Latest blog posts
Susan Collins
2025 April 18

Supporting Membership through the Sponsor Program

Sponsors make Crossref membership accessible to organizations that would otherwise face barriers to joining us. They also provide support to facilitate participation, which increases the amount and diversity of metadata in the global Research Nexus. This in turn improves discoverability and transparency of scholarship behind the works.

...Find out more
Lena Stoll
2025 April 17

Request for proposals: Crossref website information architecture review

We are looking to work with an individual or organization to perform an audit of, and propose changes to, the structure and information architecture underlying our website, with the aim of making it easier for everyone in our community to navigate the website and find the information they need.

Proposals will be evaluated on a rolling basis. We encourage submissions by May 15, 2025.

...Find out more
Helena Cousijn
2025 April 08

The programs approach: our experiences during the first quarter of 2025

At the end of last year, we were excited to announce our renewed commitment to community and the launch of three cross-functional programs to guide and accelerate our work. We introduced this new approach to work towards better cross-team alignment, shared responsibility, improved communication and learning, and make more progress on the things members need.

...Find out more
Patricia Feeney
2025 March 19

Version 5.4.0 metadata schema update now available

This year, metadata development is one of our key priorities and we’re making a start with the release of version 5.4.0 of our input schema with some long-awaited changes. This is the first in what will be a series of metadata schema updates.

What is in this update?

Publication typing for citations

This is fairly simple; we’ve added a ‘type’ attribute to the citations members supply. This means you can identify a journal article citation as a journal article, but more importantly, you can identify a dataset, software, blog post, or other citation that may not have an identifier assigned to it. This makes it easier for the many thousands of metadata users to connect these citations to identifiers. We know many publishers, particularly journal publishers, do collect this information already and will consider making this change to deposit citation types with their records.

...Find out more
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Documentation

Metadata Plus keys

To access all of the features of Metadata Plus, you’ll need to create an API Key. Once you’ve subscribed to Plus, your technical contact will receive an email to set a password to access key manager. This is where you’ll create and manage API keys for Metadata Plus access. If you subscribed to Plus before August 2023, you’ll be using a token.

Create a new API Key

  1. Login to key manager
  2. Under API Keys, click “Add New”
  3. Give the key a name (description)
  4. Copy the API Key (Note: The key will only be displayed once, so you must copy and paste it somewhere safe)

Delete an API Key

Note: a deleted key cannot be recovered.

  1. Under API Keys, find the correct key and click the three dots to its right
  2. Choose “Delete” from the drop down menu
  3. Type DELETE in the modal and click ok. The key now cannot be used to access Plus services. The key cannot be recovered. It may take up to 60 seconds for this to propagate through the system.

Edit a key’s description

  1. Under API Keys, find the correct key and click the three dots to its right
  2. Choose “Edit” from the drop down menu
  3. Edit the key’s description and click ok.

Use an API Key

API Keys can be used to access Metadata Plus services. When making requests to the REST API (including for snapshots) or OAI-PMH, put your API Key (or other token) in the Crossref-Plus-API-Token HTTPS header of all your requests. The example below shows how this should be formatted, with XXX replaced by your key:

Crossref-Plus-API-Token: Bearer XXX

For full information on how to use the REST API, see the documentation at api.crossref.org.

Page owner: Martyn Rittman   |   Last updated 2023-August-29