As we finish celebrating our 25th anniversary, we can look back on a truly transformational year, defined by the successful delivery of several long-planned, foundational projects—as well as updates to our teams, services, and fees—that position Crossref for success over the next quarter century as essential open scholarly infrastructure. In our update at the end of 2024, we highlighted that we had restructured our leadership team and paused some projects. The changes made in 2024 positioned us for a year of getting things done in 2025. We launched cross-functional programs, modernised our systems, strengthened connections with our growing global community, and streamlined a bunch of technical and business operations while continuing to grow our staff, members, content, relationships, and community connections.
Crossref turned twenty-five this year, and our 2025 Annual Meeting became more than a celebration—it was a shared moment to reflect on how far open scholarly infrastructure has come and where we, as a community, are heading next.
Over two days in October, hundreds of participants joined online and in local satellite meetings in Madrid, Nairobi, Medan, Bogotá, Washington D.C., and London––a reminder that our community spans the globe. The meetings offered updates, community highlights, and a look at what’s ahead for our shared metadata network––including plans to connect funders, platforms, and AI tools across the global research ecosystem.
In my latest conversations with research funders, I talked with Hannah Hope, Open Research Lead at Wellcome, and Melissa Harrison, Team Leader of Literature Services at Europe PMC. Wellcome and Europe PMC are working together to realise the potential of funding metadata and the Crossref Grant Linking System for, among other things, programmatic grantee reporting. In this blog, we explore how this partnership works and how the Crossref Grant Linking System is supporting Wellcome in realising their Open Science vision.
In January 2026, our new annual membership fee tier takes effect. The new tier is US$200 for member organisations that operate on publishing revenue or expenses (whichever is higher) of up to US$1,000 annually. We announced the Board’s decision, making it possible in July, and––as you can infer from Amanda’s latest blog––this is the first such change to the annual membership fee tiers in close to 20 years!
The new fee tier resulted from the consultation process and fees review undertaken as part of the Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability program, carried out with the help of our Membership and Fees Committee (made up of representatives from member organisations and community partners). The program is ongoing, and the new fee tier, intended to make Crossref membership more accessible, is one of the first changes it helped us determine.
If you take a peek at our blog, you’ll notice that metadata and community are the most frequently used categories. This is not a coincidence – community is central to everything we do at Crossref. Our first-ever Metadata Sprint was a natural step in strengthening both. Cue fanfare!. And what better way of celebrating 25 years of Crossref?
We designed the Crossref Metadata Sprint as a relatively short event where people can form teams and tackle short problems. What kind of problems? While we expected many to involve coding, teams also explored documenting, translating, researching—anything that taps into our open, member-curated metadata. Our motivation behind this format was to create a space for networking, collaboration, and feedback, centered on co-creation using the scholarly metadata from our REST API, the Public Data File, and other sources.
What have we learned in planning
The journey towards the event was filled with valuable lessons and learnings from our community. Our initial call received submissions from 71 people, which was exciting but presented the first challenge: we felt our event would work better with a relatively smaller group. An additional challenge we faced was the enthusiasm from people from different regions of the world who were eager to join, but needed support to attend in person. It reminded us how global our community is, and how important it is to think about different ways of making participation possible, especially in future events.
We also wanted to make sure that participation wasn’t limited by technical background. The selection process included a preliminary review by several members of our team to bring in a mix of perspectives and reduce bias. The event welcomed participants from all kinds of expertise levels, including colleagues who had never worked with APIs before. We sought to provide common ground for all with several group calls, where we presented introductions to our tools and used the opportunity to collect requests about tools, specific data, and questions from the participants that could enhance their preparation during the sprint.
At the Crossref Metadata Sprint
I’ve recently stumbled upon the following quote from a recognized data scientist:
Numbers have an important story to tell. They rely on you to give them a clear and convincing voice. (Stephen Few) 1
It made me think that we can replace numbers for metadata and the idea still holds. Surrounded by the paleontological collections of the National Museum of Natural History, on 8th of April in Madrid, 21 participants and 5 Crossref staff came together to work on twelve different projects. These ranged from improvements to our Public Data file formats and exploring metadata completeness, to tackling multilingual metadata challenges, understanding citation impact for retracted works, and connecting Retraction Watch metadata with other knowledge graphs metadata.
The different teams that participated in the first Crossref Metadata Sprint.
The initial hours were the most energetic (but not chaotic!) as most of the participants had the chance to interact in person for the first time, ideas were exchanged, and pre-formed groups became more stable (however, one of the advantages of the format is that teams don't have to be rigid). Twelve coffee- and tea-powered projects started taking shape, a few of which are part of larger ideas under development. By the end of the second day, we saw:
Author changes between preprints and published articles.
Coverage of funding information by publisher.
Enriching citations with Crossref metadata.
Funding metadata completeness.
Improvement to the Public Data File.
Interoperability between Crossref DOIs and hash-based identifiers.
University of Tetova’s metadata coverage.
Retraction Watch data mash-up.
Perspective about AI-driven multilingual metadata.
Public Data File in Google Big Query.
Visibility of retractions across citations.
Visualising Crossref geographic member data.
Our team worked as part of some of these projects, providing valuable insights and feedback to the participants. We ended the first session with a group dinner and re-energised for the second day, which started with everybody fully immersed in their tasks. As we approached the conclusion, the groups started preparing some quick slides for a short presentation (that you can find here).
Our team and the participants left excited and looking forward to the next opportunity to collaborate. We certainly see the potential of recreating these spaces, and we’ll work on future editions in a different location. All of the project summaries and notes will remain stored in our metadata sprint Gitlab repo. Would you like to know more about any of these ideas? Let us know in the comments.
The first Crossref Metadata Sprint in a nutshell
Participants
None of this would’ve been possible without our enthusiastic participants. Huge thanks to everyone! Here is the full list of those who attended our inaugural Sprint:
