Key Takeaways from the 2025 SSP Compensation and Benefits Study

A look at the data from the second year of the SSP Compensation and Benefits Benchmarking Study.

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US Supreme Court Ruling in Favor of Cox Protects Internet Access

Last Updated on March 26, 2026, 4:50 pm ET On March 25, the US Supreme Court ruled that internet service provider (ISP) Cox is not liable for secondary copyright infringement for...

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Postsecondary Value & Public Trust

Building on a decade or more of research and practice, we recently formed a new program area, Postsecondary Value & Public Trust. This program advances the economic, social, and civic value of postsecondary education. We partner with state agencies, build networks of institutions, and collaborate with field leaders to improve affordability, strengthen workforce alignment, and maximize value, all key levers in rebuilding public trust in higher education.

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Using Open Source Tools to Capture Closed Captions and Timecode

Vrecord is open source video capture software used by video preservation labs across the nation, with one of its most notable features being the ability to natively capture and encode FFV1 Matroska files. Until recently, the NAVCC Video Lab has not been able to capture all tapes into FFV1 Matroska due to some of vrecord’s limitations. This blog post describes a number of FADGI funded updates to vrecord which expanded the tool’s ability to digitize various video tape formats from the Library of Congress' collection.

Examining the Academic, Labor Market, and Economic Outcomes of Community College Bachelor’s Degrees

Increasingly, a bachelor’s degree is required for career advancement and economic security. On average, individuals with a bachelor’s degree earn higher wages and have greater job stability than those with less education. Community colleges, which enroll over 40 percent of undergraduates, often serve as the starting point for students seeking a bachelor’s degree, particularly for […]

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Research Paper (preprint): How are AI Agents Used? Evidence From 177,000 MCP Tools

The preprint linked below was recently shared on arXiv. Title How are AI Agents Used? Evidence From 177,000 MCP Tools Author Merlin Stein UK AI Security Institute, University of Oxford Source via arXiv DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2603.23802 Abstract Today’s AI agents are built on large language models (LLMs) equipped with tools to access and modify external environments, […]

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How Can Scholarly Publishing Overcome Its ‘SDG Inertia’?

Is there an inertia slowing efforts by scholarly publishers toward achieving the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)?

The post How Can Scholarly Publishing Overcome Its ‘SDG Inertia’? appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.

Unlocking the Path Toward Innovation in Research Libraries: Highlights of ARL President’s Institute 2026

Last Updated on March 25, 2026, 12:31 pm ET The 2026 Association of Research Libraries (ARL) President’s Institute convened in Chicago-Rosemont on February 11–12 at a time when questions of...

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Open Source Research Software and Open Science

For decades, the Open Science movement—driven by both funder mandates and scholarly norms—has sought to make academic research in all disciplines accessible to everyone, both in and outside the academy. Yet while the academic research enterprise has made significant strides in building infrastructure to support open access publication, the sharing of research data, and other […]

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ALA/ARL Section 230 Senate Commerce Hearing Letter

Last Updated on March 25, 2026, 9:22 am ET On March 24, 2026, the ARL and ALA sent a letter to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation reiterating...

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Guest Post — Senior Librarians as Publisher Change Agents: What’s the Business Case? (Part 1)

Today's guest blogger discusses Library Relations roles within publishing organizations and asks, what do both publishers and librarians hope for from these appointments?

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Ithaka S+R Publishes Library Partnership Development Framework

From an Ithaka S+R Blog Post by Melissa Blakenstein: Public and academic libraries often serve the same populations through different institutional structures. In both settings, libraries regularly serve students balancing coursework, jobs, and family responsibilities, as well as community members seeking reliable internet access, workforce resources, or a place to study and connect. These shared […]

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New Report From IFLA: Connecting Libraries to Empower Communities

From the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA): A new report presents the key findings of the Libraries Boosting Connecitivity (LBC) initiative launched in 2024 to collect crucial data on how libraries are navigating and adapting to the digital landscape. The report offers insights from the selected pilot countries and provides an analysis of library […]

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Jenny, by Sigrid Undset

A young woman’s life unravels through a series of romantic entanglements.

The Cruise of the Nona, by Hilaire Belloc

Hilaire Belloc cruises around Wales and the English Channel on his sailboat, writing on a variety of topics.

