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.
A Schematron report tells you if there’s a metadata quality issue with your records.
Schematron is a pattern-based XML validation language. We try to stop the deposit of metadata with obvious issues, but we can’t catch everything because publication practices are so varied. For example, most family names in our database that end with jr are the result of a publisher including a suffix (Jr) in a family name, but there are of course surnames ending with ‘jr’.
We do a weekly post-registration metadata quality check on all journal, book, and conference proceedings submissions, and record the results in the schematron report. If we spot a problem we’ll alert your technical contact via email. Any identified errors may affect overall metadata quality and negatively affect queries for your content. Errors are aggregated and sent out weekly via email in the schematron report.
What should I do with my schematron report?
The report contains links (organized by title) to .xml files containing error details. The XML files can be downloaded and processed programmatically, or viewed in a web browser:
