Wednesday 22nd October 2025—Crossref, the open scholarly infrastructure nonprofit, today releases an enhanced dashboard showing metadata coverage and individual organisations’ contributions to documenting the process and outputs of scientific research in the open. The tool helps research-performing, funding, and publishing organisations identify gaps in open research information, and provides supporting evidence for movements like the Barcelona Declaration for Open Research Information, which encourages more substantial commitment to stewarding and enriching the scholarly record through open metadata.
Welcome back to our series of case studies of research funders using the Grant Linking System. In this interview, I talk with Cátia Laranjeira, PTCRIS Program Manager at FCCN|FCT, Portugal’s main public funding agency, about the agency’s approach to metadata, persistent identifiers, Open Science and Open Infrastructure.
With a holistic approach to the management, production and access to information on science, FCCN|FCT’s decision to implement the Grant Linking System within their processes was not simply a technical upgrade, but a coordinated effort to continue building a strong culture of openness. With the mantra “register once, reuse always”, FCCN|FCT efforts to embrace open funding metadata was only logical.
Repositories are home to a wide range of scholarly content; they often archive theses, dissertations, preprints, datasets, and other valuable outputs. These records are an important part of the research ecosystem and should be connected to the broader scholarly record. But to truly serve their purpose, repository records need to be connected to each other, to the broader research ecosystem, and to the people behind the research. Metadata is what makes that possible. Enhancing metadata is a way to tell a fuller, more accurate story of research. It helps surface relationships between works, people, funders, and institutions, and allows us as a community to build and use a more connected, more useful network of knowledge - what Crossref calls the ‘Research Nexus’.
The Crossref Grant Linking System (GLS) has been facilitating the registration, sharing and re-use of open funding metadata for six years now, and we have reached some important milestones recently! What started as an interest in identifying funders through the Open Funder Registry evolved to a more nuanced and comprehensive way to share and re-use open funding data systematically. That’s how, in collaboration with the funding community, the Crossref Grant Linking System was developed. Open funding metadata is fundamental for the transparency and integrity of the research endeavour, so we are happy to see them included in the Research Nexus.
It can be a pain when companies rebrand as it usually requires some coordinated updating of wording and logos on websites, handouts, and slides. Nevermind changing habits and remembering to use the new names verbally in presentations.
Why bother?
As our infrastructure and services expanded, we sometimes branded services with no reference to Crossref. As explained in our The Logo Has Landed post last November, this has led to confusion, and it was not scalable nor sustainable.
With a cohesive approach to naming and branding, the benefits of changing to (some) new names and logos should help everyone. Our aim is to stem confusion and be in a much better position to provide clear messages and useful resources so that people don’t have to try hard to understand what Crossref enables them to do.
So while it may be a bit of a pain short-term, it will be worth it!
What are the new names?
As a handy reference, here is a slide-shaped image giving an overview of our services with their new names:
Overview of brand name changes, April 2016
It’s a lowercase ‘r’ in Crossref
That’s right, you’ve spent fifteen years learning to capitalize the second R in Crossref, and now we’re asking you to lowercase it! Please say hello to and start to embrace the more natural and contemporary Crossref.
I’m hoping we can count on our community to update logos and names on your end, keeping consistent with new brand guidelines. And I hope we can make it as easy as possible to do:
This Content Delivery Network (CDN) at assets.crossref.org allows you to reference logos using a snippet of code. Please do not copy/download the logos.
We also have a new website in development which will put support and resources front and center of the user experience. More on that in the next month or two.
By using the snippets of code provided via our new CDN at assets.crossref.org, these kind of manual updates should never be a problem in the future if the logo changes again (no plans anytime soon!).
Of course, we don’t expect people to update new logos and names immediately, there is always a period of transition. Please let us know let us know if we can help you to update your sites and materials in the coming weeks.
Also, check out the launch video, which presents five key Crossref brand messages:
