This year, we placed a spotlight on the Latin American community, hosting the second Crossref Metadata Sprint in São Paulo, Brazil from 4 - 6 March 2026. In our first tri-lingual event, we brought together 31 participants from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico. Our goal was to foster community co-creation using the open scholarly metadata. The Sprint was an opportunity to pose questions, share ideas, collaborate on research, and propose innovative solutions that enhance the use of metadata in scholarly communication and beyond.
Read on for more details about the content of the Sprint, and the resulting projects. You can also register to join our Sprint Showcase call on 22nd April to hear directly from the team about their creations.
On 17 March 2026, we experienced an outage that affected DOI resolution for Crossref DOIs and the deposit of metadata records by Crossref members. In this summary, we outline what happened, the impact on our community, and the steps we are taking to strengthen our systems and processes as a result.
We’re excited to announce a new data citation API endpoint and are seeking your feedback. The new service makes existing data citation relationships in our metadata available, thereby surfacing this part of the research nexus. At the same time, we’ve decided that it’s time to move on from Event Data.
Metadata is communication; it can tell a story about research and paint a picture for others to respond to and learn from, across the world and throughout the forthcoming generations. Metadata can feel technical with words like ‘infrastructure’ and ‘schema’, and sometimes, like tech in general, it comes with hyperbole. But metadata really is part art (storytelling and pictures) and part science (structured models and standards) with both aspects being equally important, and requiring people as well as systems. That necessary combination of human and machine involvement also makes metadata challenging.
Members can participate in Cited-by by completing the following steps:
Deposit references for one or more prefixes as part of your content registration process. Use your Participation Report to see your progress with depositing references. This step is not mandatory, but highly recommended to ensure that your citation counts are complete.
We will match the metadata in the references to DOIs to establish Cited-by links in the database. As new content is registered, we automatically update the citations and, for those members with Cited-by alerts enabled, we notify you of the new links.
Display the links on your website. We recommend displaying citations you retrieve on DOI landing pages, for example:
If you are a member through a Sponsor, you may have access to Cited-by through your sponsor – please contact them for more details. OJS users can use the Cited-by plugin. If you need more help, you can learn more from PKP’s Cited-by (OJS Scopus/Crossref plugin) - as of OJS 3.2, this third-party plugin allows journals to display citations and citation counts (using article DOIs) from Scopus and/or Crossref.
Citation matching
Members sometimes submit references without including a DOI tag for the cited work. When this happens, we look for a match based on the metadata provided. If we find one, the reference metadata is updated with the DOI and we add the "doi-asserted-by": "crossref" tag. If we don’t find a match immediately, we will try again at a later date.
There are some references for which we won’t find matches, for example where a DOI has been registered with an agency other than Crossref (such as DataCite) or if the reference refers to an object without a DOI, including conferences, manuals, blog posts, and some journals’ articles.
To perform matching, we first check if a DOI tag is included in the reference metadata. If so, we assume it is correct and link the corresponding work. If there isn’t a DOI tag, we perform a search using the metadata supplied and select candidate results by thresholding. The best match is found through a further validation process. Learn more about how we match references. The same process is used for the results shown on our Simple Text Query tool.
All citations to a work are returned in the corresponding Cited-by query.
Page maintainer: Isaac Farley Last updated: 2023-April-28