Brewster Kahle to Receive Computer History Museum’s Fellow Award on April 25

Brewster Kahle, founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive, has been named a 2026 Fellow by the Computer History Museum. The annual Fellow Award, to be presented on April […]

Announcing the Library Partnership Development Framework

Across sectors, organizations are increasingly recognizing that no single institution can meet the full range of needs facing students and communities today. Effective partnerships, grounded in shared goals, clear roles, and sustained collaboration, are essential for addressing complex challenges like access to education, workforce development, digital inclusion, and basic needs support. Libraries offer a compelling […]

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New Research Platform: MediManus: Preserving Ancient Medical Heritage Through Digital Collaboration

From the Center For Hellenic Studies, Harvard University: MediManus provides access to digital reproductions of Greek medical manuscripts preserved in libraries worldwide, along with original scientific information about their transmission and significance in modern medicine. The platform aims to revitalize the study of ancient Greek medicine and promote renewed scientific research by making these historical texts accessible […]

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Scholarly Society Sustainability in an Unstable Publishing World: Reasons to be Cheerful, Parts 1, 2, and 3.

In this post, Robert attempts to embrace a gloomy optimism as he muses on the state of publishing at scholarly societies.

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New Resource: “ORION Dashboard: Bringing Open Research Data Within Reach”

From a Leiden Madtrics Post by Juan Pablo Bascur Cifuentes The ORION dashboard enables easy exploration of CWTS OpenAlex data on BigQuery, letting users analyse institutions, funders, and research topics via interactive visualisations and reproducible SQL queries without any coding skills required. [Clip] What the dashboard does The current version centres on two types of […]

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Strengthening support for data citations and saying goodbye to Event Data

We’re excited to announce a new data citation API endpoint and are seeking your feedback. The new service makes existing data citation relationships in our metadata available, thereby surfacing this part of the research nexus. At the same time, we’ve decided that it’s time to move on from Event Data.

Time to say goodbye

Metadata about published scholarly research has evolved, and continues to evolve in exciting ways. A published article, book, or conference paper is only a single piece of the puzzle. A host of digital identifiers and items can be put together to form a more complete picture of a research project. This is what forms the basis of the research nexus—a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organisations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society.

Ten years ago, we launched Event Data to surface mentions of research around the Internet. What were people saying about published research? Could this discourse contribute to post-publication review and validation? We set up Event Data to capture use of Crossref DOIs in the online world from a variety of sources, including blog posts, social media, websites, and annotations. The idea was that diverse mentions (or “events”) could supplement traditional citation counts as a way to capture the value of research.

Today, the focus is increasingly on transparency, research integrity, and the completeness of outputs. Trust in research is shaped by knowing who the funder was, being able to reanalyse the original data, or checking for bugs in the analysis code. There are also more identifiers for objects within the research space and they are used more widely. This shift is evident in the relatively low usage of Event Data. We can no longer justify the resources and cost that goes into maintaining it as a service. Instead, we will focus on enabling and surfacing relationships between different types of research outputs, starting with links to datasets.

For these reasons, we have decided to sunset the Event Data API and from 23 April 2026 it will no longer be available (although access to historical data will still be possible on request). In its place, we’re making available an API endpoint for data citations.

Visibility for data citations

The new API endpoint focuses solely on data citations and uses references and relationships deposited by Crossref members, including Crossref articles referencing datasets with either Crossref or DataCite DOIs. While our metadata contains many data citations, and some of them are labelled as data citations, it is often difficult to find them because they are swamped in number by other citations. If you are trying to get data citations directly from our REST API, it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. This new endpoint makes connections easier to find, enabling organisations to track when research is reused, cited, and built upon. By putting this metadata into a dedicated service, we are making it easier for interested organisations to track and find data citations. Our goal is to make existing sets of connections easier to access, giving clarity to how scholarly works link to the data that supports them.

This beta version will allow us the opportunity to incorporate feedback from the community and make changes to improve delivery. We received early positive feedback from a number of interested organisations. Later this year we will assess whether it is ready for production, needs more work, or if insufficient interest from the community suggests we should pursue a different solution.

Anyone interested in data citations is invited to try the new endpoint. Please let us know your feedback via the community forum. You can find supporting documentation on our website and Swagger documentation, including the opportunity to try out features.

