating webinars and supporting our in-person meetings. In August 2024, in collaboration with RJI, we held a two-day in-person event in Jakarta, attended by over 100 members, and joined by our sponsors and ambassadors. Along with discussions on the fundamentals of Crossref and the role of quality metadata, we’ve heard from Ahmad Saefudin Surapermana, a sub-coordinator from ISSN Indonesia. Because so many members in Indonesia use the OJS publishing platform, colleagues from the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) joined us for a session on OJS plugins and an upgrade workshop for OJS system administrators. We continue to receive feedback from members that more regular in-person and online events should be held to facilitate connections and share developments.

Crossref Jakarta, August 2024

While interest in Crossref among this community is ever-growing, there are still painpoints for Indonesian members. Though many join through a Sponsor, some report challenges with metadata deposits, errors, and submission failures, and others struggle to navigate the documentation when technical issues arise. Some members have noted that our metadata requirements can be complex and that they struggle to achieve metadata completeness in their records. These concerns can be particularly challenging for institutions with limited resources.

To provide additional support, we developed a series of webinars in Bahasa Indonesia, covering topics such as using our Participation Reports to assess metadata completeness and workshops on best practices for using OJS. These webinars have been some of the most attended by our members. The strong interest reflects the value these sessions bring to our community, and we continue to receive requests for additional training opportunities. In total, we welcomed 1,044 registrants and 501 attendees across our webinars last year. This level of participation highlights the importance of ongoing training and the enthusiasm of our members to engage, learn, and grow together.

Despite some challenges, many members feel there is significant value in being a Crossref member. Including their metadata in Crossref enhances the visibility and accessibility of their journals globally. Because Crossref provides the infrastructure of persistent identifiers and open metadata, this ensures scholarly outputs are discoverable, connected, and part of a global research record.

“Crossref’s vision of creating open, connected scholarly infrastructure directly supports our university’s core mission of advancing knowledge and research impact. As an academic institution, we rely on Crossref’s DOI system to ensure our faculty publications and institutional repository content remain permanently accessible and properly cited. This infrastructure is essential for maximizing the visibility and impact of our research output, which directly contributes to our university’s reputation and ranking. Additionally, Crossref’s commitment to open scholarly communication aligns with our values of making knowledge freely accessible, supporting our open access initiatives and helping us demonstrate research impact to funding bodies and stakeholders. The persistent linking system also supports our students and researchers in conducting reliable literature reviews and building upon existing scholarship with confidence that their citations will remain valid over time.” — Anggota dari STIS Darul Falah, Indonesia

Ratna Galuh Manika Trisista, from Universitas Islam Jakarta, has also illustrated how joining Crossref and stewardship of rich metadata supports the development of Indonesian journals in her presentation, Our Metadata Story: Improving Citation Visibility through Reference Linking during the Crossref2025 Annual Meeting.

As membership growth in Indonesia continues, we look forward to building relationships within the community, supported by our ambassadors, sponsors, and members’ contributions.

Much of the information in this report comes from a survey sent to our members, sponsors, and ambassadors in Indonesia. 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.

Translation in Bahasa Indonesia

Tahun lalu Crossref merayakan usia ke-25, dan momen ini menjadi kesempatan istimewa untuk menyoroti wilayah-wilayah yang paling aktif dan berperan penting dalam komunitas global Crossref. Salah satunya adalah Indonesia.

Dalam perjalanan 25 tahun tersebut, keanggotaan Crossref telah berkembang pesat. Yang awalnya hanya digagas oleh beberapa penerbit besar, kini Crossref menaungi lebih dari 24.000 anggota dari 165 negara. Menariknya, hampir dua pertiga anggota Crossref saat ini berasal dari perguruan tinggi, perpustakaan, lembaga pemerintah, yayasan, penerbit ilmiah, serta institusi riset, menunjukkan semakin kuatnya peran komunitas akademik dalam ekosistem publikasi global.

Indonesia menjadi wilayah dengan pertumbuhan komunitas paling dinamis di Crossref. Sejak tahun 2017, Indonesia secara konsisten mencatat jumlah anggota baru terbanyak setiap tahunnya. Saat ini, lebih dari 4.400 anggota Crossref berbasis di Indonesia telah mendaftarkan metadata untuk lebih dari 2,6 juta karya ilmiah. Kontribusi ini tidak hanya memperkuat visibilitas riset nasional, tetapi juga menghubungkan pengetahuan yang dihasilkan di Indonesia dengan komunitas ilmiah global.

Pertumbuhan ini tentu tidak terjadi begitu saja. Ia lahir dari kerja kolektif para pengelola jurnal, penerbit perguruan tinggi, editor, dan komunitas akademik di Indonesia yang terus belajar, beradaptasi, dan saling berbagi praktik baik dalam tata kelola publikasi ilmiah. Semakin banyak institusi yang menyadari pentingnya metadata yang berkualitas, transparansi dalam publikasi, serta keterhubungan riset melalui DOI sebagai fondasi visibilitas dan keberlanjutan ilmu pengetahuan.

Di berbagai forum, pelatihan, dan pendampingan komunitas, semangat kolaborasi ini terus tumbuh. Komunitas Crossref di Indonesia tidak hanya berkembang secara kuantitas, tetapi juga menunjukkan peningkatan kualitas dalam pengelolaan metadata, kepatuhan terhadap standar internasional, serta komitmen terhadap praktik publikasi ilmiah yang etis dan terbuka. Inilah yang menjadikan Indonesia bukan sekadar pengguna, melainkan kontributor aktif dalam ekosistem pengetahuan global.

Indonesia juga dikenal sebagai pengguna Open Journal Systems (OJS) terbesar di dunia, dengan hampir 20.000 jurnal yang dikelola dan diterbitkan melalui platform ini. Sebagian besar jurnal tersebut diterbitkan oleh perguruan tinggi, lembaga riset, dan instansi pemerintah, yang menunjukkan kuatnya peran institusi akademik dan publik dalam ekosistem publikasi ilmiah nasional.

Budaya publikasi ilmiah di Indonesia sangat erat kaitannya dengan dunia pendidikan tinggi. Kebijakan Kementerian Pendidikan Tinggi, Sains, dan Teknologi mewajibkan mahasiswa untuk mempublikasikan hasil penelitiannya sebagai salah satu syarat kelulusan. Untuk menjawab kebutuhan tersebut sekaligus menyediakan ruang publikasi yang inklusif dan mudah diakses, banyak universitas dan fakultas di Indonesia membentuk serta mengelola jurnal ilmiah mereka sendiri sebagai wadah bagi karya mahasiswa.

Sebagian besar jurnal di Indonesia terindeks dalam SINTA (Science and Technology Index) yang dikelola oleh Kementerian Pendidikan Tinggi, Sains, dan Teknologi (MoHEST). SINTA bertujuan untuk meningkatkan kualitas jurnal, memfasilitasi proses penilaian, serta mendorong daya saing jurnal ilmiah Indonesia. Dalam konteks ini, penggunaan DOI menjadi salah satu persyaratan penting agar jurnal dapat terindeks di platform tersebut.

Para anggota Crossref di Indonesia memahami pentingnya persistent identifiers untuk memastikan keberlanjutan dan keterlacakan karya ilmiah mereka. Namun, semakin banyak pula yang menyadari nilai lebih dari komitmen Crossref terhadap metadata terbuka dan rekam jejak ilmiah yang terbuka. Menjadi anggota Crossref bukan sekadar memenuhi kewajiban teknis, melainkan juga menjadi bagian dari komunitas global yang lebih besar. Meski DOI dibutuhkan untuk kepentingan pengindeksan nasional, banyak organisasi memilih bergabung dengan Crossref demi meningkatkan visibilitas global konten mereka—dan pada akhirnya, memperluas dampak dari publikasi yang dihasilkan.

“Kami merasa menjadi bagian dari komunitas Crossref karena kami tidak hanya menggunakan layanannya, tetapi juga berkontribusi di dalamnya. Melalui pendaftaran DOI dan penyediaan metadata, kami ikut membangun rekam jejak keilmuan terbuka yang bermanfaat bagi semua. Menjadi bagian dari jejaring Crossref bukan sekadar status keanggotaan—ini adalah tentang visi bersama. Kami melihat diri kami sebagai kontributor aktif. Setiap kali mendaftarkan DOI dan metadata, kami menambahkan satu mata rantai baru dalam jejaring pengetahuan global. Hal ini memastikan riset kami dapat ditemukan, disitasi, dan terhubung dengan karya lain, sehingga memberi manfaat bagi semua pihak.” — Nita Nurdiana, Universitas PGRI Palembang

Semangat kontribusi ini juga diperkuat oleh peran para ambassador Crossref di Indonesia yang dengan penuh dedikasi mengadvokasi misi Crossref. Fauji Nurdin ST. Mudo dan Zulidyana Rusnalasari telah menjadi penggerak penting dalam penyelenggaraan berbagai kegiatan, mulai dari acara luring hingga webinar untuk para anggota, sekaligus mewakili Crossref dalam beragam forum di berbagai wilayah Indonesia.

Pada bulan Oktober lalu, sebagai bagian dari perayaan ulang tahun ke-25 Crossref, para ambassador ini—dengan dukungan sponsor dari Relawan Jurnal Indonesia (RJI)—menyelenggarakan sebuah acara satelit di Medan. Kegiatan ini mempertemukan peserta dari perguruan tinggi, penerbit, instansi pemerintah, lembaga riset, organisasi non-pemerintah, perpustakaan, hingga museum. Acara tersebut menjadi ruang dialog yang hidup untuk membahas isu-isu kunci dalam dunia publikasi ilmiah dan memperkuat jejaring kolaborasi lintas sektor.

Crossref 25th Anniversary Satellite Event, Medan, October 2025

Sebagian besar anggota Crossref di Indonesia bergabung dan beraktivitas melalui sponsor regional. Para sponsor ini berperan penting dalam mendampingi organisasi-organisasi kecil yang kerap menghadapi berbagai tantangan—mulai dari keterbatasan finansial, kendala teknis, hingga hambatan bahasa—yang membuat proses keanggotaan menjadi tidak selalu mudah. Dengan pemahaman yang kuat terhadap kebutuhan khas komunitas penerbitan lokal serta jejaring yang luas, para sponsor membantu organisasi mengenal dan memanfaatkan Crossref dengan cara yang lebih ramah dan mudah diakses.

