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.
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.
When you log in using your account credentials, you’ll see a view of all the publications that have been added to your workspace.
To add a publication for which you have already registered metadata with Crossref, enter its title or title-level DOI into the search bar, and click Add. Once added to your workspace, you can update the title record by hovering your mouse over the publication title and select Edit, which will take you to the Edit journal record screen. If your publication does not already have a title-level DOI, you will need to add one. Learn more about title-level DOIs. Provide additional metadata for the publication record if available (the blue/asterisk * mark indicates a required field).
To bring an article into your workspace, click into the chosen journal, and enter the article title into the Article search field.
To add a publication for which you have never registered metadata with Crossref, click New publication. On the Edit journal record screen, add details for the publication (the blue/asterisk * mark indicates a required field).
Click Save, then Close to return to the journal list. The publication will now appear in your workspace.
Page maintainer: Sara Bowman Last updated: 2022-July-22
