Blog

Each organization in the global community of Crossref members (that’s currently over 24k organizations in 166 different countries) plays a key role in building the Research Nexus. Any opportunity we have to meet with our members in person is a highlight and a way for us to learn more from each other. The month of January saw three of us travel to Bangkok to attend the first-ever Charleston Conference organised in Asia and to meet with our growing community in Thailand.

This year, we placed a spotlight on the Latin American community, hosting the second Crossref Metadata Sprint in São Paulo, Brazil from 4 - 6 March 2026. In our first tri-lingual event, we brought together 31 participants from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico. Our goal was to foster community co-creation using the open scholarly metadata. The Sprint was an opportunity to pose questions, share ideas, collaborate on research, and propose innovative solutions that enhance the use of metadata in scholarly communication and beyond.

Read on for more details about the content of the Sprint, and the resulting projects. You can also register to join our Sprint Showcase call on 22nd April to hear directly from the team about their creations.

On 17 March 2026, we experienced an outage that affected DOI resolution for Crossref DOIs and the deposit of metadata records by Crossref members. In this summary, we outline what happened, the impact on our community, and the steps we are taking to strengthen our systems and processes as a result.

We’re excited to announce a new data citation API endpoint and are seeking your feedback. The new service makes existing data citation relationships in our metadata available, thereby surfacing this part of the research nexus. At the same time, we’ve decided that it’s time to move on from Event Data.

Metadata is communication; it can tell a story about research and paint a picture for others to respond to and learn from, across the world and throughout the forthcoming generations. Metadata can feel technical with words like ‘infrastructure’ and ‘schema’, and sometimes, like tech in general, it comes with hyperbole. But metadata really is part art (storytelling and pictures) and part science (structured models and standards) with both aspects being equally important, and requiring people as well as systems. That necessary combination of human and machine involvement also makes metadata challenging.

Once a year we release all metadata records for content registered with Crossref in a public data file. This year’s version, containing nearly 180 million records, is now available. It includes metadata associated with all Crossref-registered DOIs in JSON-lines format.

Crossref Ambassadors act as local points of contact, meeting editors, librarians, researchers, and institutions to help them navigate Crossref services and understand how strong metadata supports visibility, integrity, and trust in research. They explain how to participate in our rich network of connections between works, people, and institutions, in ways that make sense in their own contexts. And last year, being our 25th anniversary, Ambassadors also massively contributed to our celebrations!

We have renewed our partnership with DOAJ to focus on a new set of objectives that reflect both organisations’ commitment to improving sustainable and equitable services and infrastructure. This renewed collaboration focuses on improving the quality of scholarly metadata while expanding support for journals in low- and middle income- countries.

We have worked together since 2021, primarily to encourage the dissemination and use of scholarly research using online technologies, and regional and international networks, partners and communities. This partnership has helped to build local institutional capacity and sustainability within the global scholarly communication ecosystem. A continued partnership also reflects that we have a shared community; currently almost 90% of DOAJ journals are represented in Crossref.

With key milestones achieved in 2025, including the appointment of new Directors of Technology and Programs, a move to the cloud, and some key schema updates, we now have a firm foundation for our next challenge: a redesign of our core technical systems to make them more modern, robust, and easier to maintain and scale.

Introducing board meeting summaries

In an ongoing effort to make more of our operations transparent, we have decided to start sharing summaries of our board meetings on the blog. We already post our board resolutions, but the summaries will give a bit more information on what the board discusses that may or may not show up on the list of resolutions.