Through user experience research (UXR) initiatives that take into account our diverse membership and community, we can have a continuous, deeper understanding of the role of metadata in our members’ workflows, and ensure that our work continues to meet our community’s needs. Your support is the key to this process, and will positively impact the wider community - and if you’d like to start today, you can take part in our latest initiative: help us improve our Events page by sharing your thoughts on the page’s feedback form.
Our 2026 Community Update took place on 13 May. Two calls, one for the eastern and one for the western time zone, highlighted how our global community is growing, how we’re refining the metadata that supports trust in the scholarly record, and connecting records more effectively through our latest tools.
Funding is one of the key enablers of the research lifecycle, but has been one of the hardest parts of the scholarly record to identify, describe and connect. This is slowly changing as we have recently reached a very exciting milestone for Crossref’s Grant Linking System (GLS). What makes it remarkable is not only the numbers reached, but where the data comes from. Research funders, who joined Crossref as members, have actively contributed more than 200,000 grants to the Research Nexus (Figure 1).
We are pleased to announce the re-launch of the Crossref Service Providers Program. From today, we are accepting applications from organisations providing tools for metadata registration to Crossref members. Participation in this program is free and the application involves an accreditation process to determine eligibility and the appropriate participation tier.
As a membership organisation, Crossref supports its members to provide rich and complete metadata which facilitates integrity judgements, increases discoverability, linking among scholarly objects and activities, and improves transparency. Service providers are key collaborators in this work because they enable our members to adopt better metadata practices.
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
