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.
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.
Crossref’s Participation Reports now offer expanded features and provide full coverage of all members and all resource types registered with Crossref DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers)—over 175 million records representing a significant share of global research production from organisations in 163 countries. Each of Crossref’s 23,000 members has a dashboard to visualise their metadata contributions, display coverage of key information for scholarly works, and get actionable feedback via a gap report that specifies records that need enrichment, all helping to make more transparent the work that goes into creating and curating the scholarly record.
For any Crossref member—whether journal publisher, research funder, university, or museum—coverage of up to 11 key elements is public and visible to everyone, including: references, abstracts, ORCID iDs, affiliation strings, ROR IDs, Open Funder Registry IDs, funding award numbers, text-mining URLs, licence URLs, Similarity Check URLs (for text-based plagiarism checking) and the presence of a Crossmark policy, indicating the organisation’s commitment to declare corrections and retractions. These metadata elements provide greater context and visibility for research objects such as journal articles and preprints, grants and awards, books and book chapters, standards, datasets, conference papers and various ‘other’ content such as scholarly blogs, images, and even physical museum artefacts.
Mochammad Tanzil Multazam, Library Director of Universitas Muhammadiyah Sidoarjo, and Secretary of the Supervisory Board of Relawan Jurnals, says, “As a sponsoring organisation for several thousand small publishers across Indonesia, we support Crossref members to register complete metadata for their works. Despite time and resource constraints, this new actionable open report on key metadata elements will help drive improvements in the information they share for their publications. This has wide-reaching implications for the visibility of that research and trust among the community, and therefore has the potential to support Indonesian scholarship in the global context.”
Lena Stoll, Program Lead at Crossref, explains, “We are happy to have extended participation reports to cover more diverse record types, including grants, datasets, dissertations, and more, and to make it easier for our members to act on their ongoing improvements to enrich their records and build towards the vision of an open and more complete Research Nexus.”
Ludo Waltman, Scientific Director and Professor of Quantitative Science Studies at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University, comments, “As a representative of the researcher and metascience communities, this data is of great importance for us to analyse the trends and effects of global research activity. Crossref is one of the main driving forces in open infrastructure, and its commitment to supporting metadata completeness through this open reporting dashboard is a significant step for the open research information movement.”
Access Crossref Participation Reports and search for any Crossref member organisation.
Participation report for a typical Crossref member, Universidad La Salle Arequipa in Peru
About Crossref
Crossref runs an open infrastructure to link research objects, entities, and actions, creating a lasting and reusable scholarly record that underpins open science. Together with their 23,000 members in 163 countries, Crossref drives metadata exchange and supports nearly 2 billion monthly API queries, facilitating global research communication, for the benefit of society.
