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.
Just when you thought 2020 couldn’t go any faster, it’s Peer Review week again! Peer Review is such an important part of the research process and highlighting the role it plays is key to retaining and reinforcing trust in the publishing process.
“Maintaining trust in the peer review decision-making process is paramount if we are to solve the world’s most pressing problems. This includes ensuring that the peer review process is transparent (easily discoverable, accessible, and understandable by anyone writing, reviewing, or reading peer-reviewed content) and that everyone involved in the process receives the training and education needed to play their part in making it reliable and trustworthy.”
A key way that publishers can make peer reviews easily discoverable and accessible is by registering them with Crossref - creating a persistent identifier for each review, linking them to the relevant article, and providing rich metadata to show what part this item played in the evolution of the content. It also gives a way to acknowledge the incredible work done by academics in this area.
For Peer Review week last year, Rosa and Rachael from Crossref created this short video to explain more.
Fast forward to 2020 and over 75k peer reviews have now been registered with us by a range of members including Wiley, Peer J, eLife, Stichting SciPost, Emerald, IOP Publishing, Publons, The Royal Society and Copernicus. We encourage all members to register peer reviews with us - and you can keep up to date with everyone who is using this API query. (We recommend installing a JSON viewer for your browser to view these results if you haven’t done so already).
Register peer reviews and contribute to the Research Nexus
At Crossref, we talk a lot about the research nexus, and it’s a theme that you’re going to hear a lot more about from us in the coming months and years.
The published article no longer has the supremacy it once did, and other outputs - and inputs - have increasing importance. Linked data and protocols are key for reproducibility, peer reviews increase trust and show the evolution of knowledge, and other research objects help increase the discoverability of content. Registering these objects and stating the relationships between them support the research nexus.
Peer reviews in particular are key to demonstrating that the scholarly record is not fixed - it’s a living entity that moves and changes over time. Registering peer reviews formally integrates these objects into the scholarly record and makes sure the links between the reviews and the article both exist and persist over time. It allows analysis or research on peer reviews and highlights richer discussions than those provided by the article alone, showing how discussion and conversation help to evolve knowledge. In particular, post-publication reviews highlight how the article is no longer the endpoint - after publication, research is further validated (or not!) and new ideas emerge and build on each other. You can see a real-life example of this from F1000 in a blog post written by Jennifer Lin a few years ago.
As we’ve said before:
Article metadata + peer review metadata = a fuller picture of the evolution of knowledge
Registering peer reviews also provides publishing transparency and reviewer accountability, and enables contributors to get credit for their work. If peer review metadata includes ORCID IDs, our ORCID auto-update service means that we can automatically update the author’s ORCID record (with their permission), while our forthcoming schema update will take this even further, making CRediT roles available in our schema.
How to register peer reviews with Crossref
You need to be a member of Crossref in order to register your peer reviews with us and you can currently register peer reviews by sending us your XML files. Unfortunately, you can’t currently register peer reviews using our helper tools like the OJS plugin, Metadata Manager, or the web deposit form.
We know that there’s a range of outputs from the peer review process, and our schema allows you to identify many of them, including referee reports, decision letters, and author responses. You can include outputs from the initial submission only, or cover all subsequent rounds of revisions, giving a really clear picture of the evolution of the article. Members can even register content for discussions after the article was published, such as post-publication reviews.
Get involved with Peer Review Week 2020
We’re looking forward to seeing the debate sparked by Peer Review Week and hearing from our members about this important area. You can get involved by checking out the Peer Review Week 2020 website or following @PeerRevWeek and the hashtags #PeerRevWk20 #trustinpeerreview on Twitter.
We’re excited to see what examples of the evolution of knowledge will be discoverable in registered and linked peer reviews this time next year!