Sponsor pertama Crossref di Indonesia, Relawan Jurnal Indonesia (RJI), bergabung pada tahun 2017. Hingga kini, Indonesia telah memiliki delapan sponsor yang secara kolektif mendukung lebih dari 3.900 anggota di seluruh Indonesia. Peran ini menjadikan para sponsor sebagai tulang punggung pertumbuhan dan keberlanjutan komunitas Crossref di tanah air.

Lebih dari sekadar pendamping teknis, para sponsor juga menjadi mitra strategis dalam membangun keterlibatan komunitas—mulai dari memfasilitasi webinar hingga mendukung pertemuan luring. Pada Agustus 2024, misalnya, Crossref bekerja sama dengan RJI menyelenggarakan acara luring selama dua hari di Jakarta, yang dihadiri oleh lebih dari 100 anggota. Selain diskusi mengenai dasar-dasar Crossref dan pentingnya metadata berkualitas, kegiatan ini juga menghadirkan Ahmad Saefudin Surapermana dari ISSN Indonesia, serta para sponsor dan ambassador Crossref. Mengingat banyaknya anggota di Indonesia yang menggunakan platform OJS, rekan-rekan dari Public Knowledge Project (PKP) turut bergabung untuk memberikan sesi khusus tentang plugin OJS serta lokakarya peningkatan versi bagi para administrator sistem OJS. Hingga kini, Crossref terus menerima masukan dari para anggota bahwa kegiatan luring dan daring yang lebih rutin sangat dibutuhkan—tidak hanya untuk memperkuat jejaring, tetapi juga untuk berbagi perkembangan terbaru dalam dunia publikasi ilmiah.

Crossref Jakarta, August 2024

Seiring dengan meningkatnya minat komunitas ini terhadap Crossref, masih terdapat sejumlah tantangan (pain points) yang dirasakan oleh anggota di Indonesia. Meskipun banyak yang bergabung melalui sponsor, sebagian anggota melaporkan kendala dalam proses deposit metadata, munculnya error, hingga kegagalan pengiriman data. Ada pula yang merasa kesulitan menavigasi dokumentasi teknis ketika menghadapi permasalahan sistem. Beberapa anggota juga menilai bahwa persyaratan metadata Crossref cukup kompleks, sehingga mereka mengalami tantangan dalam mencapai kelengkapan metadata pada rekaman mereka. Kondisi ini tentu menjadi lebih berat bagi institusi dengan sumber daya yang terbatas.

Untuk memberikan dukungan tambahan, Crossref kemudian mengembangkan rangkaian webinar dalam Bahasa Indonesia, yang membahas topik-topik praktis seperti pemanfaatan Participation Reports untuk menilai kelengkapan metadata, serta lokakarya praktik terbaik dalam penggunaan OJS. Webinar-webinar ini menjadi salah satu kegiatan dengan tingkat kehadiran tertinggi. Minat yang kuat mencerminkan nilai yang dibawa sesi ini bagi komunitas kami, dan Crossref terus menerima permintaan untuk pelatihan tambahan. Secara keseluruhan, kami menyambut 1.044 pendaftar dan 501 peserta dalam webinar sepanjang tahun 2025. Tingkat partisipasi ini menegaskan pentingnya pelatihan berkelanjutan serta antusiasme anggota kami untuk terlibat, belajar, dan berkembang bersama.

Di balik berbagai tantangan tersebut, banyak anggota tetap merasakan nilai strategis dari keanggotaan Crossref. Penyertaan metadata jurnal ke dalam Crossref secara signifikan meningkatkan visibilitas dan aksesibilitas jurnal Indonesia di tingkat global. Melalui infrastruktur persistent identifiers dan metadata terbuka yang disediakan Crossref, keluaran ilmiah menjadi lebih mudah ditemukan, saling terhubung, dan tercatat sebagai bagian dari rekam jejak riset global.

“Visi Crossref dalam membangun infrastruktur keilmuan yang terbuka dan saling terhubung sangat mendukung misi utama universitas kami dalam memajukan pengetahuan dan dampak riset. Sebagai institusi akademik, kami mengandalkan sistem DOI Crossref untuk memastikan publikasi dosen dan konten repositori institusi kami tetap dapat diakses secara permanen dan disitasi dengan tepat. Infrastruktur ini sangat penting untuk memaksimalkan visibilitas dan dampak luaran riset kami, yang secara langsung berkontribusi pada reputasi dan peringkat universitas. Selain itu, komitmen Crossref terhadap komunikasi ilmiah terbuka sejalan dengan nilai-nilai kami dalam membuka akses pengetahuan seluas-luasnya, mendukung inisiatif open access, serta membantu kami menunjukkan dampak riset kepada lembaga pendanaan dan para pemangku kepentingan. Sistem keterhubungan yang berkelanjutan ini juga mendukung mahasiswa dan peneliti kami dalam melakukan tinjauan pustaka yang andal, dengan keyakinan bahwa sitasi yang digunakan akan tetap valid dalam jangka panjang.”
— Anggota dari STIS Darul Falah, Indonesia

Pengalaman serupa juga disampaikan oleh Ratna Galuh Manika Trisista dari Universitas Islam Jakarta, yang memaparkan bagaimana keikutsertaan di Crossref dan pengelolaan metadata yang kaya dapat mendukung pengembangan jurnal Indonesia. Hal ini ia sampaikan dalam presentasinya berjudul “Our Metadata Story: Improving Citation Visibility through Reference Linking” pada Crossref Annual Meeting 2025. Seiring pertumbuhan keanggotaan Crossref di Indonesia yang terus berlanjut, kami menantikan penguatan relasi dengan komunitas—dengan dukungan para ambassador, sponsor, serta kontribusi aktif dari para anggota itu sendiri.

