Cross-posted from the Knowledge Futures blog.
For many years, PubPub has made it possible for communities to assign DOIs to a range of outputs and component Pubs. Knowledge Futures and Crossref are building together to test the limits of what’s possible for high-volume, high-granularity DOI management. That means fast prototypes, real building, and learning through the process.
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.
Kornelia Korzec, Lena Stoll, Patrick Vale, Ginny Hendricks – 2025 October 21
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 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).
Ginny Hendricks, Rachael Lammey, Lucy Ofiesh, Geoffrey Bilder, Ed Pentz – 2023 September 12
Agreement to combine and publicly distribute data about tens of thousands of retracted research papers, and grow the service together
12th September 2023—The Center for Scientific Integrity, the organisation behind the Retraction Watch blog and database, and Crossref, the global infrastructure underpinning research communications, both not-for-profits, announced today that the Retraction Watch database has been acquired by Crossref and made a public resource. An agreement between the two organisations will allow Retraction Watch to keep the data populated on an ongoing basis and always open, alongside publishers registering their retraction notices directly with Crossref.
When Crossref began over 20 years ago, our members were primarily from the United States and Western Europe, but for several years our membership has been more global and diverse, growing to almost 18,000 organisations around the world, representing 148 countries.
As we continue to grow, finding ways to help organisations participate in Crossref is an important part of our mission and approach. Our goal of creating the Research Nexus—a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organisations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society—can only be achieved by ensuring that participation in Crossref is accessible to all. Building a network for the global community must include input from all of the global community.Â
22 June 2021, London, UK and Boston, MA, USA—The future of global open access publishing received a boost today with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and Crossref. The MOU formalizes an already strong partnership between the two organisations and furthers their shared pursuit of an open scholarly communications ecosystem that is inclusive of emerging publishing communities.
Both organisations aim to encourage the dissemination and use of scholarly research using open infrastructure, online technologies, regional and international networks, and community partners - all supporting local institutional capacity and sustainability around the world.
On November 11th 2020, the Crossref Board voted to adopt the “Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure” (POSI). POSI is a list of sixteen commitments that will now guide the board, staff, and Crossref’s development as an organisation into the future. It is an important public statement to make in Crossref’s twentieth anniversary year. Crossref has followed principles since its founding, and meets most of the POSI, but publicly committing to a codified and measurable set of principles is a big step. If 2019 was a reflective turning point, and mid-2020 was about Crossref committing to open scholarly infrastructure and collaboration, this is now announcing a very deliberate path. And we’re just a little bit giddy about it.
A number of our members have asked if they can register their peer reviews with us. They believe that discussions around scholarly works should have DOIs and be citable to provide further context and provenance for researchers reading the article. To that end, we can announce some pertinent news as we enter Peer Review Week 2017 : Crossref infrastructure is soon to be extended to manage DOIs for peer reviews. Launching next month will be support for this new resource/record type, with schema specifically dedicated to the reviews and discussions of scholarly content.
As of this week, there are 80,000,000 scholarly items registered with Crossref!
By the way, we update these interesting Crossref stats regularly and you can search the metadata.
The 80 millionth scholarly item is [drumroll…] Management Approaches in Beihagi History from the journal Oman Chapter of Arabian Journal of Business and Management Review, published by Al Manhal in the United Arab Emirates.
There have been loads of changes since Wiley registered “Designer selves: Construction of technologically mediated identity within graphical, multiuser virtual environments” with the DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(1999)50:10<855::AID-ASI3>3.0.CO;2-6), which happens to have been Crossref’s first official DOI (after many prototype deposits).
