Madhura Amdekar is a Community Engagement Manager at Crossref. Her primary responsibility is to engage with scholarly editors, publishers, and editorial organizations to develop engagement programmes that help this community to leverage rich metadata for asserting the integrity of the scholarly record. Prior to joining Crossref, she was a Senior Associate at Wiley, where she was overseeing an editor support service. Madhura has a PhD. in Behavioural Ecology from the Indian Institute of Science (Bengaluru, India), for which she studied the colour-change behaviour of a tropical agamid lizard. She has a special interest in research integrity and she is based in the Netherlands. Outside of work, she enjoys reading fiction, embroidering, and traveling.
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.
Madhura Amdekar, Thursday, Aug 6, 2026
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.
We are pleased to announce the re-launch of the Crossref Service Providers program. From today, we are accepting applications from organisations providing tools for metadata registration to Crossref members. Participation in this program is free and the application involves an accreditation process to determine eligibility and the appropriate participation tier.
As a membership organisation, Crossref supports its members to provide rich and complete metadata which facilitates integrity judgements, increases discoverability, linking among scholarly objects and activities, and improves transparency. Service providers are key collaborators in this work because they enable our members to adopt better metadata practices.
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”.
Each organization in the global community of Crossref members (that’s currently over 25k 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.