ARL Daily Intelligence (March 23–26)

Last Updated on March 26, 2026, 3:04 pm ET The ARL Daily Intelligence is the trusted source of news and analysis for library leaders and advocates. Released Monday through Thursday, the ARL Daily...

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Join Internet Archive and Partners for the National Summit on Local News Preservation

Join Internet Archive, Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), and the Poynter Institute for the National Summit on Local News Preservation. This event will bring together the producers, preservers, and users […]

Art and Protest!

Art can be a powerful tool for protest, activism, and resistance. The following is a selection of books published within the past 15 years from…

What’s New Online at the Library of Congress: March 2026

In our Spring 2026 edition of "What’s New Online at the Library of Congress," we share updates to the Library's digital collections, web archives, datasets, and more. Click through to read all about it!

From the Community Survey to action: the OpenCitations Roadmap for 2026

In February, we published a blog post presenting the main outcomes of the Community Survey we conducted between October and December 2025 to help guide the future direction of OpenCitations. As we explained in that post, the data collection and analysis phase resulted in a report that we have made openly available on Zenodo. Following the publication of the report, the OpenCitations Team entered a phase of internal evaluation to define priorities for the coming year. In doing so, we carefully considered the need to ensure that OpenCitations continues to grow in a sustainable … Continue reading From the Community Survey to action: the OpenCitations Roadmap for 2026

The Role of Gossip in Scholarly Publishing

Let’s say the quiet part out loud: gossip plays an important role in scholarly publishing. But is that a bad thing?

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Chance, by Joseph Conrad

The daughter of a banker jailed for fraud spontanously decides to marry a sea captain after a brief encounter.

The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective, by Catherine Louisa Pirkis

A female private investigator solves crimes in late-Victorian England.

Enriching Europe PMC with SciLifeLab's ROR ID

Europe PMC has long been at the forefront of ROR adoption. In their latest ROR-related project, they've used ROR in publication metadata to help their partner SciLifeLab, a major research facility and funder, make almost 17,000 linked research publications discoverable on Europe PMC. Read on to learn more about this important open metadata initiative.

The Hoosier Schoolmaster, by Edward Eggleston

A young man takes on a difficult teaching assignment in rural Indiana.

Journal Article: “Evaluating Open Access Advantages for Citations and Altmetrics (2011-21): A Dynamic and Evolving Relationship Open Access”

The article linked below was recently published by Quantitative Science Studies. Title Evaluating Open Access Advantages for Citations and Altmetrics (2011-21): A Dynamic and Evolving Relationship Open Access Authors Mike Taylor University of Wolverhampton Source Quantitative Science Studies 1–60. DOI: 10.1162/QSS.a.470 Abstract Differences between the impacts of Open Access (OA) and non-OA research have been observed […]

The post Journal Article: “Evaluating Open Access Advantages for Citations and Altmetrics (2011-21): A Dynamic and Evolving Relationship Open Access” appeared first on Library Journal infoDOCKET.

Celebrating Women’s History Month 2026 in ARL Libraries

Last Updated on March 23, 2026, 1:23 pm ET Join ARL and our member libraries in celebrating women’s history during the month of March. Below is a roundup of events,...

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Diogenes’ lantern and the researcher’s self-examination: scientific integrity under pressure

Using the metaphor of Diogenes’ lantern, Ricardo Limongi and Marcio Pimenta discuss contemporary scientific practice. More than merely offering a critique, the image of the lantern invites a deeper reflection: how to turn the light inward, engaging in self-examination, ethical responsibility, and integrity while confronting a context that is often unfavorable to researchers in Brazil. …Read More →

The post Diogenes’ lantern and the researcher’s self-examination: scientific integrity under pressure first appeared on SciELO in Perspective.

Guest Post — All the Seats at the Table: A Summary and Status Review of the NIH APC Caps Proposal

Today's post considers the NIH proposal to implement APC funding caps, public responses it engendered, and, while we await a final decision, and shares thoughts on what may come next.

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Short Fiction, by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke

A collection of short fiction by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, ordered by date of publication.

