Hello, 

We spend a lot of time thinking about how to help research travel further, that is, how it is found, connected to other outputs, and how it is reused. As we’re standing at the threshold of reaching 2 billion citation links in our metadata, in this newsletter we focus on recent developments in enriching the research nexus and making our metadata more useful for the community. 

From zooming in on how enrichment works at Crossref, and sharing our new funder matching strategy, to strengthening support for data citations, releasing our annual public data file for the Crossref community to explore, and updates from the latest Metadata Sprint in Sao Paulo – read on to dive into the metadata available in the research nexus.

Join us on 13th May for our mid-year community call to see these developments in action, including live demos of funder matching and the new data citation API endpoint (beta). Whether you’re depositing metadata or building tools using it, this call is designed for our community to see what’s new and engage with us directly. 

We will host two calls to accommodate our community in different time zones:

Eastern time zone: 07:00 - 08:45 UTC | Online

Western time zone: 16:00 - 17:45 UTC | Online

Register now

As always, I welcome your feedback. 

Reyhana

Metadata is a form of communication that requires technical as well as social systems to work well. It describes research outputs of various types from journal articles and peer reviews, to grants and datasets that tell a story of their relationships with other works, people, and institutions. Crossref members register their records with us, including the metadata, that is then subsequently enriched in a number of ways. Learn about different layers of enrichment for member-deposited metadata in Crossref, that connect the records in ways that offer useful context for the community.

Explore how Crossref enriches metadata.

Funder matching strengthens one of the core relationships in the research nexus: the link between funding organisations and research outputs. We have recently developed a high performing matching strategy to connect funder names to ROR IDs. We’re currently working to include that in our standard process to enrich members’ metadata while helping funders track the impact of research investments. This matching is the first of six matching tasks we will set out to include on our system. 

See how we are transforming messy and unstructured data into clear relationships.

We are improving the visibility of links between research and underlying data with the launch of a new data citation API endpoint (beta). This new API endpoint uses references and relationships deposited by Crossref members - including those referencing datasets registered with DataCite DOIs. This development comes at the time when we’ve decided that it’s time to move on from Event Data. If you are interested in data citations, you are invited to test the new endpoint, which makes connections easier to find, enabling organisations to track when research is reused, cited, and built upon. 

Learn more about the features of this new endpoint.

While all our metadata is openly available through our REST API at all times, we release a public data file annually containing all metadata records for all content registered with Crossref. And this year's public data file contains 12.7 million new records. You will find that the records deposited with Crossref are interconnected with many types of relationships between works, people, and organisations that tell a story of the research endeavour. Richer connections enable a more complete view of the scholarly record and our public data file makes this possible. The file is available for download via Academic Torrents or directly from AWS. 

Read about what’s new in this year’s public data file.

With the benefit of members’ deposits and following layers of enrichment in Crossref metadata, our Sprints help the community collaborate and experiment with the rich open relational records we hold. Our second Metadata Sprint was held in Brazil in March 2026 in what was our first tri-lingual event fostering community co-creation. Participants posed questions, shared ideas, collaborated on research, and proposed innovative solutions that enhance the use of metadata in scholarly communications in their region.  You can watch the recording of a showcase of all 8 projects created at the event, presented by the participants in English, Portuguese and Spanish. 

Watch a recording of the showcase now.