It’s been said that Americans are unusual in tending to ask “Where do you work?” as an initial question upon introduction to a new acquaintance, indicating a perhaps unhealthy preoccupation with work as identity. But in the context of published research, “What is this author’s affiliation?” is a question of global importance that goes beyond just wanting to know the name – and perhaps prestige level – of the place a researcher works.
As Crossref membership continues to grow, finding ways to help organisations participate is an important part of our mission. Although Crossref membership is open to all organisations that produce scholarly and professional materials, cost and technical challenges can be barriers to joining for many.
We are pleased to announce that—effective 1st January 2026—we have made two changes to grant record registration fees that aim to accelerate adoption of Crossref’s Grant Linking System (GLS) and provide a two-year window of opportunity to increase the number and availability of open persistent grant identifiers and boost the matching of relationships with research objects.
We are very pleased to kick off the New Year with another important schema update and the news that a Grant DOI field is now supported for all record types. This means that Crossref members can explicitly include the Crossref Grant IDs as part of their DOI metadata records for publications and any other output type, accurately linking research outputs to the funding that made it possible, all through metadata. We hope that our members will leverage this to respond to recent calls for stronger funding transparency and best practices for reporting funding sources in research outputs.Â
For Reference Linking, you need to find the existing DOIs for each work in your reference list, and then display the DOI for that item in your reference list.
Step 1: Find DOIs for the referenced works.
There are a few different options:
Crossref Reference Linking plugin in the OJS platform - if you’re using the OJS platform, make sure to add and enable the Crossref Reference Linking Plugin. The plugin will use the Crossref API to check against your plain-text references and locate possible DOIs. It will then display the reference lists with DOIs on the article landing page.
Simple Text Query - paste your reference lists into this web form, and it will return matches. This is a manual interface, and is suitable for low-volume querying.
XML API - submit XML formatted according to the query schema section to our system as individual requests or as a batch upload. This method requires API skills, and allows you significant control over your query execution and results.
Step 2: Display the DOIs in your reference lists.
Once you have retrieved the relevant DOIs, display them as URLs in your reference lists (following our DOI display guidelines).
Page maintainer: Maryna Kovalyova Last updated: 2025-August-15
