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.
We are looking for an organization to perform an audit of, and propose changes to, the structure and information architecture underlying our website, with the aim of making it easier for everyone in our community to navigate the website and find the information they need.
Proposals will be evaluated on a rolling basis. We encourage submissions by May 15, 2025.
The DOI error report is sent immediately when a user informs us that they’ve seen a DOI somewhere which doesn’t resolve to a website.
The DOI error report is used for making sure your DOI links go where they’re supposed to. When a user clicks on a DOI that has not been registered, they are sent to a form that collects the DOI, the user’s email address, and any comments the user wants to share. We compile the DOI error report daily using those reports and comments, and send it via email to the technical contact at the member responsible for the DOI prefix as a .csv attachment.
If you would like the DOI error report to be sent to a different person, please contact us.
The DOI error report .csv file contains (where provided by the user):
DOI - the DOI being reported
URL - the referring URL
REPORTED-DATE - date the DOI was initially reported
USER-EMAIL - email of the user reporting the error
COMMENTS
We find that approximately 2/3 of reported errors are ‘real’ problems. Common reasons why you might get this report include:
you’ve published/distributed a DOI but haven’t registered it
the DOI you published doesn’t match the registered DOI
a link was formatted incorrectly (a . at the end of a DOI, for example)
a user has made a mistake (confusing 1 for l or 0 for O, or cut-and-paste errors)
What should I do with my DOI error report?
Review the .csv file attached to your emailed report, and make sure that no legitimate DOIs are listed. Any legitimate DOIs found in this report should be registered immediately. When a DOI reported via the form is registered, we’ll send out an alert to the reporting user (if they’ve shared their email address with us).
I keep getting DOI error reports for DOIs that I have not published, what do I do about this?
It’s possible that someone is trying to link to your content with the wrong DOI. If you do a web search for the reported DOI you may find the source of your problem - we often find incorrect linking from user-provided content like Wikipedia, or from DOIs inadvertently distributed by members to PubMed. If it’s still a mystery, please contact us.
Page owner: Isaac Farley | Last updated 2024-July-19
