In December 2026, we plan to publish new Crossref Member Practices which will set out the standards we expect all Crossref members to meet. From August to October 2026 we are consulting with our members on a draft of these Member Practices. This blog provides the background to this, and explains how you can share your views.
The Crossref community in India is as diverse as the region that it represents, comprising 1605 members, 11 sponsoring organisations, and 5 ambassadors, who between them cover the length and breadth of this country. Between November 2025 and March 2026, we organised three webinars focused on supporting this community with best metadata and publishing practices. We collaborated with the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) to embed understanding of metadata’s role in the greater context of publishing integrity.
PID strategies are being written around the world right now, and the decisions being made will shape the scholarly record for decades. After 25 years running open scholarly infrastructure—now on behalf of 25,000 members in 167 countries—Crossref has an informed perspective on what those decisions should ideally rest on. Today we’re setting it out in our first position paper: Persistent identifiers in research infrastructure policy: the need for a holistic approach. You can read it online or download the PDF; it’s a 16-minute read.
Research is rarely limited to a single contributor performing a single role. Behind every research output are people contributing in various ways: software development, data analyses, methodology design, and much more. Often, the same person contributes in several of these ways. Until now, Crossref metadata could only capture part of that picture, but this is changing with Schema 5.5.
Learn more about conflicts and the conflict report. Conflicts are usually flagged upon deposit, but sometimes this doesn’t happen, creating a missed conflict.
A missed conflict may occur for several reasons:
Two DOIs are deposited for the same item, but the metadata is slightly different (DOI A deposited with an online publication date of 2011, DOI B deposited with a print publication date of 1972)
DOIs were deposited with a unique item number. Before 2008, DOIs containing unique item numbers (supplied in the <publisher_item> element) were not checked for conflicts.
The missed conflict report compares article titles across data for a specified journal or journals. To retrieve a missed conflict report for a title:
The missed conflict interface will pop up in a second window. Enter your email address in the appropriate field. Multiple title IDs can be included in a single request if needed
A report will be emailed to the email address you provided. This report lists all DOIs with identical article titles that have not been flagged as conflicts.
Page maintainer: Isaac Farley Last updated: 2024-July-22
icon at the far right of the title