New Journal Article: How Artificial Intelligence is Reshaping Information Literacy in Academic Libraries: A Global Scientometric Analysis (2020–2025)

The article linked below was published today by The Journal of Academic Librarianship. Title How Artificial Intelligence is Reshaping Information Literacy in Academic Libraries: A Global Scientometric Analysis (2020–2025) Authors Munazza Jabeen Humboldt zu universitaire, Berlin, Germany Allama Iqbal Open University, Islamabad, Pakistan Claudia Lux Humboldt zu universitaire, Berlin, Germany Source The Journal of Academic […]

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STM Plants a Flag About Responsible Use of Research Content in GenAI

A new STM Association paper seeks to foster a discussion about how GenAI systems can reliably incorporate scholarly research.

The post STM Plants a Flag About Responsible Use of Research Content in GenAI appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.

On metadata enrichment

Metadata is communication; it can tell a story about research and paint a picture for others to respond to and learn from, across the world and throughout the forthcoming generations. Metadata can feel technical with words like ‘infrastructure’ and ‘schema’, and sometimes, like tech in general, it comes with hyperbole. But metadata really is part art (storytelling and pictures) and part science (structured models and standards) with both aspects being equally important, and requiring people as well as systems. That necessary combination of human and machine involvement also makes metadata challenging.

Crossref, as the earliest adopter of DOIs specialising in scholarly research, became synonymous with DOIs in this community. However, not everyone realises that DOIs can be registered with any one of nine different agencies, which are all separate organisations with entirely separate systems that do not at present integrate or connect. And what’s more – there isn’t a central or shared “DOI schema” – each agency develops the metadata for the purposes of their organisation or community. In Crossref’s case, with our vision to create the research nexus as a complete and robust network of relationships between objects, people, and institutions of scholarship – that community encompasses the whole of the research enterprise.

The immense 180 million records of research outputs in Crossref are maintained in a system that 24,000 member organisations have already invested in. Those records benefit from rich and format-appropriate metadata schema, developed in close collaboration with the community, which makes it possible for our members to offer contextual information about each object they register. We have a long history of working with our members on recording that context, creating tools, and providing support to adopt standard metadata, enriching the context for the benefit of the scholarly community, and society at large.

Of course, those metadata records are not perfect, both in terms of quality and completeness, and the frustration around gaps in metadata is particularly strong. We are working to improve the quality and completeness of the metadata from many angles: by working with the community to understand their needs and obstacles, by identifying and analysing potential sources for additional metadata, by maintaining and adopting the existing system to changing environment, and by planning a new flexible system that will allow third-party assertions and automated enrichment workflows.

In 2020, we published a paper for the inaugural issue of Quantitative Science Studies on Crossref: The Sustainable Source of Community-Owned Scholarly Metadata and blogged an introduction to it under Crossref Metadata for Bibliometrics. One of the things our analyses in 2019 showed was that over 80% of records between 2013-2016 had been updated. Reviewing the numbers recently, we continue to see this stewardship and maintenance of metadata, amounting to almost 70% of records from the past decade being updated at least once. On the dawn of reaching 2 billion citation links, we’d like to share our experience, plans, and views on this ubiquitous activity of updating and connecting metadata – by our members and by automations built into the system by us. Altogether, these constitute the enrichment process to improve the usability of the information for the community.

Metadata available through Crossref

Crossref collects, processes, stores, and shares metadata records for a wide range of research outputs. While each record describes an individual research output, it also mentions other entities and their attributes - and, most importantly, the relationships between them. Two works identified by DOIs, for example, may be linked by a citation relationship. A person identified by an ORCID may be connected to an institution identified by a ROR ID through an affiliation relationship. A preprint and its corresponding journal article, each with its own DOI, can be linked by an “is preprint of” relationship. A research output may be associated with a grant through a “financed by” relationship. Together, these entities and relationships form the foundational building blocks of the research nexus.

As of March 14, 2026, the Crossref database contains 180,034,490 metadata records describing research outputs. You can download all the records and examine them yourself in the latest public data file. The plot below illustrates how the number of works has changed over time, showing that the rate of growth is accelerating.

