In April 2025, we launched the metadata matching project, in order to add missing relationships to the scholarly metadata. We will do this by consolidating all existing and planned matching workflows, which enrich member-deposited metadata in Crossref. This unified service will result in a more complete research nexus. In this blog post, we share our latest milestone: developing and evaluating a strategy for matching funder metadata to Research Organization Registry (ROR) identifiers.
Preserving the integrity of the scholarly record is an important component of the overall endeavour to protect research integrity. Open scholarly infrastructure enables persistent recording of research objects and associated metadata, which provides an evidence trail for these objects for all in the research community. Crossref and DataCite – as providers of essential infrastructure for preservation of the scholarly record – we share our joint expertise in the new guide on “Why metadata matters for research integrity and how to contribute”.
As our global community continues to grow, it is important for us to build and maintain our connections within it. In March this year, we had the opportunity to visit São Paulo for a community event at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas. The content of our presentations is available online. Events such as this provide an opportunity for us to update our members on Crossref fundamentals and developments, and help us better tune in to the varied needs of our communities and learn how we can work together more effectively. This was our third visit to Brazil, with previous events held in Campinas and São Paulo in 2016, and Goiânia and Fortaleza in 2018.
Each organization in the global community of Crossref members (that’s currently over 24k organizations in 166 different countries) plays a key role in building the Research Nexus. Any opportunity we have to meet with our members in person is a highlight and a way for us to learn more from each other. The month of January saw three of us travel to Bangkok to attend the first-ever Charleston Conference organised in Asia and to meet with our growing community in Thailand.
Some of the typical users (outer) and uses (inner) of Crossref metadata
People using Crossref metadata need it for all sorts of reasons including metaresearch (researchers studying research itself such as through bibliometric analyses), publishing trends (such as finding works from an individual author or reviewer), or incorporation into specific databases (such as for discovery and search or in subject-specific repositories), and many more detailed use cases.
All Crossref metadata is open and available for reuse without restriction. Our 170 million records include information about research objects like articles, grants and awards, preprints, conference papers, book chapters, datasets, and more. The information covers elements like titles, contributors, descriptions, dates, references, connecting identifiers such as Crossref DOIs, ROR IDs and ORCID iDs, together with all sorts of metadata that helps to determine provenance, trust, and reusability—such as funding, clinical trial, and license information.
Anyone can retrieve and use >170 million records without restriction. So there are no fees to use the metadata but if you really rely on it then you might like to sign up for Metadata Plus which offers greater predictability, higher rate limits, monthly data dumps in XML and JSON, and access to dedicated support from our team.
Options for retrieving metadata
All Crossref metadata is completely open and available to all. Whatever your experience with metadata, there are several tools, techniques, and support guides to help—whether you’re just beginning, exploring occasionally, or need an ongoing reliable integration.
BEGINNING?
You’ve heard Crossref metadata might be useful and want to know where to start.
We recommend you start with metadata search, funder search, or simple text query for matching references to DOIs. Also take a look at the REST API which only needs you to get a JSON plugin to view the results. We are building tutorials to demonstrate the possibilities, starting with a Python notebook and an R notebook. If it’s retractions and corrections that you need, check out the frequently-updated csv file of the Retraction Watch dataset that we acquired and opened in 2023.
EXPLORING?
You have some specific queries and want a lightweight way to use Crossref metadata.
You rely on Crossref metadata and need to incorporate it into your product at scale.
You might want to jump straight to subscribing to Metadata Plus, which is our premium service for the REST API that comes with monthly data dumps in JSON and XML, higher rate limits, and fast support. But we always recommend that you try out the public version first to make sure it will work for your product. If you’re looking for a single DOI record in multiple formats (e.g. RDF, BibTex, CSL) you can use content negotiation.
Watch the animated introduction to metadata retrieval