Sebagian besar informasi dalam laporan ini bersumber dari survei yang dikirimkan kepada anggota, sponsor, dan ambassador Crossref di Indonesia. Kami sangat menghargai seluruh umpan balik, komentar, dan saran yang telah diberikan, dan berharap dapat terus melanjutkan kolaborasi serta meningkatkan keterlibatan bersama komunitas di masa mendatang.

Insights from a roundtable on author affiliation metadata

Amanda French — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been said that Americans are unusual in tending to ask “Where do you work?” as an initial question upon introduction to a new acquaintance, indicating a perhaps unhealthy preoccupation with work as identity. But in the context of published research, “What is this author’s affiliation?” is a question of global importance that goes beyond just wanting to know the name – and perhaps prestige level – of the place a researcher works.

When collected, used, and analyzed at scale, data about author affiliations can provide intriguing insights about international collaboration trends, signal trust and lack of trust in particular research institutions, generate business intelligence for publishers, help universities track the work their researchers do, help funders demonstrate the impact of their funding, and much more.

In November we partnered with OA Switchboard to organize a roundtable on author affiliation metadata for the Crossref community, service and infrastructure providers, production vendors, data scientists, researchers, and librarians. We aimed to bring together scholarly information professionals with many diverse perspectives; ultimately, participants from more than 40 organizations joined the roundtable to share their experiences and their thoughts.

In focusing on a single type of metadata, we hoped to focus our discussions, as well. Similarly, in October the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information organized a roundtable on “Moving Funding Metadata Forward” in which it became clear that “improving the quality and coverage of funding metadata was on the agenda of many organisations and there was a strong interest in collaborating on practical next steps.”

While many of the issues and solutions discussed at both roundtables are similar, in the course of the author affiliation metadata roundtable we identified some unique challenges as well as benefits related to this particular flavor of information. In this blog post, I’ll share these insights.

Insights from presenters

I opened the roundtable with a brief introduction and a working definition of affiliation metadata: names and/or identifiers such as Research Organization Registry (ROR) IDs for organizations where research was conducted or with which authors and contributors are associated, usually officially, as in their place of employment.

Next, to create a shared context for discussion, we heard four presentations on the current state of author affiliation metadata, its importance, and Crossref’s ongoing initiative to enhance it automatically.

Nees Jan van Eck of Leiden University’s Center for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) shared observations on the state of author affiliations from a preprint titled “Crossref as a source of open bibliographic metadata” that presents the findings of an analysis performed annually since 2021. Nees’s key points:

Crossref is a foundational data source for bibliographic metadata.
Affiliation metadata is available for only 1 out of 3 journal articles in Crossref for the period 2023-2024.
There is considerable variation in the extent to which Crossref members deposit affiliation metadata.
Downstream sources try to fill gaps using suboptimal approaches, leading to missing, inaccurate, and inconsistent linking of publications to institutions.
Publications lacking affiliation metadata in Crossref are less visible in bibliometric applications, analyses, studies, and tools (such as the open edition of the Leiden Ranking of over 2800 universities).

Next, Yvonne Campfens of OA Switchboard reiterated the desirability of the Crossref community providing complete and accurate author affiliation metadata at the source. Yvonne called upon publishers to “Integrate metadata creation in your systems and workflows before publication and relay it throughout the editorial, production, and publication processes.”

Yvonne pointed out that in the context of managing Open Access agreements, publishers ought to keep in mind that providing good affiliation metadata improves customer satisfaction, since institutions and consortia need to have that information in order to connect research to the correct organization. In closing, Yvonne featured best practices from OA Switchboard’s Data Quality Challenge:

eLife captures affiliations at submissions with “author select,” ensuring that ROR IDs are introduced early and verified before publication, coupled with a quality assurance process during proofing. (See also our piece on Metadata Excellence Award winner eLife.)
EMS Press captures metadata via manuscript extraction as early as at submission, building on globally valid identifiers whenever possible (ROR IDs, DOIs, ORCIDs).
Pensoft Publishers uses AI-assisted metadata extraction with human review and in-house metadata validation.
Beilstein-Institut performs post-acceptance metadata quality assurance through automation and expert review.
The Royal Society embeds metadata in OA payment and agreement workflows.
American Chemical Society (ACS) has a multi-method persistent identifier matching strategy with near-complete coverage.
The American Society for Microbiology (ASM) combines AI-powered submission tools with editorial oversight via expert manual checks. (See also our piece on Metadata Excellence Award winner ASM.)
Rockefeller University Press (RUP) maintains ROR IDs across the full publishing workflow with “author select” at submission through metadata deposits upon publication. (See also the ROR case study on RUP.)