The metadata records describe research outputs of various types, including:

• journal articles
• books and book chapters
• conference proceedings
• peer reviews
• reports
• datasets
• preprints
• dissertations
• grants
• and more

The majority of works in the Crossref database (67%) are journal articles. However, the distribution of record types has changed considerably over time. Newer types, such as components, datasets, and posted content, are growing more quickly than more traditional ways of communicating research:

Research outputs in the Crossref database are represented by rich metadata records, which may include:

• basic bibliographic metadata (title, publication dates, contributors, journal title, conference name, volume and issue numbers)
• authors’ affiliations and ORCID identifiers
• abstracts and links to full text
• funding metadata, including funders and grant details
• license metadata
• bibliographic reference lists
• clinical trial numbers
• updates such as corrections or retractions
• relationships between works and other entities, such as “is translation of”, “is review of”, “is preprint of”, or “is version of”
• components associated with the work, such as figures, tables, and supplemental materials

All metadata is freely available through the Crossref REST API, and additional services, such as Crossref Search, are also provided.

A natural question is: where does all this metadata come from? This is important for two main reasons. First, it helps address the question of trust, as understanding the origin of the metadata allows users to better assess its reliability. Second, it points us to the right place when investigating or addressing issues or gaps in the data.

At first glance, the answer might seem straightforward: from Crossref members. Crossref members, such as publishers, research institutions, universities, funders, museums, libraries, data and subject repositories, and conference providers, register metadata for the outputs they publish. Crossref stores this metadata and makes it available to the community.

In reality, however, the story is more complicated.

Metadata enrichment layers

The initial metadata deposit is only the beginning of what can become a long and rather fascinating journey. What users can see in our REST API is often the result of a series of updates and additions that occur over time, sometimes coming from multiple sources and happening in different ways. We can think of these ways as enrichment layers.

Each enrichment layer offers opportunities to improve the metadata while also introducing its own considerations and challenges. Rather than forming a sequence of clearly separated stages, these layers intertwine, overlap, and affect one another, collectively shaping how a research output is represented within the research nexus.

Enrichment layers are essential for completeness of the research nexus. If we relied solely on the original, one-off deposits from members, the metadata would be full of gaps, limiting the usefulness of any analysis or assessment based on it. While the scholarly metadata will never be perfectly complete, applying these enrichment layers is how we gradually and collectively build a fuller, more accurate picture of the research nexus.

One important caveat is that more metadata doesn’t magically equal better metadata. In fact, there’s often a delicate tradeoff between completeness and quality: the harder one pushes to fill every gap, the greater the chance of introducing errors. At Crossref, we believe quality comes first. We recognise that no dataset will ever be perfect, but we’re equally unwilling to apply enrichment processes without quality control. Any enrichment we introduce must meet a high bar for accuracy — no exceptions, no shortcuts.

The order of the enrichment layers discussed here loosely reflects how established they are within the scholarly ecosystem. There also might be a correlation, or at least a perceived one, between this ordering and the reliability of the underlying processes. That said, one must tread carefully when making such interpretations: perceived reliability is not the same as actual reliability.

Layer 1: Member updates

Crossref members not only deposit metadata, but also update it over time. This is an essential part of the system for several reasons. There may be errors in the originally deposited metadata that need to be corrected. Also, the initial record may contain gaps that can be filled later as more information becomes available. In addition, many changes naturally occur: landing page URLs may change, works may be archived in new locations, or identifiers for affiliated organisations may become available. Those situations also ideally result in an update.

This update process is well established. Over 24,000 Crossref members form a large global community that operates under shared membership terms. As part of these terms, members are responsible for maintaining and updating their metadata records. In this governance framework it is clearly defined who owns and stewards the metadata associated with each record, and who is responsible for the quality level and issues.

Member updates are very common. As an example, over 80% of works deposited between 2013 and 2020 were updated at least once. This demonstrates the community’s commitment to improving completeness and quality of the scholarly record. The plot below shows the percentage of works created in a given month that were updated at least once.

However, this layer also comes with challenges. It relies on members actively meeting their obligations to maintain and improve their metadata. As a result, gaps and inconsistencies can remain, and overall metadata quality is never perfect.

Our plans for the future in this area largely build on what is already happening. This includes developing and maintaining effective user interfaces for updating metadata, evolving the input metadata schema to keep pace with changes in the scholarly landscape, offering regular workshops on metadata improvements, and collaboratively establishing best practices while educating members on how to apply them.

