Wednesday 22nd October 2025—Crossref, the open scholarly infrastructure nonprofit, today releases an enhanced dashboard showing metadata coverage and individual organisations’ contributions to documenting the process and outputs of scientific research in the open. The tool helps research-performing, funding, and publishing organisations identify gaps in open research information, and provides supporting evidence for movements like the Barcelona Declaration for Open Research Information, which encourages more substantial commitment to stewarding and enriching the scholarly record through open metadata.
Welcome back to our series of case studies of research funders using the Grant Linking System. In this interview, I talk with Cátia Laranjeira, PTCRIS Program Manager at FCCN|FCT, Portugal’s main public funding agency, about the agency’s approach to metadata, persistent identifiers, Open Science and Open Infrastructure.
With a holistic approach to the management, production and access to information on science, FCCN|FCT’s decision to implement the Grant Linking System within their processes was not simply a technical upgrade, but a coordinated effort to continue building a strong culture of openness. With the mantra “register once, reuse always”, FCCN|FCT efforts to embrace open funding metadata was only logical.
Repositories are home to a wide range of scholarly content; they often archive theses, dissertations, preprints, datasets, and other valuable outputs. These records are an important part of the research ecosystem and should be connected to the broader scholarly record. But to truly serve their purpose, repository records need to be connected to each other, to the broader research ecosystem, and to the people behind the research. Metadata is what makes that possible. Enhancing metadata is a way to tell a fuller, more accurate story of research. It helps surface relationships between works, people, funders, and institutions, and allows us as a community to build and use a more connected, more useful network of knowledge - what Crossref calls the ‘Research Nexus’.
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.
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 web deposit form, our new record registration form for journal articles and grants, 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
