Metadata is communication; it can tell a story about research and paint a picture for others to respond to and learn from, across the world and throughout the forthcoming generations. Metadata can feel technical with words like ‘infrastructure’ and ‘schema’, and sometimes, like tech in general, it comes with hyperbole. But metadata really is part art (storytelling and pictures) and part science (structured models and standards) with both aspects being equally important, and requiring people as well as systems. That necessary combination of human and machine involvement also makes metadata challenging.
Once a year we release all metadata records for content registered with Crossref in a public data file. This year’s version, containing nearly 180 million records, is now available. It includes metadata associated with all Crossref-registered DOIs in JSON-lines format.
Crossref Ambassadors act as local points of contact, meeting editors, librarians, researchers, and institutions to help them navigate Crossref services and understand how strong metadata supports visibility, integrity, and trust in research. They explain how to participate in our rich network of connections between works, people, and institutions, in ways that make sense in their own contexts. And last year, being our 25th anniversary, Ambassadors also massively contributed to our celebrations!
We have renewed our partnership with DOAJ to focus on a new set of objectives that reflect both organisations’ commitment to improving sustainable and equitable services and infrastructure. This renewed collaboration focuses on improving the quality of scholarly metadata while expanding support for journals in low- and middle income- countries.
We have worked together since 2021, primarily to encourage the dissemination and use of scholarly research using online technologies, and regional and international networks, partners and communities. This partnership has helped to build local institutional capacity and sustainability within the global scholarly communication ecosystem. A continued partnership also reflects that we have a shared community; currently almost 90% of DOAJ journals are represented in Crossref.
Wednesday 22nd October 2025—Crossref, the open scholarly infrastructure nonprofit, today releases an enhanced dashboard showing metadata coverage and individual organisations’ contributions to documenting the process and outputs of scientific research in the open. The tool helps research-performing, funding, and publishing organisations identify gaps in open research information, and provides supporting evidence for movements like the Barcelona Declaration for Open Research Information, which encourages more substantial commitment to stewarding and enriching the scholarly record through open metadata.
Crossref’s Participation Reports now offer expanded features and provide full coverage of all members and all resource types registered with Crossref DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers)—over 175 million records representing a significant share of global research production from organisations in 164 countries. Each of Crossref’s 23,000 members has a dashboard to visualise their metadata contributions, display coverage of key information for scholarly works, and get actionable feedback via a gap report that specifies records that need enrichment, all helping to make more transparent the work that goes into creating and curating the scholarly record.
For any Crossref member—whether journal publisher, research funder, university, or museum—coverage of up to 11 key elements is public and visible to everyone, including: references, abstracts, ORCID iDs, affiliation strings, ROR IDs, Open Funder Registry IDs, funding award numbers, text-mining URLs, licence URLs, Similarity Check URLs (for text-based plagiarism checking) and the presence of a Crossmark policy, indicating the organisation’s commitment to declare corrections and retractions. These metadata elements provide greater context and visibility for research objects such as journal articles and preprints, grants and awards, books and book chapters, standards, datasets, conference papers and various ‘other’ content such as scholarly blogs, images, and even physical museum artefacts.
Mochammad Tanzil Multazam, Library Director of Universitas Muhammadiyah Sidoarjo, and Secretary of the Supervisory Board of Relawan Jurnals, says, “As a sponsoring organisation for several thousand small publishers across Indonesia, we support Crossref members to register complete metadata for their works. Despite time and resource constraints, this new actionable open report on key metadata elements will help drive improvements in the information they share for their publications. This has wide-reaching implications for the visibility of that research and trust among the community, and therefore has the potential to support Indonesian scholarship in the global context.”
Lena Stoll, Program Lead at Crossref, explains, “We are happy to have extended participation reports to cover more diverse record types, including grants, datasets, dissertations, and more, and to make it easier for our members to act on their ongoing improvements to enrich their records and build towards the vision of an open and more complete Research Nexus.”
Ludo Waltman, Scientific Director and Professor of Quantitative Science Studies at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University, comments, “As a representative of the researcher and metascience communities, this data is of great importance for us to analyse the trends and effects of global research activity. Crossref is one of the main driving forces in open infrastructure, and its commitment to supporting metadata completeness through this open reporting dashboard is a significant step for the open research information movement.”
Access Crossref Participation Reports and search for any Crossref member organisation.
Participation report for a typical Crossref member, Universidad La Salle Arequipa in Peru
About Crossref
Crossref runs an open infrastructure to link research objects, entities, and actions, creating a lasting and reusable scholarly record that underpins open science. Together with their 23,000 members in 164 countries, Crossref drives metadata exchange and supports nearly 2 billion monthly API queries, facilitating global research communication, for the benefit of society.
