On behalf of the Nominating Committee, I’m pleased to share the slate of candidates for the 2026 board election. Every active member organisation is invited to submit a ballot to elect the incoming board class.
We’re providing a summary of the board’s July 2026 meeting. The July board meeting is our only in-person meeting. The board gathers for two days of strategic thinking and long-range planning, as well as conducting annual board business. This year, we focused on allocating surplus funds we have on hand to invest in a three-year project to redesign the content system. In a related discussion, we decided to lower content registration fees starting in 2027 because we’ve had a demonstrated history of generating surpluses, exceeding what we need to run Crossref. We also discussed the board structure, as part of our regular review of stakeholder governance. And we conducted annual board business, such as approving the audited financial statements and reviewed our risk register and mitigation plans.
The resolutions are available on the dedicated section of our website, which also lists the members of the Board and offers further information about our governance.
We also managed to squeeze in watching a World Cup game over dinner.
Starting today, funder names deposited in Crossref metadata without an identifier will be matched to ROR IDs, to support an open and connected Research Nexus. Funding information is an increasingly important part of the scholarly record. The improved matching strategy supports researchers, funders, institutions, and meta-researchers, who rely on that information to understand how research is supported and what outcomes that support produces.
Strengthening Scholarly Publishing in Africa is a collaborative webinar series bringing together ASSAf, Crossref, DOAJ, EIFL, and PKP to share practical guidance, resources, and approaches for strengthening the publishing ecosystem in the region. This series responds to the growing interest in open access, digital publishing, stronger editorial practices, and greater visibility of research publishing across Africa. Each partner organisation has long experience of building that capacity in the area of their expertise. In this series, we’re coming together to offer a more holistic learning experience to the community of African publishers, putting different aspects of the publishing process in their broader context.
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: