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.
The depositor report is used for checking basic info about your DOI registrations.
Depositor reports list all DOIs by member and title for journals, books, and conference proceedings. We currently have depositor reports for journals, books, and conference proceedings (but not for other record types). The index page is updated weekly. Title-level reports are updated as your metadata is updated with us.
Each title-level report lists all DOIs registered for the title as well as (for each DOI) the owning prefix, the deposit timestamp, the date the record was last updated, and the number of Cited-by matches. To view each title-level report, select the member name then the appropriate title.
Field/missing metadata report: You can also see what basic bibliographic metadata fields are populated for your journal articles - click on the green triangle to the right of each member name to view a field / missing metadata report.
DOI crawler: We crawl a broad sample of journal DOIs to make sure the DOIs are resolving to the appropriate page. For each journal crawled, a sample of DOIs that equals 5% of the total DOIs for the journal up to a maximum of 50 DOIs is selected. You can access the crawler details for a given journal by selecting the linked date in the ‘last crawl date’ column.
Click on a member name in the report, and you will see a list of that member’s titles below the name. Click on any publication title to open a text file which list all DOIs for that title.
The initial view shows:
Name: name of the member. Members with more than one prefix will appear multiple times
Journal/Book/Conf Proc count: number of journal, book, or conference proceeding titles associated with the member
Total DOIs: total number of DOIs deposited for the selected title
Field report: shows missing metadata fields for each member, select the icon to view
The expanded view shows:
Name of each journal, book, or conference proceeding with DOI names deposited by the member
DOIs: Total number of DOIs registered for each journal, book, or conference proceeding deposited by the member
Last crawl date: date of last crawler report (if available)
Depositor report title view
Select a journal, book, or conference proceeding title to retrieve a list of DOIs for the title (DOI), the owner prefix of the DOI (OWNER), the timestamp value for the DOI (DEPOSIT-TIMESTAMP) the date the DOI was last updated (LAST-UPDATED), and the number of Cited-by matches for the DOI:
Title-level depositor report data may also be retrieved using format=doilist - learn more about retrieving DOIs by title.
Page maintainer: Isaac Farley Last updated: 2024-July-19
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