Adam Day of Clear Skies Ltd began his talk by wryly framing the first and second rules of data science as contradictory: “Never fix data: always use sources that produce high-quality data in the first place,” but also “Get good at fixing data, because you will have to.” Adam went on to demonstrate the central role author affiliation metadata plays in research integrity investigations, displaying anonymized data for institutions with a high number of alerts. In conclusion, Adam reiterated the importance of author affiliation metadata to research integrity efforts:

Data analysis is critical to research integrity.
Quality data helps enormously by giving oversight, saving time, and assisting investigations.

Lastly, our own Director of Technology Dominika Tkaczyk gave an account of our plans to enrich author affiliation metadata by matching organization name text strings to ROR IDs as part of our metadata matching initiative. A strategy for performing such matching has already been developed and tested and an open dataset of results made available. Tests on a set of 3,000 affiliations sampled from our metadata show that the strategy can be expected to match 95 million ROR IDs to organization names with 97.35% precision, an astronomical increase over the less than 1 million ROR IDs deposited in Crossref records to date.

Dominika concluded the presentation portion of the session by reiterating that our planned enrichment of author affiliation metadata

Will use flexible and transparent matching strategies (and open code),
Will welcome community participation in developing new strategies, and
Will be available in the REST API.

Automatic matching of organization names to ROR IDs in author affiliations cannot solve the problem of missing organization names, of course, but it represents a huge leap forward in addressing metadata quality issues.

All of our speakers’ presentations are available on Zenodo at https://doi-org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/10.13003/661591chqlyw.

Insights into challenges

In the next stage of the event, participants broke into six breakout groups to identify factors contributing to incomplete or inaccurate affiliation metadata. Participants were pre-assigned to groups randomly by role to ensure a variety of perspectives in every discussion.

At least two participants, it should be noted, pointed out that it would be helpful to agree on a definition of “complete” and “accurate” affiliation metadata, which in itself is a challenge, and one we did not address in this roundtable. For instance, practices most recently have trended away from defining a complete author affiliation in open metadata as including an institutional address, although many internal databases might include such information separately.

Even without such definitions, however, all six groups were able to identify several general areas for attention, and one participant provided a particularly helpful categorization of these areas that is largely reused here.

Inherent data complexity

Research organizations have names in different languages, abbreviations, and many other name variants.
Research organizations have frequent name changes, mergers, and rebranding.
Research organizations have different degrees, levels, and complexity of hierarchical granularity, and authors, publishers, and software systems are often misaligned as to which level in an organization’s structure is appropriate to use in a particular instance.
Research organizations often lack official policies on how affiliations should be written, leading to hundreds of variations for a single institution.

Corresponding authors often submit information for all co-authors, which can lead to inaccuracies.
Many authors have multiple profiles across multiple submission systems, which can introduce errors.
Authors may have “octopus affiliations,” claiming affiliations with many institutions that are difficult to verify.
Authors may fail to update affiliations when changing institutions between manuscript acceptance and publication.
Authors may demonstrate “apathy” when repeatedly filling out submission forms, sometimes providing incomplete, inconsistent, or incorrect information.
On occasion, authors might even provide false or purchased affiliations, which of course is a significant research integrity concern.

Technical barriers

Many manuscript tracking and peer review systems, especially legacy systems, lack structured fields for affiliations or don’t support open organization identifiers like ROR.
Some systems limit authors to a single affiliation, despite many researchers having multiple institutional connections.
Some systems only collect affiliation information for the corresponding author.
Some systems link affiliations to user accounts instead of to publications.
Different systems use competing identifier registries, including proprietary identifier registries, creating interoperability challenges.

Publisher practices

Even when publishers improve current metadata collection practices, historical data correction is resource-intensive and often not prioritized.
Publishers collect affiliation information at submission but don’t ensure that it is maintained throughout all stages of the publication process and deposited in metadata.
Some publishers are unaware of the importance of author affiliation metadata or do not prioritize its improvement.
Some publishers deliberately choose not to deposit affiliation metadata to Crossref, viewing it as value-added information they’ve invested in curating.

Insights into solutions

Naturally, we didn’t rest at identifying challenges: after a break, we gathered in the same groups to brainstorm approaches to improving author affiliation metadata.

Adopt collective approaches

Collective action, where corrections and improvements made by various stakeholders flow back into shared systems, has historically worked for proprietary systems and could be even more powerful with open infrastructure.
Since those who do not provide metadata “upstream” will inevitably have it provided for them “downstream” by multiple separate entities using multifarious methods, provenance metadata indicating who asserted author affiliations and how (whether automatically or with the author’s or editor’s input) would help metadata users assess trust levels.

Engage authors and institutions

Reach out to authors and institutions to educate them on the need for more consistent affiliation reporting, especially in terms of language, name format, and degree of hierarchical granularity.
Demonstrate the benefit to institutions of maintaining accurate records in registries like ROR, including abbreviations and name variants.
Publishers and/or software systems should allow authors to review (though not necessarily edit) affiliation information during the proofing process to verify accuracy. Authors should not, however, need to know, see, or use ROR IDs.

