As Crossref celebrated its 25th anniversary last year, we are highlighting some of the most active and engaged regions in our global community.
Over the past 25 years, the makeup of Crossref membership has evolved significantly; founded by a handful of large publishers, we now have more than 24,000 members representing 165 countries. Nearly two-thirds of them self-identify as universities, libraries, government agencies, foundations, scholar publishers, and research institutions.
It’s been said that Americans are unusual in tending to ask “Where do you work?” as an initial question upon introduction to a new acquaintance, indicating a perhaps unhealthy preoccupation with work as identity. But in the context of published research, “What is this author’s affiliation?” is a question of global importance that goes beyond just wanting to know the name – and perhaps prestige level – of the place a researcher works.
As Crossref membership continues to grow, finding ways to help organisations participate is an important part of our mission. Although Crossref membership is open to all organisations that produce scholarly and professional materials, cost and technical challenges can be barriers to joining for many.
We are pleased to announce that—effective 1st January 2026—we have made two changes to grant record registration fees that aim to accelerate adoption of Crossref’s Grant Linking System (GLS) and provide a two-year window of opportunity to increase the number and availability of open persistent grant identifiers and boost the matching of relationships with research objects.
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.
Crossref’s Participation Reports now offer expanded features and provide full coverage of all members and all resource types registered with Crossref DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers)—over 175 million records representing a significant share of global research production from organisations in 164 countries. Each of Crossref’s 23,000 members has a dashboard to visualise their metadata contributions, display coverage of key information for scholarly works, and get actionable feedback via a gap report that specifies records that need enrichment, all helping to make more transparent the work that goes into creating and curating the scholarly record.
For any Crossref member—whether journal publisher, research funder, university, or museum—coverage of up to 11 key elements is public and visible to everyone, including: references, abstracts, ORCID iDs, affiliation strings, ROR IDs, Open Funder Registry IDs, funding award numbers, text-mining URLs, licence URLs, Similarity Check URLs (for text-based plagiarism checking) and the presence of a Crossmark policy, indicating the organisation’s commitment to declare corrections and retractions. These metadata elements provide greater context and visibility for research objects such as journal articles and preprints, grants and awards, books and book chapters, standards, datasets, conference papers and various ‘other’ content such as scholarly blogs, images, and even physical museum artefacts.
Mochammad Tanzil Multazam, Library Director of Universitas Muhammadiyah Sidoarjo, and Secretary of the Supervisory Board of Relawan Jurnals, says, “As a sponsoring organisation for several thousand small publishers across Indonesia, we support Crossref members to register complete metadata for their works. Despite time and resource constraints, this new actionable open report on key metadata elements will help drive improvements in the information they share for their publications. This has wide-reaching implications for the visibility of that research and trust among the community, and therefore has the potential to support Indonesian scholarship in the global context.”
Lena Stoll, Program Lead at Crossref, explains, “We are happy to have extended participation reports to cover more diverse record types, including grants, datasets, dissertations, and more, and to make it easier for our members to act on their ongoing improvements to enrich their records and build towards the vision of an open and more complete Research Nexus.”
Ludo Waltman, Scientific Director and Professor of Quantitative Science Studies at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University, comments, “As a representative of the researcher and metascience communities, this data is of great importance for us to analyse the trends and effects of global research activity. Crossref is one of the main driving forces in open infrastructure, and its commitment to supporting metadata completeness through this open reporting dashboard is a significant step for the open research information movement.”
Access Crossref Participation Reports and search for any Crossref member organisation.
Participation report for a typical Crossref member, Universidad La Salle Arequipa in Peru
About Crossref
Crossref runs an open infrastructure to link research objects, entities, and actions, creating a lasting and reusable scholarly record that underpins open science. Together with their 23,000 members in 4 Crossref drives metadata exchange and supports nearly 2 billion monthly API queries, facilitating global research communication, for the benefit of society.
