Position paper: persistent identifiers in research infrastructure policy - Crossref

The Research Nexus vision for a more connected scholarly community

Crossref envisions “a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organizations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society”. This Research Nexus expands on the importance of research objects being persistently and uniquely identified. The scholarly community has an established practice of connecting things such as citations to others’ work and it is increasingly critical to identify relationships beyond citations, bringing together published work, unpublished work, institutions, individuals, and identifying the actions that they take e.g., funding, publishing, creating, modifying, citing, and sharing. The Research Nexus brings together metadata and relationships to build a joined-up picture of the scholarly ecosystem and helps everyone identify these relationships and how they change through time. This vision is possible if all parts of the scholarly ecosystem (and beyond) work together, including various scholarly infrastructure organizations.

You are Crossref - Crossref

Crossref runs open infrastructure to link research objects, entities, and actions—creating a lasting and reusable scholarly record that underpins open science. Together with our >25,000 members in 167 countries, we drive metadata exchange and support 2.1 billion monthly API queries, facilitating global research communication, for the benefit of society.

Who Will Keep Research Data Infrastructure Open and Running?

The scientific community must consider the longevity of open research infrastructure—why it might fail and how to prevent it.

Who Will Keep Research Data Infrastructure Open and Running?

The scientific community must consider the longevity of open research infrastructure—why it might fail and how to prevent it.

Crossref: The sustainable source of community-owned scholarly metadata

This paper describes the scholarly metadata collected and made available by Crossref, as well as its importance in the scholarly research ecosystem. Containing over 106 million records and expanding at an average rate of 11% a year, Crossref’s metadata has become one of the major sources of scholarly data for publishers, authors, librarians, funders, and researchers. The metadata set consists of 13 content types, including not only traditional types, such as journals and conference papers, but also data sets, reports, preprints, peer reviews, and grants. The metadata is not limited to basic publication metadata, but can also include abstracts and links to full text, funding and license information, citation links, and the information about corrections, updates, retractions, etc. This scale and breadth make Crossref a valuable source for research in scientometrics, including measuring the growth and impact of science and understanding new trends in scholarly communications. The metadata is available through a number of APIs, including REST API and OAI-PMH. In this paper, we describe the kind of metadata that Crossref provides and how it is collected and curated. We also look at Crossref’s role in the research ecosystem and trends in metadata curation over the years, including the evolution of its citation data provision. We summarize the research used in Crossref’s metadata and describe plans that will improve metadata quality and retrieval in the future.

The Gradual Merging of Repository and CRIS Solutions to Meet Institutional Research Information Management Requirements

Much has been said in recent times about the alleged dichotomy between Institutional Repositories (IRs) and Current Research Information Systems (CRISs). According to this highly ideological argument, IRs would be the platforms to support the non- commercial initiative jointly carried out by HEIs – and specifically their Libraries – in order to freely disseminate their research outputs, whereas CRISs would support the whole institutional research information management (RIM) with special emphasis on projects and funding. RIM being an activity oriented towards reporting for research assessment exercises and thus tightly connected to the institutional funding, the support from the Management at HEIs for CRIS implementation and operation and for the Research Office traditionally in charge of such tasks would be much higher than for the much less relevant IR. Moreover, the awareness of researchers and scholars towards such platforms will usually be much higher for the CRIS – from whose accurate and complete depiction of their research activity their salaries will ultimately depend – and it won’t be unusual to collect complaints on the need to ensure that both systems are simultaneously fed with the appropriate, often duplicated information. According to this conception, it is often hard to get the institutional Research Office and Library to work together for improving the end-user experience by enhancing their system interoperability. While much of this may still be happening at a number of HEIs, the general landscape is swiftly evolving and it's not that accurate anymore to describe the RIM system configuration at institutions in such oversimplified terms. CRIS/IR interoperability is now a fairly widespread feature that will allow both platforms to efficiently exchange information and reinforce each other's features, and especially the borders between what each of these platforms is and does are becoming increasingly blurred. Commercial CRISs are gradually becoming compliant with the OAI-PMH protocol and thus becoming able to offer institutions an integrated repository functionality, while the main open source IR platforms have now developed extended data models that will allow them to deliver features traditionally associated to CRISs such as project and funding management, hence becoming suitable solutions for research institutions where purchasing or developing a highly-sophisticated CRIS is not a top priority. This paper aims to describe the areas where CRIS/IR interoperability is taking place, and will provide a set of use cases for institutional research information system configuration involving IRs, CRISs and a combination of both. These will show how both systems are now increasingly merging for best serving institutions and their researchers.

Governing the scholarly AI Commons – Open Future

New report explores how academic communities can shape AI governance in research and publishing, from regulation to community-led approaches.

