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.
On behalf of the Nominating Committee, I’m pleased to share the slate of candidates for the 2025 board election.
Each year we do an open call for board interest. This year, the Nominating Committee received 51 submissions from members worldwide to fill five open board seats.
We have four large member seats and one small member seat open for election in 2025. We maintain a balanced board of 8 large member seats and 8 small member seats. Size is determined based on the organization’s membership tier (small members fall in the $0-$1,650 tiers and large members in the $3,900 - $50,000 tiers).
In 2022, we wrote a blog post “Rethinking staff travel, meetings, and events” outlining our new approach to staff travel, meetings, and events with the goal of not going back to ‘normal’ after the pandemic and said that in the future we would report on our efforts to balance online and virtual events, work life balance for staff, and track our carbon emissions. In December 2024, we wrote a blog post, “Summary of the environmental impact of Crossref,” that gave an overview of 2023 and provided the first report on our carbon emissions. Our report on 2023 only just made it into 2024, so we are happy to report on 2024 a little sooner in the year.
To date, there are about 100 Crossref members who have made use of our co-access service for one or more of their books. The service was designed to be a last-resort measure when multiple parties - book publishers, aggregators, and other members - had rights to register book content. Unfortunately, the service allowed members to register multiple DOIs for shared books and book chapters, thereby violating our own core tenet of one DOI per content item. We should not have created a service that violated that tenet, resulting in duplicate DOIs. As we are able to offer an alternative in the form of the multiple resolution service, it is time to switch co-access off. Among other benefits – for the publisher and the authors, creation of a single DOI for each item, regardless of where it might be hosted, will result in more accurate citation counts and usage statistics. We’re retiring co-access at the end of 2026.
The record registration form can be used to deposit metadata for your records. You do not need any knowledge of XML to use it. You can download your records to your local machine and re-upload them to the form later to make edits to the metadata. You can also save partial records to be used as templates in the future.
The form currently supports journal articles and grants, but we are planning to add support for additional record types in future.
How to use the record registration form
Start at the record registration form and enter your Crossref account credentials. You can choose to create a new record or upload a record you’ve already created using this form. If this is the first time you’ve used this form, you’ll choose New Record.
Create a new record
Select the type of record you wish to create, then add the metadata associated with your record. Some fields are required to be filled out in order to submit your record, while others are optional. If you are submitting a journal article, you can find links to our documentation in the form for more information on what each field means.
At any point while filling out the form, you can use the download button to save your record to your local computer for future edits. The record will download as a .json file, which is named automatically: for grant records, it will be named the funder name and award number; for journal article records, it will be named after the journal’s e-ISSN (or p-ISSN if no e-ISSN is available) and article title. This file can be loaded back into the form at a later date to make changes to your record.
Submit your record
Click Submit at the bottom of the form once you have filled out the required fields, as well as any optional metadata you want to deposit. The submission will be made immediately and a success message will appear on the screen. You can also download the record from this page, or choose to start another submission. If you have submitted a journal article record, you can choose to repeat the process for another article in the same journal and/or journal issue, which will pre-fill the appropriate metadata for you so you don’t have to re-enter it.
If there is a problem with your submission, you will see an error message appear instead. Go to the documentation for tips on how to troubleshoot common errors from our deposit system.
Load a saved record
If you’ve used the record registration form before to create a record, you can upload your saved copy to make edits and re-deposit the metadata. Start at the record registration form and choose Load Record. Select the appropriate .json file from your computer and click Open. Note: the record you load must be a .json file previously downloaded from the record registration form.
Once the form is loaded, you can make edits to your record and submit your record to update the metadata. You can also download a new version to your local machine to repeat the process later.
Create a template
You can partially complete a form and download it for use as a template in the future. For example, if you register multiple grants, your depositor information (name, email address) and funder information (funder name, funder ID) are likely to be the same across all submissions. So you might complete just those parts of the form, download the record, and upload it each time you need to submit a new grant record.
Page maintainer: Lena Stoll Last updated: 2025-March-02
