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.
We are very pleased to kick off the New Year with another important schema update and the news that a Grant DOI field is now supported for all record types. This means that Crossref members can explicitly include the Crossref Grant IDs as part of their DOI metadata records for publications and any other output type, accurately linking research outputs to the funding that made it possible, all through metadata. We hope that our members will leverage this to respond to recent calls for stronger funding transparency and best practices for reporting funding sources in research outputs.
Some of the typical users (outer) and uses (inner) of Crossref metadata
People using Crossref metadata need it for all sorts of reasons including metaresearch (researchers studying research itself such as through bibliometric analyses), publishing trends (such as finding works from an individual author or reviewer), or incorporation into specific databases (such as for discovery and search or in subject-specific repositories), and many more detailed use cases.
All Crossref metadata is open and available for reuse without restriction. Our 170 million records include information about research objects like articles, grants and awards, preprints, conference papers, book chapters, datasets, and more. The information covers elements like titles, contributors, descriptions, dates, references, connecting identifiers such as Crossref DOIs, ROR IDs and ORCID iDs, together with all sorts of metadata that helps to determine provenance, trust, and reusability—such as funding, clinical trial, and license information.
Anyone can retrieve and use >170 million records without restriction. So there are no fees to use the metadata but if you really rely on it then you might like to sign up for Metadata Plus which offers greater predictability, higher rate limits, monthly data dumps in XML and JSON, and access to dedicated support from our team.
Options for retrieving metadata
All Crossref metadata is completely open and available to all. Whatever your experience with metadata, there are several tools, techniques, and support guides to help—whether you’re just beginning, exploring occasionally, or need an ongoing reliable integration.
BEGINNING?
You’ve heard Crossref metadata might be useful and want to know where to start.
We recommend you start with metadata search, funder search, or simple text query for matching references to DOIs. Also take a look at the REST API which only needs you to get a JSON plugin to view the results. We are building tutorials to demonstrate the possibilities, starting with a Python notebook and an R notebook. If it’s retractions and corrections that you need, check out the frequently-updated csv file of the Retraction Watch dataset that we acquired and opened in 2023.
EXPLORING?
You have some specific queries and want a lightweight way to use Crossref metadata.
You rely on Crossref metadata and need to incorporate it into your product at scale.
You might want to jump straight to subscribing to Metadata Plus, which is our premium service for the REST API that comes with monthly data dumps in JSON and XML, higher rate limits, and fast support. But we always recommend that you try out the public version first to make sure it will work for your product. If you’re looking for a single DOI record in multiple formats (e.g. RDF, BibTex, CSL) you can use content negotiation.
Watch the animated introduction to metadata retrieval
