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.
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).
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.
The record registration form can be used to deposit metadata for your records. You do not need any knowledge of XML to use it. The tool currently supports journal articles and grants, but we are planning to add support for additional record types in future.
Select the type of record you wish to create, then enter the metadata associated with your record in the corresponding fields. Some fields are required to be filled out in order to submit your record, while others are optional. If you are registering a journal article, you can find links to our documentation in the form for more information on what each field means.
Journal article metadata also includes some information on the journal and, optionally, the issue and/or volume that the article was published in. To help avoid common errors with journal titles, you can look up your journal in our database by entering an e-ISSN or p-ISSN that you have previously included in a deposit with Crossref and hitting Autofill. Note that an ISSN is currently required to use the record registration form for registering journal articles.
Submit your record
After filling out the required fields as well as any optional metadata you want to deposit, check that everything looks correct and then click Submit at the bottom of the form. The submission will be made immediately and a success message will appear on the screen.
From the success page, you can download a .json file of your record to your local computer as a template for future submissions. For grant records, this file is named after the funder name and award number; for journal article records, it is named after the journal’s e-ISSN (or p-ISSN if no e-ISSN is available) and article title.
You can also choose to start another submission. If you have registered a journal article, you can choose to repeat the process for another article in the same journal and/or journal issue, which will pre-fill the form with the appropriate metadata 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 of the success page. Go to the documentation for tips on how to troubleshoot common errors from our deposit system.
Edit an existing record
Metadata can change over time, and the record registration form allows you to update your records to reflect this.
You can scroll through the list or filter it by the date when the record was last updated. Find the record you are looking for and click Edit to access the record registration form with the record’s metadata filled in. Simply make any changes and submit the record again to register the updated metadata.
Note that it can take up to an hour for metadata updates to be reflected in our system, so if you have just registered or updated a record, you may have to wait a while before editing it again.
Create a template
If you are registering grants, you can partially complete the form and download a .json file for use as a template in the future. For example, 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-October-06
