Scholarly metadata, deposited by thousands of our members and made openly available can act as “trust signals” for the publications. It provides information that helps others in the community to verify and assess the integrity of the work. Despite having a central responsibility in ensuring the integrity of the work that they publish, editorial teams tend not be fully aware of the value of metadata for integrity of the scholarly record. How can we change that?
Crossref was created back in 2000 by 12 forward-thinking scholarly publishers from North America and Europe, and by 2002, these members had registered 4 million DOI records. At the time of writing, we have over 23,600 members in 164 different countries. Half of our members are based in Asia, and 35% are universities or scholar-led. These members have registered over 176 million open metadata records with DOIs (as of today). What a difference 25 years makes!
In our 25th anniversary year, I thought it would be time to take a look at how we got here. And so—hold tight—we’re going to go on an adventure through space and time1, stopping every 5 years through Crossref history to check in on our members. And we’re going to see some really interesting changes over the years.
The Frankfurt Book Fair is the largest book fair in the world, and therefore a key event on our calendar. Held annually in Frankfurt, Germany, the 77th Frankfurt Book Fair (October 15–19, 2025) saw 118,000 trade visitors and 120,000 private visitors from 131 countries. The Crossref booth was located, as usual, in Hall 4.0 where all the stands with information about academic publishing can be found. Four Crossref colleagues attended the Book Fair this year, and in this blog post, you can read more about their meetings, experiences, and plans.
TL;DR. Metadata Manager will be retired at the end of 2025. Over the past four years, we have been developing a new helper tool to replace it, and that tool has now reached a stage of maturity that means we will be able to switch off Metadata Manager by the end of the year.
A DOI may refer to a journal or book (a title-level DOI), or to a specific article or chapter.
Journals and DOIs
Like a set of nesting dolls, a journal may be made up of volumes, each containing a number of issues, each containing a number of articles. You can assign a DOI at each level, for example:
journal-level-DOI (sometimes called the title-level-DOI) 10.5555/QYPF2031. Like an ISSN, it refers to the whole journal
volume-level-DOI 10.5555/FFFU4804
issue-level-DOI 10.5555/QKLE5634
article-level-DOI 10.5555/CNBT7653
The role of the journal-level-DOI, volume-level-DOI, and issue-level-DOI is to link persistently to a point in the journal structure. These DOIs do not have any associated content, and it does not cost anything to register these DOIs.
However, article-level-DOIs do have associated content, and therefore a fee applies to register these DOIs.
Books and DOIs
Like a set of nesting dolls, a book may be made up of chapters. Again, you can assign a DOI at each level, for example:
book-level-DOI (sometimes called the title-level-DOI) 10.5555/ZAAR1365. Just like an ISBN, it refers to the whole book.
chapter-level-DOI 10.5555/TFWD2627
Both book-level-DOIs and chapter-level-DOIs have associated content, and therefore a fee applies to register these DOIs.
