We have renewed our partnership with DOAJ to focus on a new set of objectives that reflect both organisations’ commitment to improving sustainable and equitable services and infrastructure. This renewed collaboration focuses on improving the quality of scholarly metadata while expanding support for journals in low- and middle income- countries.
We have worked together since 2021, primarily to encourage the dissemination and use of scholarly research using online technologies, and regional and international networks, partners and communities. This partnership has helped to build local institutional capacity and sustainability within the global scholarly communication ecosystem. A continued partnership also reflects that we have a shared community; currently almost 90% of DOAJ journals are represented in Crossref.
With key milestones achieved in 2025, including the appointment of new Directors of Technology and Programs, a move to the cloud, and some key schema updates, we now have a firm foundation for our next challenge: a redesign of our core technical systems to make them more modern, robust, and easier to maintain and scale.
In an ongoing effort to make more of our operations transparent, we have decided to start sharing summaries of our board meetings on the blog. We already post our board resolutions, but the summaries will give a bit more information on what the board discusses that may or may not show up on the list of resolutions.
Registering your DOI records using the OJS platform
In order to register DOI records with Crossref, you need to set up your OJS (Open Journal Systems) platform to create DOIs on your Crossref DOI prefix, and also set up your OJS platform to send your records to Crossref. You do this in a different way depending on whether you are using OJS 3.4 or OJS 3.3:
You can download the newest versions of OJS in the Public Knowledge Project’s (PKP) documentation.
Additional OJS plugins for Crossref
There are also other important plugins that can be enabled in OJS to enrich your metadata records:
Funding Metadata plugin - as of OJS 3.1.2, it is possible to enable a funder registry plugin for submitting funding information to Crossref. The plugin will use the Open Funder Registry to check against existing funding agencies. The plugin will include funding information in your Crossref DOI deposits.
Similarity Check plugin - if you are using OJS 3.1.2 or above, you are able to use the Similarity Check plugin. This will enable you to automatically send manuscripts to your iThenticate account to check their similarity to already published content. You will need to be subscribed to Crossref’s Similarity Check service for this to work.
ROR plugin - the ROR Plugin for OJS enables authors to add the ROR ID for the organization they are affiliated with.
Getting help with OJS plugins
The team at Crossref didn’t create these plugins - they were either created by the team at PKP, or by third-party developers. Because of this, we aren’t able to give in-depth help or troubleshooting on problems with these plugins.
