Blog

The American Society for Microbiology (ASM) has earned recognition in Crossref’s Participation Reports for its exceptional metadata coverage among large publishing members––an achievement built on intentional change, technical investment, and collaborative work. In this Q&A, the ASM team shares what that journey looked like, the challenges they’ve tackled, and how centering metadata has helped them better connect research with the global scientific community.

The Crossref Board recently approved three recommendations for changes to our fees: introduction of a new lowest membership fee tier, removal of volume discounts for record registration, and normalisation of registration fees for peer reviews. The changes will be applied from January 2026.

This is the first outcome of the Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability (RCFS) program, launched in 2023, as a comprehensive effort to review all aspects of Crossref revenue and how we’re adapting to growth and the diversification of our membership. The program aims to make fees more equitable, simplify our complex fee schedule, and rebalance revenue sources.

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En 2025, lanzamos los Premios Crossref a los Metadatos, con el objetivo de destacar el rol de nuestra comunidad en la gestión y el enriquecimiento del registro académico. En esta publicación, destacamos a la Universidad La Salle, Perú, ganadora del premio a la excelencia entre los nuevos miembros, y contamos con la participación de Yasiel Pérez, Responsable Técnico y Editor de la Revista, quien comparte sus ideas:

This June, we presented at the Beijing International Book Fair (BIBF) and connected directly with our growing community in China. With a surge of interest from Chinese publishers and partners, it was clear: there’s a strong and rising curiosity around how metadata plays a vital role in maintaining the integrity of the scholarly record.

As a new Community Engagement Manager at Crossref, dedicated to working with the funders community, I frequently hear requests for examples and case studies of adopting Crossref’s Grant Linking System (GLS) by ‘funders like us’. This has spurred me to start a series of blog posts presenting funders’ perspectives on joining Crossref and using our system – to demonstrate how it’s done. 

If you take a peek at our blog, you’ll notice that metadata and community are the most frequently used categories. This is not a coincidence – community is central to everything we do at Crossref. Our first-ever Metadata Sprint was a natural step in strengthening both. Cue fanfare!. And what better way of celebrating 25 years of Crossref?

We designed the Crossref Metadata Sprint as a relatively short event where people can form teams and tackle short problems. What kind of problems? While we expected many to involve coding, teams also explored documenting, translating, researching—anything that taps into our open, member-curated metadata. Our motivation behind this format was to create a space for networking, collaboration, and feedback, centered on co-creation using the scholarly metadata from our REST API, the Public Data File, and other sources.

English version

Dado que Crossref celebra su 25º aniversario este año, nos gustaría destacar algunas de las regiones activas y comprometidas en nuestra comunidad global.

Durante los primeros 25 años, la composición de los miembros de Crossref ha evolucionado significativamente. De un puñado de grandes editoriales fundadoras, ahora tenemos más de 22.000 miembros de 160 países. Casi dos tercios de ellos se identifican como universidades, bibliotecas, entidades gubernamentales, fundaciones, editoriales académicas, e institutos de investigación.

Marking our 25th anniversary, we launch the Crossref Metadata Awards to emphasise our community’s role in stewarding and enriching the scholarly record.

We are pleased to recognise Noyam Publishers, GigaScience Press, eLife, American Society for Microbiology, and Universidad La Salle Arequipa Perú with the Crossref Metadata Excellence Awards, and Instituto Geologico y Minero de España wins the Crossref Metadata Enrichment Award. These inaugural awards highlight the leadership of members who show dedication to the best metadata practices.

We’ve been accelerating our metadata development efforts and recently released version 5.4 of our metadata schema, and are planning to release version 5.5 (including support for multiple contributor roles and the CRediT taxonomy) this summer. We will also extend our grants schema based on the Funders Advisory Group work, and make progress on other changes as set out on our new metadata development roadmap.

As we work towards the vision of the rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organisations, people, things, and actions, dubbed the Research Nexus, our schemas need to change to accommodate the evolving landscape of research processes and communications.

Crossref is a membership organisation, and it’s the global community of members that creates the Research Nexus together. Meeting our community locally is a highlight and an important learning experience. This year, we started by connecting with a growing community in Accra, Ghana - our first in-person event in the country included in our GEM program. From 14 members in 2023 to 31 in 2025, our community in Ghana is blooming.

At its core, Crossref Accra 2025 was about showing up for the community in Ghana - listening, learning, and building together. On the 20th of March, we welcomed 66 participants: journal editors, university staff, librarians, and researchers. People who are doing the real work of making scholarly publishing happen in the region.