We’re providing a summary of the board’s March 2026 meeting. At the meeting, the board reviewed progress in our key programs and initiatives, the strategic outlook for 2026, filled a vacancy on the Board, considered an additional legal entity for Crossref, and reviewed our governance structures. The resolutions are available on the dedicated section of our website, which also lists the members of the Board and offers further information about our governance.
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 SĂŁo Paulo for a community event at the Fundação GetĂşlio 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 SĂŁo Paulo in 2016, and Goiânia and Fortaleza in 2018.Â
On September 1st we completed the final stage of the Crossmark v2.0 release and sent an email to all participating publishers containing instructions for upgrading. The first phase of v2.0 happened when we changed the design and layout of the Crossmark box back in May of this year. That allowed us to better display the growing set of additional metadata that our members are depositing, and saw the introduction of the Linked Clinical Trials feature.
Now all publishers have the opportunity to complete the upgrade by simply replacing the Crossmark button and the piece of code that calls the box. The new button designs are, we think, a much better fit for most websites, and are designed to look more like a button than a flat logo. The new buttons are also available as .eps files for placement in PDFs.
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Crossmark box on a mobile phone
Most importantly, switching to 2.0 makes the Crossmark box responsive for better display on mobile devices.
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Just two weeks after the code release a number of publishers have already upgraded and are running Crossmark 2.0 on their content. Congrats to the Pan African Medical Journal who were the first member to upgrade just a couple of days after the release. Â Of course we realise that many members will need time to schedule the upgrade, and while we are keen to see as many early adopters as possible, we will support version 1.5 of Crossmark through to the end of March 2017.
If your content is running Crossmark 2.0 we would love to see it. Drop us a line or put a link in the comments below.
