Weâve had a year full of growth and reached a milestone of 60+ team members; letâs take a moment to digest what that means for people operations. Hiring staff in 19+ countries is no easy task, but we are up for it, and I can honestly say it is the main reason why our culture is so great. That might sound biased coming from Crossrefâs first Head of Human Resources, but hear me out.
You can now register rich metadata for a variety of record types in Metadata Manager using simple, guided workflows. The tool is used by many in our community to register grant and journal article records, and it has now been expanded to support books and chapters, reports, dissertations, and post-publication updates for journal content.
Metadata Manager makes it easier to capture identifiers for contributors and their affiliations, funding information, references, and more. Thanks to automated reference matching by Crossref, this offers greater visibility for the works, while the affiliations and funding information can serve as important trust signals for the community.
This year’s edition of the FORCE11 conference was hosted in June by Singapore Management University. Its title, âTo Go Far, Go Together: Advancing Scholarly Communication Across Boundaries and Disruptionsâ truly resonates with Crossrefâs truths; it takes a village! Crossref only works as long as the scholarly research community wants to work together globally, across all disciplines, for integrity and openness of the scientific record. The conversations were influenced by a genuinely diverse mix of librarians, researchers, open infrastructures, and service providers, and that mix shaped almost every interaction we had at the conference.
We have some rather unusual news to share: Crossref fees are going down again. At its meeting in Paris earlier this month, the Crossref Board approved two further recommendations from the Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability (RCFS) project: effective 1st January 2027, we will reduce the majority of Content Registration fees for all 25,000 members, and remove fees for back-year records altogether.
Content Registration fees haven’t increased in around 20 years, and this is the first significant change to them in that timeâdownwards. Since these fees account for the largest share of Crossref’s revenue (around 60%), and since every member registers DOI records, these changes reach further than anything we’ve announced under the RCFS project so far.
Why metadata matters for research integrity and jow to contribute
Some aspects of research integrity depend on accurate, complete, and connected metadata. This joint guide from Crossref and DataCite sets out the metadata elements most critical for assessing research integrityâand how all stakeholders can contribute to and benefit from a richer, more trustworthy scholarly record.
Strategists
Understand why metadata is infrastructure for research integrity.
Why completeness, accuracy, and openness across the scholarly record matters for systemic trust in research.
Decision-makers
Know which metadata elements to require, check, and act on.
A practical resource for publishers, funders, and institutions making metadata-related policy decisions.
Practitioners
Learn how to deposit, enrich, and query research integrity metadata.
Step-by-step guidance using Crossref and DataCite services and open APIs.
What this guide covers
This guide walks through the key metadata elements that enable research integrity assessment, and explains how to contribute them via Crossref and DataCite:
Contributors and their rolesâidentifying who did what
Affiliationsâlinking researchers to institutions
Datesâsubmission, acceptance, publication, and update dates
Funder, funding, and grant informationâtransparency on who paid for the research
Versioningâtracking how a work has changed over time
Retractions, corrections, and updatesâkeeping the record accurate
Abstracts and descriptionsâwhat the work is actually about
Clinical trialsâregistration and reporting
Referencesâconnecting works to what they cite
Peer reviewsâwhen and how work was reviewed
Publisher and stewardâaccountability for the record
Record and resource typesâwhat kind of object is this?
Relationships and related identifiersâlinking datasets, preprints, articles, and more
Rights, licences, and accessâhow the work can be used
The guide also sets out a call to action for each stakeholder group: how to enrich your records, query existing metadata via APIs, and report inconsistencies.
Amdekar, M., Chen, X., Cousijn, H., El-Gebali, S., Feeney, P., Hendricks, G., & Stathis, K. (2026, April). Why metadata matters for research integrity and how to contribute. Zenodo. https://doi-org.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/10.5281/zenodo.19695957