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.
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.
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.
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.
We aim to fix that. Crossref and Wikimedia are launching a new initiative to better integrate scholarly literature in the world’s largest public knowledge space, Wikipedia.
This work will help promote standard links to scholarly references within Wikipedia, which persist over time by ensuring consistent use of DOIs and other citation identifiers in Wikipedia references. Crossref will support the development and maintenance of Wikipedia’s citation tools on Wikipedia. This work will include bug fixes and performance improvements for existing tools, extending the tools to enable Wikipedia contributors to more easily look up and insert DOIs, and providing a “linkback” mechanism that alerts relevant parties when a persistent identifier is used in a Wikipedia reference.
In addition, Crossref is creating the role of Wikimedia Ambassador (modeled after Wikimedian-in-Residence) to act as liaison with the Wikimedia community, promote use of scholarly references on Wikipedia, and educate about DOIs and other scholarly identifiers (ORCIDs, PubMed IDs, DataCite DOIs, etc) across Wikimedia projects.
Starting today, Crossref will be working with Daniel Mietchen to coordinate Crossref’s Wikimedia-related activities. Daniel’s team will be composed of Max Klein and Matt Senate, who will work to enhance Wikimedia citation tools, and will share the role of Wikipedia ambassador with Dorothy Howard.
Since the beginnings of Wikipedia, Daniel Mietchen has worked to integrate scholarly content into Wikimedia projects. He is part of an impressive community of active Wikipedians and developers who have worked extensively on linking Wikipedia articles to the formal literature and other scholarly resources. We’ve been talking to him about this project for nearly a year, and are happy to finally get it off the ground.
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]7 Matt, Max and Daniel at #wikimania2014. Photo by Dorothy.
