Latest blog posts
Rocío Gaudioso Pedraza
2025 October 01

Piecing together the Research Nexus: uncovering relationships with open funding metadata

The Crossref Grant Linking System (GLS) has been facilitating the registration, sharing and re-use of open funding metadata for six years now, and we have reached some important milestones recently! What started as an interest in identifying funders through the Open Funder Registry evolved to a more nuanced and comprehensive way to share and re-use open funding data systematically. That’s how, in collaboration with the funding community, the Crossref Grant Linking System was developed. Open funding metadata is fundamental for the transparency and integrity of the research endeavour, so we are happy to see them included in the Research Nexus.

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Ludo Waltman
2025 September 25

Innovation in scientific publishing and its implications for Crossref DOI registration practices - Request for input

Lots of exciting innovations are being made in scientific publishing, often raising fundamental questions about established publishing practices. In this guest post, Ludo Waltman and André Brasil discuss the recently launched MetaROR publish-review-curate platform and the questions it raises about good practices for Crossref DOI registration in this emerging landscape.

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Kornelia Korzec
2025 September 22

Crossref and PKP enter new partnership phase to support richer and more inclusive metadata

Crossref and the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) have been working closely together for many years, sharing resources and supporting our overlapping communities of organisations involved in communicating research. Now we’re delighted to share that we have agreed on a new set of objectives for our partnership, centred on further development of the tools that our shared community relies upon, as well as building capacity to enable richer metadata registration for organisations using the Open Journal Systems (OJS).

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Scott Edmunds
2025 September 17

Raising the standard: GigaScience Press on metadata and discoverability

To mark Crossref’s 25th anniversary, we launched our first Metadata Awards to highlight members with the best metadata practices. GigaScience Press, based in Hong Kong, was the leader among small publishers, defined as organisations with less than USD 1 million in publishing revenue or expenses. We spoke with Scott Edmunds, Ph.D., Editor-in-Chief at GigaScience Press, about how discoverability drives their high metadata standards.

What motivates your organisation/team to work towards high-quality metadata? What objectives does it support for your organisation?

Our objective is to communicate science openly and collaboratively, without barriers, to solve problems in a data- and evidence-driven manner through Open Science publishing. High-quality metadata helps us address these objectives by improving the discoverability, transparency, and provenance of the work we publish. It is an integral part of the FAIR principles and UNESCO Open Science Recommendation, playing a role in increasing the accessibility of research for both humans and machines. As one of the authors of the FAIR principles paper and an advisor of the Make Data Count project, I’ve also personally been very conscious to practice what I preach.

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Integrity of the scholarly record (ISR)

Upcoming events

The integrity of the scholarly record is an essential aspect of research integrity. Every initiative and service that we’ve launched since our founding has been focused on documenting and clarifying the scholarly record in an open, machine-actionable and scalable form, and all of this has been done to make it easier for the research community to assess the trustworthiness of scholarly outputs.

We want to ensure that we are definitely collecting and distributing the right metadata “trust signals” that the community needs to preserve the integrity of the scholarly record, while ensuring that we are really clear on the role that Crossref can and cannot play in this. With this in mind, we’ve created a focused program around Integrity of the Scholarly Record - the “ISR Program”.

This page lists the rationale behind this program, and our ongoing and planned initiatives under this program.

Background

The outputs of the research and publishing process create a “scholarly record”. This scholarly record is more than just the published outputs - it’s also a network of inputs, relationships, and contexts. At Crossref, we talk about the “Research Nexus”,

a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organisations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society.

Crossref Research Nexus vision image

When published outputs are tied to a persistent and unique identifier, they get a persistent record. Maintaining this record for the long term and having a layer of context associated with the record, establishes the integrity of the scholarly record. The context comes from the metadata associated with the work. In simpler words, scholarly metadata tells us:

  • Who are the authors of a work?
  • What are the affiliations of the authors?
  • Which funding programs supported the work?
  • Which datasets arose out of the work, OR how is dataset A connected to paper A?
  • Was the work updated after its publication, i.e. was it retracted or corrected?
  • And more..

By providing this important context, scholarly metadata can act as a signal of trustworthiness.

Crossref is focused on providing infrastructure which enables those who produce scholarly outputs to provide metadata and relationships (evidence and context) about how they ensure the quality of their content, and how their outputs fit into the wider scholarly record. We do not assess the quality of our members’ content- the presence of a DOI record is not a signal of quality, but the community can use the presence (or lack of) rich metadata associated with a DOI record as evidence of integrity.

Read more: ISR part one: What is our role in preserving the integrity of the scholarly record

Upcoming Events

We’re starting a new webinar series to connect with the publishing community in India and help members get more out of Crossref’s services. The sessions will go beyond DOIs and highlight how other Crossref tools can support better publishing practices, stronger metadata, and greater visibility of research. We’ll also look at common challenges publishers face and share practical ways to improve how metadata is collected and used. This series will build towards an in-person event in the future, focused on supporting research integrity and strengthening the scholarly record.

Crossref logo icon Webinar #1: Beyond identifiers: the value of Crossref metadata

The first webinar in the series, Beyond Identifier – The Value of Crossref Metadata, will feature speakers from Crossref and DOAJ who will share practical insights on publishing best practices and the role of metadata in supporting discovery, transparency, and research integrity.

November 13, 2025 | Online

Register now

Crossref logo icon Webinar #2: Watch this space.

Crossref logo icon Workshop: Watch this space.

+- Previous webinars (This is where past event information will be stored.)

Webinar 1: Beyond identifiers: the value of Crossref metadata led by Crossref and DOAJ on November 13, 2025, 6:00 AM UTC. View the recording and slides

Webinar 2: Beyond identifiers: the value of Crossref metadata led by Crossref and DOAJ on November 13, 2025, 6:00 AM UTC. View the recording and slides

Workshop: Beyond identifiers: the value of Crossref metadata led by Crossref and DOAJ on November 13, 2025, 6:00 AM UTC. View the recording and slides

Page maintainer: Amanda Bartell
Last updated: 2024-July-16