Blog

The programs approach: our experiences during the first quarter of 2025

Sara Bowman, Helena Cousijn, Martyn Rittman, Lena Stoll – 2025 April 08

In ProgramsRoadmapStrategy

At the end of last year, we were excited to announce our renewed commitment to community and the launch of three cross-functional programs to guide and accelerate our work. We introduced this new approach to work towards better cross-team alignment, shared responsibility, improved communication and learning, and make more progress on the things members need.

In line with the Crossref strategic agenda, the three programs focus on:

• Co-creation and Community Trends (CCT): This program is responsible for interfaces such as reports/dashboards, record registration interfaces, connections and collaborations such as Open Funder Registry, ROR, ORCID auto-update, as well as OJS and other partner integrations. This program also includes the Crossref website and any front-end interfaces to support other programs. It includes initiatives aimed at upholding the integrity of the scholarly record and our tools in this area, such as Crossmark and retraction/correction tooling, and Similarity Check for text comparisons.
• Contributing to the Research Nexus (CRN): This program manages and oversees all activities relating to contributing to the Research Nexus. A lot of the work in this program revolves around our REST API, but also includes our other APIs, incorporating external data sources like Retraction Watch and Event Data, building out metadata matching services with the new data science team, supporting the community of metadata users with API sprints and more modern options for retrieving metadata based on usage and need.
• Open and Sustainable Operations (OSO): This program manages and oversees all activities related to making our operations more open, transparent, and sustainable. This program focuses on supporting and strengthening the core functions our members rely on and enabling future growth. It includes metadata deposit and processing, most apps for e.g. managing titles, authentication, and architectural and infrastructural projects like moving from the data centre to the AWS cloud service. This program also includes modernising our operations in general, which is not just technology but also finance and human resources, so projects like membership process automation, financial analyses, and business system integrations.

The approach we are taking is to support the work within the programs through (internal) cross-functional steering groups. Led by three program leads (who share updates on their programs below), three program steering groups meet regularly to discuss the topics and work that fall within the scope of each program. The steering groups consist of representatives from all teams within Crossref, which means every steering group has people from the community team, membership team, technical team, data science team, and operations and finance team, bringing all the perspectives and expertise needed to prioritise the next steps for Crossref and fostering broad knowledge sharing and shared responsibility.

Although the whole organisation contributes to these programs, they are coordinated by the Programs and Services team. The team was formed towards the end of 2024, and on the 1st of February, Helena Cousijn joined Crossref in the new role of Director of Programs and Services. Helena has a background in both product management and community engagement and is very excited to help Crossref shape the programs approach and work with all teams across the organisation to drive the strategic agenda forward!

If you’d like to keep an eye on the work that is happening within each program, you can find more information on the Crossref productboard.

Co-creation and Community Trends (CCT)

The mission of the CCT program is to build and foster relationships with our community and other services and organisations within it, so that Crossref can meet and anticipate community needs. Curiosity and listening are at the core of how we co-create to tackle emerging challenges, develop best practices, and explore new ideas for building the Research Nexus. We want our work to benefit all of Crossref’s diverse stakeholders - from our own colleagues and members to underrepresented communities in the wider scholarly ecosystem.

In the first quarter of 2025, our focus areas have been:

• Improvements to our new record registration form for journal articles, which already supports grants, and was launched in beta for articles in 2024. For example, the form now has a built-in reference deposit feature. Join the conversation on the community forum for updates and feedback on this new helper tool.
• Running a series of multilingual metadata health check webinars. There are more of these coming up throughout Q2, so it’s not too late to sign up for one if you are interested.
• Integrating with Rogue Scholar to automate the assignment of DOIs to, and the archiving of, posts on this very blog.
• Planning for the inaugural Crossref Metadata Awards - join our upcoming community call on 7 May to find out what this is all about.

In the coming months, we are hoping to tackle the following:

• Kick off a project to review the information architecture of this website and look into how we can make our documentation and related information more helpful and easier to navigate.
• Expand the record registration form for journal articles to allow easy editing of previously submitted records. This will allow us to sunset the long-deprecated Metadata Manager tool, as was first announced in 2021.
• Begin building new record registration forms for more work types. Watch this space.
• Explore options for supporting the integration of additional software systems with Crossref, building on our existing approach with OJS plugins, with a focus on open-source tools relied upon by our members for registering metadata.
• Restore faceted search on Crossref Metadata Search. This feature was disabled in 2022 following intermittent performance issues. We believe recent improvements to Metadata Search will allow us to bring some filters back, although we will need to start small so as not to overload our systems with these more complex queries.

Contributing to the Research Nexus (CRN)

The research nexus is a rich and reusable open network that represents scholarly activity. It consists of connections between research organisations, people, things, and actions; it’s an evolving model of the scholarly record that the global community can build on forever for the benefit of society.

Our metadata is already a contribution to the research nexus, however, there is much more we would like to do. Our next steps will be to consolidate our existing data and services, and build the technical capacity, partnerships, and knowledge to enhance our contribution with new relationships. Some parts of our data storage and workflows don’t yet have the flexibility to fully capture all types of research objects and how they are connected.