Improve the tech

Publishers would welcome submission systems that incorporate structured fields for author affiliations with well-designed auto-suggestions linked to ROR or other organization identifiers.
Making affiliation data mandatory at submission could significantly improve capture rates, although it would be important to ensure that independent researchers can use these systems as well.
Enable collection of affiliations for all authors, not just the corresponding author.
Pull in verified affiliation information from ORCID.
Increasingly, intelligent matching systems can be implemented to reduce author burden and perhaps also increase accuracy and completeness of metadata.
Better crosswalks between different organization identifier systems would make it vastly easier for publishers to maintain better metadata. Since open registries cannot include proprietary information, proprietary registries should provide their customers with crosswalks to all standard open identifiers.

Encourage publisher best practices

Publishers can use already-available tools to help assess and improve the quality of both new and legacy author affiliation metadata.
Share the benefits of improved author affiliation metadata for internal and external analytics, customer satisfaction, and research integrity.
Identify best practices in collecting and structuring author affiliation metadata.
Understand that the entire research ecosystem would benefit from publishers sharing collected affiliation data with Crossref.

It’s worth mentioning that these solutions are heterogeneous: not all strategies can be implemented by any one actor nor even by any one sector of our profession. Clearly, collaborative action is necessary for substantive change.

Moving forward

The affiliations metadata roundtable represented an important step in addressing affiliation metadata challenges in a productive and collaborative way. If there was a consensus, it was that while perfect completeness and accuracy of author affiliation metadata may not be achievable (or even definable), incremental improvements can substantially enhance the quality and availability of affiliation metadata for the entire scholarly information community.

Here at Crossref, we intend to use the insights from this roundtable to inform our support of the Crossref community, including publishers, service providers, and metadata users. We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions on this issue! Share your thoughts with Amanda French at alfrench@crossref.org.

References

van Eck, N. J., & Waltman, L. (2025). Crossref as a source of open bibliographic metadata (No. smxe5_v2). MetaArXiv. https://doi-org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/10.31222/osf.io/smxe5_v2
Tkaczyk, D. (2025). Crossref relationships involving research organisations [Dataset]. Zenodo. https://doi-org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/10.5281/zenodo.15254993
French, A., van Eck, N. J., Campfens, Y., Day, A., & Tkaczyk, D. (2026, January 19). Affiliations Metadata Roundtable 2025—All Presentations. https://doi-org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/10.13003/661591chqlyw

Participating organizations


Africa PID Alliance / TCC Africa	Frontiers Media SA
American Association of Cancer Research (AACR)	Iowa State
American Chemical Society (ACS)	Kriyadocs / Exeter Premedia Services
American Physical Society (APS)	MDPI
American Society for Microbiology (ASM)	Noyam Publishers
Aptara	OpenAIRE / OpenOrgs
Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC)	Optica Publishing Group
Atypon	ORCID
Beilstein-Institut	Oxford University Press
California Digital Library (CDL)	Public Knowledge Project (PKP)
Cambridge University Press	Public Library of Science (PLOS)
Carnegie Mellon University	River Valley Technologies
CHORUS	Rockefeller University Press
Clarivate / Web of Science	SAGE Publications
Copernicus GmBH	Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information
Curtin University / Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI)	Silverchair / ScholarOne
De Gruyter Brill	Springer Science & Business
Digital Science / Figshare	TNQTech
Digital Science / Symplectic Elements	University of Laval
eLife	University of Chicago Press
Elsevier BV	University of Split
Enago

The GEM program - Year Three and program expansion for 2026

Susan Collins — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

As Crossref membership continues to grow, finding ways to help organisations participate is an important part of our mission. Although Crossref membership is open to all organisations that produce scholarly and professional materials, cost and technical challenges can be barriers to joining for many.

Our Global Equitable Membership (GEM) Program aims to provide greater membership equity and accessibility to organisations in the world’s least economically advantaged countries. Eligible members pay no membership or record registration fees. Eligibility for the program is based on a member’s country. Seeing its effectiveness in increasing participation in the research nexus from previously underrepresented regions, this year we are expanding the GEM program to include 18 new countries.

Overview of the first 3 years of GEM

The program began in January 2023 with 214 existing members. By the end of 2025, we had 628 organisations under the GEM program. Of these, 535 are independent members, and 89 members work through one of our sponsors. To date, GEM program members have contributed approximately 334,000 works to the Research Nexus.

Global equitable membership	2023	2024	2025
New members joining	129	127	151
Total member count	327	458	628

Total number of Crossref GEM members by country until the end of 2025:

GEM country – alphabetically	Total no. of members	GEM country – alphabetically	Total no. of members
Afghanistan	29	Malawi	2
Bangladesh	167	Maldives	4
Benin	6	Mali	4
Bhutan	6	Marshall Islands	0
Burkina Faso	7	Mauritania	1
Burundi	3	Micronesia	0
Cambodia	14	Mozambique	2
Central African Republic	1	Myanmar	3
Chad	0	Nepal	60
Comoros	1	Nicaragua	2
Congo, Democratic Republic	24	Niger	0
Côte d’Ivoire	3	Rwanda	9
Djibouti	0	Samoa	0
Eritrea	0	São Tomé and Principe	0
Ethiopia	17	Senegal	7
Gambia	0	Sierra Leone	2
Ghana	38	Solomon Islands	0
Guinea	0	Somalia	10
Guinea-Bissau	0	South Sudan	0
Guyana	3	Sri Lanka	31
Haiti	2	Sudan	14
Honduras	3	Tajikistan	8
Kiribati	0	Tanzania, United Republic of	28
Kosovo	9	Togo	1
Kyrgyz Republic	27	Tonga	0
Lao, People’s Democratic Rep.	5	Tuvalu	0
Lesotho	0	Uganda	23
Liberia	1	Vanuatu	0
Madagascar	5	Yemen	37
		Zambia	8

