In April 2025, we launched the metadata matching project, in order to add missing relationships to the scholarly metadata. We will do this by consolidating all existing and planned matching workflows, which enrich member-deposited metadata in Crossref. This unified service will result in a more complete research nexus. In this blog post, we share our latest milestone: developing and evaluating a strategy for matching funder metadata to Research Organization Registry (ROR) identifiers.
Preserving the integrity of the scholarly record is an important component of the overall endeavour to protect research integrity. Open scholarly infrastructure enables persistent recording of research objects and associated metadata, which provides an evidence trail for these objects for all in the research community. Crossref and DataCite – as providers of essential infrastructure for preservation of the scholarly record – we share our joint expertise in the new guide on “Why metadata matters for research integrity and how to contribute”.
As our global community continues to grow, it is important for us to build and maintain our connections within it. In March this year, we had the opportunity to visit São Paulo for a community event at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas. The content of our presentations is available online. Events such as this provide an opportunity for us to update our members on Crossref fundamentals and developments, and help us better tune in to the varied needs of our communities and learn how we can work together more effectively. This was our third visit to Brazil, with previous events held in Campinas and São Paulo in 2016, and Goiânia and Fortaleza in 2018.
Each organization in the global community of Crossref members (that’s currently over 24k organizations in 166 different countries) plays a key role in building the Research Nexus. Any opportunity we have to meet with our members in person is a highlight and a way for us to learn more from each other. The month of January saw three of us travel to Bangkok to attend the first-ever Charleston Conference organised in Asia and to meet with our growing community in Thailand.
For Reference Linking, you need to find the existing DOIs for each work in your reference list, and then display the DOI for that item in your reference list.
Step 1: Find DOIs for the referenced works.
There are a few different options:
Crossref Reference Linking plugin in the OJS platform - if you’re using the OJS platform, make sure to add and enable the Crossref Reference Linking Plugin. The plugin will use the Crossref API to check against your plain-text references and locate possible DOIs. It will then display the reference lists with DOIs on the article landing page.
Simple Text Query - paste your reference lists into this web form, and it will return matches. This is a manual interface, and is suitable for low-volume querying.
XML API - submit XML formatted according to the query schema section to our system as individual requests or as a batch upload. This method requires API skills, and allows you significant control over your query execution and results.
Step 2: Display the DOIs in your reference lists.
Once you have retrieved the relevant DOIs, display them as URLs in your reference lists (following our DOI display guidelines).
Page maintainer: Maryna Kovalyova Last updated: 2025-August-15
