It’s been said that Americans are unusual in tending to ask “Where do you work?” as an initial question upon introduction to a new acquaintance, indicating a perhaps unhealthy preoccupation with work as identity. But in the context of published research, “What is this author’s affiliation?” is a question of global importance that goes beyond just wanting to know the name – and perhaps prestige level – of the place a researcher works.
As Crossref membership continues to grow, finding ways to help organisations participate is an important part of our mission. Although Crossref membership is open to all organisations that produce scholarly and professional materials, cost and technical challenges can be barriers to joining for many.
We are pleased to announce that—effective 1st January 2026—we have made two changes to grant record registration fees that aim to accelerate adoption of Crossref’s Grant Linking System (GLS) and provide a two-year window of opportunity to increase the number and availability of open persistent grant identifiers and boost the matching of relationships with research objects.
We are very pleased to kick off the New Year with another important schema update and the news that a Grant DOI field is now supported for all record types. This means that Crossref members can explicitly include the Crossref Grant IDs as part of their DOI metadata records for publications and any other output type, accurately linking research outputs to the funding that made it possible, all through metadata. We hope that our members will leverage this to respond to recent calls for stronger funding transparency and best practices for reporting funding sources in research outputs.
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.