Membership Density in GEM Program Countries until the end of 2025

Program expansion in 2026

Starting on 1st of January 2026, we’re excited to invite organisations from Angola, Belize, Cabo Verde, Cameroon, Republic of Congo, Dominica, Eswatini, Fiji, Grenada, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Timor Leste, and Uzbekistan to join Crossref and register their content and metadata with us without membership or record registration fees. There are 711 existing Crossref members based in these countries who are now eligible for the program, bringing the overall number of GEM members to 1339 across 77 countries (that’s close to 5% of all Crossref members).

In creating our eligibility list, we refer to existing sources. For the first three years of the program, our list was predominantly based on the World Bank’s International Development Association (IDA) classification. In 2026, we leveraged additional sources to curate our list, resulting in the inclusion of 18 new countries in the program. Following community feedback, we now refer to the IDA, the IDA Blend List, and the United Nations Least Developed Countries list. In our choices, we also keep abreast of the global situation and conversations about supporting equitability in scholarly publishing and in the future, we may consider other factors too.

We will review our lists and the eligibility criteria annually and note any changes on our website. Members whose country moves on or off the GEM Program will be notified of any upcoming fees (or the removal of fees) with adequate time to plan and budget accordingly. Although the GEM program reduces financial barriers, many small organisations may still need administrative, technical, and language support provided by our Sponsors, and we will continue working with suitable organisations to make participation in Crossref easier.

Reduction of Grant DOI registration fees: a boost for the Research Nexus

Ginny Hendricks — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce that—effective 1st January 2026—we have made two changes to grant record registration fees that aim to accelerate adoption of Crossref’s Grant Linking System (GLS) and provide a two-year window of opportunity to increase the number and availability of open persistent grant identifiers and boost the matching of relationships with research objects.

Launched in 2019 with close input from several funders and other infrastructure organisations, the GLS primarily offers the ability to create and steward Crossref Grant DOIs, along with several benefits such as dedicated grant/award metadata like funding type, value, contributors, and projects, as well as hosted landing pages, tools to create and update metadata, and of course both member-asserted and Crossref-automatic matching of relationships within the global corpus of 180 million other research objects. Essentially, we need to identify what research objects are produced as a result of the award, and these objects could be articles, preprints, data, code, blogs, posters, and more.

This connected network is what we call the Research Nexus, essential for exploring research activity in general, as well as evaluating reach and return on funding and other support like use of facilities/equipment.

A fee reduction and a two-year fee waiver pilot

Following a review by our Membership & Fees Committee, the Board met in December and passed two related motions:

Current-Year (CY) grant registration fee has been cut in half to match other record types: The board approved the adjustment of the Current-Year (CY) grant registration fee down from $2.00 to $1.00 USD, effective 1st January 2026.
Back-Year (BY) grant registration fee is waived through 2027: The board approved a time-limited fee waiver as a pilot for Back-Year (BY) grant registration fees, bringing that per-record fee down from $0.30 to $0.00 for 2026 and 2027.

We aim to boost registration of Back-Year (BY) records and accelerate the growth of the Research Nexus with millions more grant<->output matches. During the course of the two-year pilot, the Membership & Fees Committee and our fee project work that started in 2023 and also brought in other fee reductions, will consider more adjustments across BY registration fees for the benefit of members beyond just funders and beyond just grants.

All Board motions are publicly available and we encourage questions from the community about our governance processes and the decisions on our members’ behalf; email us via feedback@crossref.org anytime, or post on the forum.

Supercharging the Grant Linking System

Leading up to the GLS launch in 2019, we worked with a group of funders and metadata experts to inform the design and implementation of the new service, including a funder governance and fees working group. That was seven years ago, and our Funder Advisory Group now includes nearly 100 funding community representatives the GLS has grown to almost 50 funder members that have registered more than 185,000 open grant metadata records. But they are mostly research councils and agencies or charities from Europe and North America, and we know that for a truly comprehensive and interconnected Research Nexus, more needs to be done to include organisations from all parts of the world. The other key driver is simply to boost more metadata connections; the more grant metadata we gather, the better we can match it to all kinds of research outputs, and this metadata directly feeds thousands of services available in our community, from Dimensions and Scopus, to OA.Report and OpenAlex, as well as funders’ own analytics tools. See our recent report about the latest dataset and of course use api.crossref.org directly.

Relatedly, we just added a new Grant DOI field to our schema for all record types, to give our members a precise and accurate way of capturing funding metadata for all research outputs. With the new lower CY registration fee and a pilot waiver of BY fees for grant records, we hope to boost the creation of more Grant DOIs by more funders from more parts of the world—so that others also see and can build on the momentum and reuse the data in their own tools and services. All actors need to play their role, and Crossref’s part is in running the global linking infrastructure at scale, connecting research objects and making them openly available while ensuring that the barriers for the registration, use and reuse of metadata remain as low as possible.

We feel we’re at a tipping point that only needs a small nudge to truly scale the Grant Linking System.

