Scholarly metadata, deposited by thousands of our members and made openly available can act as âtrust signalsâ for the publications. It provides information that helps others in the community to verify and assess the integrity of the work. Despite having a central responsibility in ensuring the integrity of the work that they publish, editorial teams tend not be fully aware of the value of metadata for integrity of the scholarly record. How can we change that?
Crossref was created back in 2000 by 12 forward-thinking scholarly publishers from North America and Europe, and by 2002, these members had registered 4 million DOI records. At the time of writing, we have over 23,600 members in 164 different countries. Half of our members are based in Asia, and 35% are universities or scholar-led. These members have registered over 176 million open metadata records with DOIs (as of today). What a difference 25 years makes!
In our 25th anniversary year, I thought it would be time to take a look at how we got here. And soâhold tightâweâre going to go on an adventure through space and time1, stopping every 5 years through Crossref history to check in on our members. And weâre going to see some really interesting changes over the years.
The Frankfurt Book Fair is the largest book fair in the world, and therefore a key event on our calendar. Held annually in Frankfurt, Germany, the 77th Frankfurt Book Fair (October 15â19, 2025) saw 118,000 trade visitors and 120,000 private visitors from 131 countries. The Crossref booth was located, as usual, in Hall 4.0 where all the stands with information about academic publishing can be found. Four Crossref colleagues attended the Book Fair this year, and in this blog post, you can read more about their meetings, experiences, and plans.Â
TL;DR. Metadata Manager will be retired at the end of 2025. Over the past four years, we have been developing a new helper tool to replace it, and that tool has now reached a stage of maturity that means we will be able to switch off Metadata Manager by the end of the year.
Registering your DOI records using OJS version 3.3
You can register your DOI records with us using the OJS (Open Journal Systems) platform with two extra plugins - the DOI plugin, and the Crossref XML plugin for OJS. We highly recommend including your references in the metadata you send to us, too - you can do this by adding the OJS references plugin. The instructions below are for configuring OJS version 3.3.
Ask your OJS administrator to install the DOI plugin, and add the DOI prefix that we gave to you. Your prefix will start with 10. and is in the format 10.xxxx (e.g., 10.1234).
You can check whether the DOI Plugin is already set up by following these steps:
Go to âSettingsâ on your dashboard and click âWebsiteâ
Switch to the âPluginsâ tab
Search âPublic Identifier Pluginsâ and find âDOIâ
Click the checkbox on the right side of the DOI plugin description to enable it
Step 2: Set up the Crossef XML plugin for OJS
To make best use of the plugin, make sure youâre using OJS version 3 or higher.
You can start by finding the Crossref plugin from your dashboard:
Click âToolsâ
Choose the âImport/Exportâ tab
Click âCrossref XML Export Pluginâ
You can deposit content with us in one of three ways:
Register your content with us automatically using the OJS plugin
Register the content with us manually, from the plugin interface
Simply click the checkbox at the bottom of the DOI plugin settings to enable automatic deposits.
Youâll then need to add information into the plugin:
Hereâs what to enter into each of the fields shown in the screenshot above:
Depositor name - the name of the organisation registering the DOIs (note: this field is not authenticated with Crossref)
Depositor email - the email address of the individual responsible for registering content with Crossref (note: this field is not authenticated with Crossref)
Username - this is the username element of your Crossref depositor credentials. It will be passed to us to authenticate your submission(s). Your username might be just a collection of letters (role credentials), or it might be an email address (user credentials) - there is more information on role versus user credentials below.
Password - this is the password associated with your Crossref depositor credentials
Note: if the combination of username and password is incorrect, OJS will return a â401 unauthorized status codeâ error at the time of registration. This error indicates that the username and password are incorrectly entered. That is, they do not match the username and/or password set with Crossref.
If you are using organisation-wide, shared role credentials (i.e. your username is a collection of letters), you can simply add in your shared username and password.
If you are using personal user credentials that are unique to you (i.e. your username is your email address), youâll need to add your email address and your role into the username field, and your personal password into the password field. Hereâs an example of what this will look like:
The OJS references plugin is available from OJS 3.1.2 onwards. The plugin will use the Crossref API to check against plain text references and locate possible DOIs for articles. The plugin will also allow the display of reference lists on the article landing page in OJS and deposit them as part of your metadata deposit. Linking references is a requirement of Crossref membership.
Two things need to be set up to activate the references plugin:
a) Workflow Settings
Click âSettingsâ and then âWorkflowâ from your dashboard
Under the âSubmissionâ tab, choose âMetadataâ!
Scroll down to the bottom and to find the âReferencesâ section Make sure you enable references metadata by clicking the checkbox âEnable references metadataâ. You also need to select the option âAsk the author to provide references during submissionâ.
Click save!
b) Website Settings
Then you need to activate the references plugin on the website, too, by following the instructions here:
Click âSettingsâ and then âWebsiteâ from your dashboard
Choose the âPluginsâ tab.
Search âCrossref reference linkingâ
Click the âCrossref reference linking checkbox
This plugin will deposit the references that you enter into the XML deposit.
Additional OJS plugins for Crossref
In addition to the Crossref XML plugin for OJS, there are also other important plugins that can be enabled in OJS to enrich your metadata records:
Funding Metadata plugin - as of OJS 3.1.2, it is possible to enable a funder registry plugin for submitting funding information to Crossref. The plugin will use the Open Funder Registry to check against existing funding agencies. The plugin will include funding information in your Crossref DOI deposits.
Similarity Check plugin - if you are using OJS 3.1.2 or above, you are able to use the Similarity Check plugin. This will enable you to automatically send manuscripts to your iThenticate account to check their similarity to already published content. You will need to be subscribed to Crossrefâs Similarity Check service for this to work.
ROR plugin - the ROR Plugin for OJS enables authors to add the ROR ID for the organization they are affiliated with.
Getting help with OJS plugins
The team at Crossref didnât create these plugins - they were either created by the team at PKP, or by third-party developers. Because of this, we arenât able to give in-depth help or troubleshooting on problems with these plugins.
