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 organizations, 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.
In 2022, we set out to update our DOI display guidelines with the intention to adopt the proposals in 2025. It’s important to note from the outset that we are not mandating any immediate changes to the DOI display guidelines. Instead, we are working with our community to co-create a solution that addresses the diverse needs of all users, rather than imposing technical changes that may not suit everyone.
Sponsors make Crossref membership accessible to organizations that would otherwise face barriers to joining us. They also provide support to facilitate participation, which increases the amount and diversity of metadata in the global Research Nexus. This in turn improves discoverability and transparency of scholarship behind the works.
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 owner: Isaac Farley | Last updated 2024-July-19