By waiving BY fees entirely for two years, we’re hoping to see members fill in historical data and create more comprehensive grant<->outcome connections. There is often a long period of time between funding being awarded, and the resulting research objects being generated and communicated. That is why historical grant metadata is so important; we think that there will be many funding outcome relationships and insights just waiting to be uncovered!

Why give funders a fee break and not others?

We’re not ruling out this kind of fee incentive in future for other members and other object types, but that needs more analysis (which we plan to do) and right now, the relatively small number of grant records, combined with a growing need for this kind of metadata, means the changes are small enough to have almost no impact on Crossref’s healthy financial position.

This decision is consistent with the goals of our Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability (RCFS) to review our fees to make sure they are equitable and clear, while ensuring Crossref retains a sustainable business model. Our fees can encourage or discourage the community to participate in Crossref. The RCFS project has also resulted in the creation of a lower membership fee tier for the very lowest-resourced members, and the tidying up of things like outlier volume discounts.

The BY fee waiver is positioned as a pilot to allow us to measure its impact over the next two years and feed into the Membership & Fees Committee and RCFS project. We will evaluate the pilot results (i.e. does it indeed supercharge funding metadata connections and adoption?) and consider additional adjustments to other BY registration fees and whether such fee incentives might be extended to other members.

We encourage all funders to take advantage of these reduced rates to contribute to the Research Nexus and help us build a more complete picture of the relationship between research funding and outcomes.

Take a look at the recent case studies from early GLS adopters FWF (Austria), NWO (The Netherlands), FCCN|FCT (Portugal), and Wellcome/EuropePMC, reach out to them or us with any questions, or peruse the GLS community forum!

The best way of acknowledging research funding in the metadata: Crossref Grant ID

Patricia Feeney — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We are very pleased to kick off the New Year with another important schema update and the news that a Grant DOI field is now supported for all record types. This means that Crossref members can explicitly include the Crossref Grant IDs as part of their DOI metadata records for publications and any other output type, accurately linking research outputs to the funding that made it possible, all through metadata. We hope that our members will leverage this to respond to recent calls for stronger funding transparency and best practices for reporting funding sources in research outputs.

Funding information is very important for the research community. As explored by some key European funder representatives, providing mechanisms to clearly link funding with its outputs is essential for the community to have a full picture of the research endeavour.

When funders systematically register grants with persistent identifiers and make this information openly available, they create a foundation that publishers and infrastructure providers such as repositories can reliably build upon when depositing output metadata.”

– Hans de Jonge, Katharina Rieck and Zoé Ancion

Up until now, if a Crossref member wanted to include a Crossref Grant ID to unambiguously identify the output funding source, they would need to use other available fields, such as for an award number. While it was an important step towards increasing transparency and is heavily used for reporting and impact assessment, being an unstructured field, it was prone to errors, and of course, funders’ internal award identifiers are not unique, persistent, or necessarily open. This limited our ability to create unambiguous relationships with the Crossref Grant DOIs registered by our now ~50 funder members. As the new field becomes increasingly populated by our members, this rich metadata will pave the way for capturing and representing the funding relationships in a more accurate and complete way and fulfilling one of our commitments at the recent funding metadata workshop with the Barcelona Declaration.

The Crossref Grant ID field in the schema is a clear signal of the growing demand for these persistent Grant IDs (Crossref DOIs), and the relationships these help us create. Those connections can in turn enable streamlined reporting for the grantees, as well as compliance tracking and programme evaluation for funders.

As part of our work to enable the research nexus, Crossref has been proactively identifying funding information and prototyping metadata enrichment processes through matching projects, ensuring that as many relationships as possible are established and made discoverable. With this schema update, we aim to lower barriers and encourage more members to register output-funding relationships at source. This will facilitate the links that make the research nexus a connected, interoperable, and an important source of information that ensures a transparent and trustworthy research process.

We encourage all Crossref members to start incorporating Grant DOIs when available into your metadata submissions. By taking advantage of this new field, you’ll help build a more complete and transparent record of research funding, making it easier for the community to understand and trace the impact of funded research.

When collecting funding information for your publication, please consider asking the authors for the Grant DOI (Crossref Grant ID) as well as the funder’s details (such as their name and identifier). Here’s how the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Scientific and Technical Information’s (OSTI-DOE) grant https://doi-org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/10.46936/aps-182101/60010611 can be included in the metadata for related works, from datasets, to preprints, conference proceedings, journal articles, and more:

<assertion name="fundgroup">
 <assertion name="ror">https://ror.org/04qxsr837</assertion>
 <assertion name="grant_doi">10.46936/aps-182101/60010611</assertion>
 </assertion>

Similarly, a grant https://doi-org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/10.3030/732489 from European Union H2020-EU.2.1.1. - INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP, would be represented in related work’s metadata as follows:

<assertion name="fundgroup">
 <assertion name="funder_name”>H2020 LEIT Information and Communication Technologies
 <assertion name="funder_identifier”>10.13039/100010669</assertion>
 </assertion>
 <assertion name="grant_doi">10.3030/732489</assertion>
</assertion>

For more technical documentation and implementation guidance, please visit our funding data documentation. If you have questions or need support integrating Grant IDs into your workflow, our support team is here to help!