Latest blog posts
David Haber
2025 August 04

From storage closet to metadata champions: ASM's journey toward a smarter scholarly infrastructure

The American Society for Microbiology (ASM) has earned recognition in Crossref’s Participation Reports for its exceptional metadata coverage among large publishing members––an achievement built on intentional change, technical investment, and collaborative work. In this Q&A, the ASM team shares what that journey looked like, the challenges they’ve tackled, and how centering metadata has helped them better connect research with the global scientific community.

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Amanda Bartell
2025 July 28

Changing fees to increase equity and reduce complexity

The Crossref Board recently approved three recommendations for changes to our fees: introduction of a new lowest membership fee tier, removal of volume discounts for record registration, and normalisation of registration fees for peer reviews. The changes will be applied from January 2026.

This is the first outcome of the Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability (RCFS) program, launched in 2023, as a comprehensive effort to review all aspects of Crossref revenue and how we’re adapting to growth and the diversification of our membership. The program aims to make fees more equitable, simplify our complex fee schedule, and rebalance revenue sources.

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Yasiel Pérez Vera
2025 July 25

Metadata excellence among new members: La Salle University, Perú

Click here for the version in English

En 2025, lanzamos los Premios Crossref a los Metadatos, con el objetivo de destacar el rol de nuestra comunidad en la gestión y el enriquecimiento del registro académico. En esta publicación, destacamos a la Universidad La Salle, Perú, ganadora del premio a la excelencia entre los nuevos miembros, y contamos con la participación de Yasiel Pérez, Responsable Técnico y Editor de la Revista, quien comparte sus ideas:

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Johanssen Obanda
2025 July 24

Crossref at Beijing International Book Fair 2025

This June, we presented at the Beijing International Book Fair (BIBF) and connected directly with our growing community in China. With a surge of interest from Chinese publishers and partners, it was clear: there’s a strong and rising curiosity around how metadata plays a vital role in maintaining the integrity of the scholarly record.

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Metadata Retrieval

Analyse Crossref metadata to inform and understand research

Crossref is the sustainable source of community-owned scholarly metadata and is relied upon by thousands of systems across the research ecosystem and the globe.

Diagram depicting many types of users and uses of Crossref metadata

Some of the typical users (outer) and uses (inner) of Crossref metadata

People using Crossref metadata need it for all sorts of reasons including metaresearch (researchers studying research itself such as through bibliometric analyses), publishing trends (such as finding works from an individual author or reviewer), or incorporation into specific databases (such as for discovery and search or in subject-specific repositories), and many more detailed use cases.

All Crossref metadata is open and available for reuse without restriction. Our 160,104,382 records include information about research objects like articles, grants and awards, preprints, conference papers, book chapters, datasets, and more. The information covers elements like titles, contributors, descriptions, dates, references, connecting identifiers such as Crossref DOIs, ROR IDs and ORCID iDs, together with all sorts of metadata that helps to determine provenance, trust, and reusability—such as funding, clinical trial, and license information.

Take a look at a list of some of the organisations who rely on our REST API and read some of the case studies from a selection of users. Download the metadata retrieval fact sheet or read more about the types of metadata and records we have.

Anyone can retrieve and use 160,104,382 records without restriction. So there are no fees to use the metadata but if you really rely on it then you might like to sign up for Metadata Plus which offers greater predictability, higher rate limits, monthly data dumps in XML and JSON, and access to dedicated support from our team.

Options for retrieving metadata

All Crossref metadata is completely open and available to all. Whatever your experience with metadata, there are several tools, techniques, and support guides to help—whether you’re just beginning, exploring occasionally, or need an ongoing reliable integration.

BEGINNING?

You’ve heard Crossref metadata might be useful and want to know where to start.

We recommend you start with metadata search, funder search, or simple text query for matching references to DOIs. Also take a look at the tips for querying our REST API in a browser which only needs you to get a JSON plugin to view the results. We are also building up tutorials to demonstrate the possibilities, starting with a funder metadata workbook. If it’s retractions and corrections that you need, check out the frequently-updated csv file of the Retraction Watch dataset that we acquired and opened in 2023.

EXPLORING?

You have some specific queries and want a lightweight way to use Crossref metadata.

Take a look at the in-depth interactive documentation for our REST API at api.crossref.org. If you’re comfortable with tar data files you can download our latest annual public data file. You may be interested in how relationships between research objects are represented, so have a look at the Colab notebook of the upcoming endpoint for relationship metadata, currently in beta at https://api-crossref-org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/beta/relationships. Our Crossref Learning Hub is also another helpful resource.

INTEGRATING?

You rely on Crossref metadata and need to incorporate it into your product at scale.

You might want to jump straight to subscribing to Metadata Plus, which is our premium service for the REST API that comes with monthly data dumps in JSON and XML, higher rate limits, and fast support. But we always recommend that you try out the public version first to make sure it will work for your product. If you’re looking for a single DOI record in multiple formats (e.g. RDF, BibTex, CSL) you can use content negotiation.

Watch the animated introduction to metadata retrieval

Learn more by visiting our learning hub.

Page maintainer: Martyn Rittman
Last updated: 2024-February-03