If you are reading this blog on our website, you may have noticed that alongside each post we now list a Crossref DOI link, which was not the case a few months ago (though we have retroactively added DOIs to all older posts too). You can find the persistent link for this post right above this paragraph. Go on, click on it, we’ll wait. Are you back here? Good.

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 – ommunity 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?

This post is based on an interview with Sciety team at eLife. What is Sciety? Sciety is a community-led initiative developed by a team within eLife, that brings together expert evaluations of papers in one place. It is focused on preprints, preprint review and curation. Can you tell us more about how Sciety works? Sciety aggregates preprints from different sources to facilitate the processes of discovery and evaluation.

English version Dado que Crossref celebra su 25º aniversario este año, nos gustaría destacar algunas de las regiones activas y comprometidas en nuestra comunidad global. Durante los primeros 25 años, la composición de los miembros de Crossref ha evolucionado significativamente. De un puñado de grandes editoriales fundadoras, ahora tenemos más de 22.000 miembros de 160 países.

The Crossref Nominating Committee invites expressions of interest to join the Board of Directors of Crossref for the term starting in January 2026. The committee will gather responses from those interested and create the slate of candidates that our membership will vote on in an election in September.

In its March 2025 meeting, the Crossref board unanimously voted to update both the Crossref bylaws and the Crossref membership terms to: Provide more clarity and alignment between our bylaws and membership terms, where they had become out of sync over the years. Reflect previous board motions and bring both documents up-to-date with current processes for suspending and revoking membership, and reviewing those decisions.

Marking our 25th anniversary, we launch the Crossref Metadata Awards to emphasise our community’s role in stewarding and enriching the scholarly record. We are pleased to recognise Noyam Publishers, GigaScience Press, eLife, American Society for Microbiology, and Universidad La Salle Arequipa Perú with the Crossref Metadata Excellence Awards, and Instituto Geologico y Minero de España wins the Crossref Metadata Enrichment Award.

We’ve been accelerating our metadata development efforts and recently released version 5.4 of our metadata schema, and are planning to release version 5.5 (including support for multiple contributor roles and the CRediT taxonomy) this summer. We will also extend our grants schema based on the Funders Advisory Group work, and make progress on other changes as set out on our new metadata development roadmap.

Crossref is a membership organisation, and it’s the global community of members that creates the Research Nexus together. Meeting our community locally is a highlight and an important learning experience. This year, we started by connecting with a growing community in Accra, Ghana - our first in-person event in the country included in our GEM program. From 14 members in 2023 to 31 in 2025, our community in Ghana is blooming.

2025 Update In 2022, we set out to update our DOI display guidelines with the intention to adopt the proposals in 2025. It’s important to note from the outset that we are not mandating any immediate changes to the DOI display guidelines. Instead, we are working with our community to co-create a solution that addresses the diverse needs of all users, rather than imposing technical changes that may not suit everyone.

Sponsors make Crossref membership accessible to organizations that would otherwise face barriers to joining us. They also provide support to facilitate participation, which increases the amount and diversity of metadata in the global Research Nexus. This in turn improves discoverability and transparency of scholarship behind the works.