To support this process, the main priorities in the program are:

1. Collaborate with our community. We want to get to know users of our metadata better and work more collaboratively alongside them. Also, we seek partners to contribute new data sources that will enhance our metadata with additional relationships.
2. Share the research nexus vision. We know that we aren’t alone in developing the research nexus, so we will reach out to others with a similar vision and identify where we have common goals.
3. Maintain our technology. We have already identified technical improvements we can make to our REST API, and we need to keep on top of monitoring and fixing bugs. We also need to build capacity for new types of data and relationships. Our other endpoints, such as the XML API and forwardlinks (for citations), need maintenance and are likely to be affected by a planned redesign of our core architecture.
4. Building a new matching service. Identifying relationships between metadata records is a key part of the research nexus. We have already improved reference matching over the years, and we’re looking to implement funding, affiliations, and version matching next. We’ve carried out research on several types of matching and are looking at building a new service to handle it in production.

In the first quarter of 2025, we’ve been working on:

• Schema changes, making the first significant updates to our schema for several years, including adding the capacity for depositing ROR IDs for funding organisations in funding metadata.
• Delivering Retraction Watch retractions via the REST API, integrated with member-supplied retraction/correction data.
• Getting the community involved and understanding needs, planning a sprint and various workshops.
• Plenty of under-the-hood updates to the REST API, and more significant upgrades to come later this year.

Next up, we will:

• Plan and build out the new matching service.
• Improve representation of some metadata in the REST API, including Crossref members, journals, and typed citations such as data citations.
• Update the grants schema to extend the award types and respond to new funder member requests
• Add contributor roles to the schema, including CRediT.
• Ask our community about metadata retrieval, including the various APIs and the Metadata Plus subscription service.
• Upgrade elements of the REST API and optimise the underlying technical infrastructure.

Open and Sustainable Operations (OSO)

The OSO program is centered on transparency and sustainability of our technical systems and our business and people operations. We focus on maintaining critical systems and operations and ensuring their security, addressing technical and operational debt, and controlling or reducing costs - to Crossref, our community, or the environment. We’re always keen to tackle projects to automate repetitive and manual tasks – of which we have many – and pay down technical debt, being as open and transparent as possible along the way.

Our most recently completed work includes:

• Moving from Oracle to an open-source database, PostgreSQL. This work aligns with the POSI principles and sets us up for a more robust, reliable, and modern infrastructure.
• Implementing metadata schema changes for deposit submission and processing, so we can now accept ROR IDs in funding metadata, as well as the changes in latest schema version (5.4.0) which includes the new ability to label references with a type (such as dataset, software, blog post, article, etc.).
• Automating parts of the process to keep Sponsor information on our website up to date and make it easier to search, so our community can find relevant and accurate information about our Sponsors and how to work with them, and our membership team spends less time keeping the website current.

Ongoing work in our program includes:

• Moving from a physical data center into the cloud (AWS). The PostgreSQL migration was the first step needed to enable our move to the cloud, which will allow us to operate more sustainably and efficiently.
• Automating new member setup in our systems, which is largely a manual process now.

And coming up are:

• Making changes in our core system to accept the upcoming 5.5 metadata schema version.
• Extracting billing code from our main codebase, to set up as its own service. This will allow us to simplify our code and make it easier to maintain. We’ll also be implementing the changes to billing enacted as part of the Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability program (TBD!).
• Holding a “systems workshop” in April, to understand how our current system(s) are and aren’t meeting staff, member, and community needs, and how we might go about building the open, sustainable Crossref system of the future.

What have we learned so far?

Internal communication

One of the reasons to implement a programs approach was to improve internal communication across the organisation. With all teams being represented on all steering groups, everyone is in the loop when decisions are taken. We see that this way, people feel more connected to the strategic agenda and, importantly, the ‘why’ is clearer to people. It is easier to get perspectives from across the organisation because contributing to these conversations is now part of people’s day jobs and so it’s easier to ask for their time. We are still looking to improve how we facilitate group discussions and decision-making to ensure we make the most of the program steering groups.

Planning and delivery

Working closely with people from across the organisation has helped with more effective planning. A closer collaboration between program leads and developers makes the delivery of new features and functionality more accurate and predictable. With the community and support teams also being part of the conversation, they can plan related comms and support/documentation efforts in a timely manner. So far, it has also been easier to get more things delivered. We have some big projects coming up this year that will be a good test for the programs approach!

Cross-cutting topics

The implementation of a cross-functional approach facilitates discussions around cross-cutting topics, but also leads to the question of how cross-cutting topics fit within a specific program! Maybe you already noticed that work on metadata schema 5.4 and the planned work on 5.5 is included under both Contributing to the Research Nexus and Open and Sustainable Operations in the update above. Because metadata development impacts many of our systems, work was needed within all programs to enable these changes - the input, the output and the interfaces. Later this year, we’re planning to share some visuals that better explain which projects sit with which program and how we deal with cross-cutting topics.

Alignment

One of the most important things for the approach to be successful is that people are bought in and willing to participate and communicate. For cross-organisational alignment, a culture needs to be in place (or developed) where people are willing to collaborate and be open and transparent about their work. In a practical sense, we are still looking at how we can better align our code bases with the current programs so that it is easier to develop the relevant expertise within the programs.

We hope to see many of you at our upcoming community call on 7 May. Please register to join as we discuss some of the work included in this update.