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.Â
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.
The Metadata Manager tool is in beta and contains many bugs. It has been deprecated since 2021 and will be sunset at the end of 2025. We recommend using an alternative such as the record registration form, the web deposit form, or the OJS plugin if your content is hosted on the OJS platform from PKP.
Metadata Manager (beta) offers a way to deposit and update metadata for journal articles for both single and multiple deposits.
You’ll now see your Metadata Manager workspace. This is where all deposits occur, both new deposits and updates to content you’ve already registered with Crossref. To return to this view at any time, click Home at the top of the screen.
Your workspace holds your list of publications, and it will be blank when you first log in. As you add the publications you want to manage to Metadata Manager, they’ll start collecting on this screen.
You can add new publications and edit existing publications you have previously submitted to our system from your workspace. You can also click into each publication and add or edit articles against them.
The home button - Return to the overview of all your publications by clicking Home.
Deposit history - See your previous deposits made via Metadata Manager (excludes deposits via other deposit methods such as HTTPS POST, or the web deposit form).
To deposit - Shows items for which you’ve entered information, but have not yet deposited with us. The number next to To deposit shows how many records are awaiting deposit.
Your username - Shows the credential you’ve used to log in. Click the down arrow to access account functions, log out, and view a tutorial of Metadata Manager.
Search publication - This search bar allows you to find and add publications to your workspace. You can search by title name or title-level DOI.
New publication - This section allows you to create a new journal and add it to your workspace.
Page maintainer: Sara Bowman Last updated: 2022-July-22
