Paul Davis

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.

The Frankfurt Book Fair is the largest book fair in the world, and therefore a key event on our calendar. Held annually in Frankfurt, Germany, the 77th Frankfurt Book Fair (October 15–19, 2025) saw 118,000 trade visitors and 120,000 private visitors from 131 countries. The Crossref booth was located, as usual, in Hall 4.0 where all the stands with information about academic publishing can be found. Four Crossref colleagues attended the Book Fair this year, and in this blog post, you can read more about their meetings, experiences, and plans. 

My name is Isaac Farley, Crossref Technical Support Manager. We’ve got a collective post here from our technical support team - staff members and contractors - since we all have what I think will be a helpful perspective to the question: ‘What’s that one thing that you wish you could snap your fingers and make clearer and easier for our members?’ Within, you’ll find us referencing our Community Forum, the open support platform where you can get answers from all of us and other Crossref members and users. We invite you to join us there; how about asking your next question of us there? Or, simply let us know how we did with this post. We’d love to hear from you!

Quality metadata is foundational to the research nexus and all Crossref services. When inaccuracies creep in, these create problems that get compounded down the line. No wonder that reports of metadata errors from authors, members, and other metadata users are some of the most common messages we receive into the technical support team (we encourage you to continue to report these metadata errors).

We make members’ metadata openly available via our APIs, which means people and machines can incorporate it into their research tools and services - thus, we all want it to be accurate. Manuscript tracking services, search services, bibliographic management software, library systems, author profiling tools, specialist subject databases, scholarly sharing networks - all of these (and more) incorporate scholarly metadata into their software and services. They use our APIs to help them get the most complete, up-to-date set of metadata from all of our publisher members. And of course, members themselves are able to use our free APIs too (and often do; our members account for the vast majority of overall metadata usage).

Hello, I’m Paul Davis and I’ve been part of the Crossref support team since May 2017. In that time I’ve become more adept as a DOI detective, helping our members work out whodunnit when it comes to submission errors.

If you have ever received one of our error messages after you have submitted metadata to us, you may know that some are helpful and others are, well, difficult to decode. I’m here to help you to become your own DOI detective.