Governing by dismantling: tech oligarchy and the stifling of public data infrastructure

Published in Science as Culture (Ahead of Print, 2026)

The Discovery Engine: A Framework for AI-Driven Synthesis and Navigation of Scientific Knowledge Landscapes

Scientific progress relies on the effective accumulation, synthesis, and critical evaluation of knowledge. Traditionally, the well-documented, peer reviewed publication served as the primary standard for filtering and disseminating credible findings within the scientific community. Recently, however, we are witnessing an unprecedented acceleration in research output, a veritable explosion of scientific publications across all disciplines [1]. Yet, this very abundance creates a paradox: the sheer volume threatens to overwhelm the mechanisms designed for its assimilation and synthesis. Researchers, even within highly specialized subfields, face an almost insurmountable challenge in keeping abreast of relevant developments, integrating disparate findings, and identifying the truly novel signals amidst the noise [2]. This information overload contributes to disciplinary fragmentation, hindering the cross-pollination of ideas essential for disruptive innovation [3]. Furthermore, persistent concerns regarding "reproducibility crisis" [2], predatory journals, inflation of research areas[4], growing retractions and the potential influences of bibliometrics on research direction [5] highlight systemic challenges in validating and prioritizing scientific contributions to fundamental knowledge.

Manuscript submission systems and metadata completeness in Crossref: Patterns and associations

The importance of open research information, particularly publication metadata, is widely recognised. Crossref is one of the most important infrastructures for registering open metadata as part of DOI record registration. It is widely known, however, that the metadata of many publications is far from complete, with many publishers making certain metadata openly available, but failing to do so for other metadata elements. Publishers’ ability to register this metadata with Crossref depends on their capacity to capture and retain this data in their production workflows. Manuscript submission systems are an important, yet largely overlooked, factor in the extent to which publishers make metadata available through Crossref. In this paper, we present the results of an analysis investigating the relation between the level of metadata that publishers deposit with Crossref and the submission systems that they deploy for their journals. We have looked at the 153 publishers with the largest amounts of publications in Crossref and concentrate on the four most commonly used systems: Editorial Manager, ScholarOne, Open Journal Systems (OJS) and eJournalPress. We show that some submission systems appear better suited to capturing certain metadata elements. However, there are always cases where publishers using the same system differ widely in the level of metadata they register, suggesting that technology is not the only prohibiting factor and other considerations are at play.

Investing in resilient infrastructure to safeguard scientific knowledge

Political threats to scientific data demand coordinated, resilient open infrastructure — IOI is helping build it.

Center for Open Science

At the Center for Open Science, our mission is to increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scholarly research. Promoting these practices within the research funding and publishing communities accelerates scientific progress

The Risks of Industry Influence in Tech Research

Emerging information technologies like social media, search engines, and AI can have a broad impact on public health, political institutions, social dynamics, and the natural world. It is critical to develop a scientific understanding of these impacts to inform evidence-based technology policy that minimizes harm and maximizes benefits. Unlike most other global-scale scientific challenges, however, the data necessary for scientific progress are generated and controlled by the same industry that might be subject to evidence-based regulation. Moreover, technology companies historically have been, and continue to be, a major source of funding for this field. These asymmetries in information and funding raise significant concerns about the potential for undue industry influence on the scientific record. In this Perspective, we explore how technology companies can influence our scientific understanding of their products. We argue that science faces unique challenges in the context of technology research that will require strengthening existing safeguards and constructing wholly new ones.

Designing a multi-sided data platform: findings from the International Data Spaces case

The paper presents the findings from a 3-year single-case study conducted in connection with the International Data Spaces (IDS) initiative. The IDS represents a multi-sided platform (MSP) for secure and trusted data exchange, which is governed by an institutionalized alliance of different stakeholder organizations. The paper delivers insights gained during the early stages of the platform’s lifecycle (i.e. the platform design process). More specifically, it provides answers to three research questions, namely how alliance-driven MSPs come into existence and evolve, how different stakeholder groups use certain governance mechanisms during the platform design process, and how this process is influenced by regulatory instruments. By contrasting the case of an alliance-driven MSP with the more common approach of the keystone-driven MSP, the results of the case study suggest that different evolutionary paths can be pursued during the early stages of an MSP’s lifecycle. Furthermore, the IDS initiative considers trust and data sovereignty more relevant regulatory instruments compared to pricing, for example. Finally, the study advances the body of scientific knowledge with regard to data being a boundary resource on MSPs.

Two billion citation links in Crossref help research travel further - Crossref

We’ve recently reached an important milestone for the research nexus: the works in our metadata corpus are now connected with over 2 billion citation links! This is a great opportunity to share a dedicated dataset and discuss why these are important for science.