Layer 2: Community feedback loop

Crossref metadata is widely used and examined by a large community of consumers. As a result, issues with metadata are sometimes identified by community members and reported back to us. When this happens, Crossref does not directly correct the metadata records. Instead, we contact the relevant member responsible for the record and able to deposit an update.

In this layer, the stewardship of metadata remains with the member, while responsibility for metadata quality broadens to include other actors in the community. This creates significant potential for scaling by involving a large community in identifying and reporting metadata issues.

At present, however, this process is not automated. Crossref staff effectively act as intermediaries between those reporting issues and the responsible member. As a result, the process has limited scalability. It also depends on the willingness of members to act on the reports they receive, as they are not obligated to respond to such reports.

In the future, we may explore automating portions of this workflow to handle community feedback more efficiently and lighten the load on everyone involved.

Layer 3: Metadata matching

Metadata matching is the task of finding an identifier for an item based on a structured or unstructured description of it. Matching strategies run as fully automated processes that analyse information deposited and updated by members and add identifiers, filling gaps in the metadata.

There are many instances of metadata matching problems, for example:

• bibliographic reference matching: finding a DOI for a cited paper based on a bibliographic reference,
• funder matching: finding the ROR ID for a funder based on its name,
• affiliation matching: finding the ROR ID for an organisation based on an affiliation string,
• preprint matching: finding the DOI for a preprint that precedes a given journal article,
• grant matching: finding the grant DOI based on an award number and a funder name.

This layer is unique, as it focuses on a crucial type of gap in the scholarly record: the missing relationships between entities. Indeed, adding an identifier for an entity mentioned within a metadata record of a research output is typically an equivalent of asserting a relationship between that output and the matched entity. For example, bibliographic reference matching inserts citation relationships, and funder name matching - funding relationships between a research output and a funding organisation. These relationships form the foundation of the research nexus.

Currently, at Crossref, we perform two types of matching. We match bibliographic references to the DOIs of cited outputs, and funder names to Funder IDs. Both processes rely on fuzzy comparisons and other heuristic approaches to identify likely matches.

In the case of bibliographic reference matching, as it turns out, more than half of the cited DOIs (1 billion) available in the Crossref database originate from automated metadata matching:

In the case of funder name matching, the distribution is very different, but the matching strategy was still able to fill in some of the gap:

Metadata matching is a particularly valuable form of enrichment for several reasons. Matching strategies can often achieve high levels of accuracy while working in a fully automated way. This makes them highly scalable and drastically reduces the need for human oversight. Their focus on relationships also strengthens the foundations of the research nexus.

At the same time, this enrichment layer presents a number of challenges.

Its most fundamental limitation to remember is that metadata matching can only fill gaps when there is at least some useful information to work with. For example, it can identify a cited document only using structured or unstructured citation data, and the funding organisation can only be identified if some funding information is available. But if citation information, or funding information, is completely absent, as is the case for 101M (56%) records and 166M (92%) records respectively, then matching simply isn’t possible.

Matching strategies can also be complex and time-consuming to research, develop, and maintain. They require additional considerations of issues such as openness, explainability, complexity, flexibility, and cost.

Perhaps most importantly, in the case of matching, it becomes less clear who is responsible for the information introduced through the matching process. This is particularly important because matching results are never perfect, meaning there is always a risk of introducing errors. The risk is further amplified by the fact that matching strategies typically operate in a fully automated, unsupervised manner. As a result, careful evaluation of matching performance, as well as maintaining accurate provenance records, becomes increasingly important.

At Crossref, we have ambitious plans in this area. We intend to rebuild Crossref’s metadata matching workflows using modern software development and data science practices. The goal is to create a dedicated, consolidated matching service that will eventually replace all existing production matching processes, with results made available through the REST API. This project will cover six matching tasks: bibliographic reference matching, funder name matching, preprint matching, affiliation matching, grant matching, and title matching. You can learn more about metadata matching at Crossref at a dedicated project page.

Layer 4: Third-party datasets

There are many databases containing scholarly data, and one way to fill gaps in Crossref member-provided metadata is to incorporate additional metadata from those external sources.

We already have one example of this. Crossref ingests data from the Retraction Watch database to supplement information about retractions and other updates to records:

This layer has several advantages. It draws on subject-specific and metadata-specific expertise, avoids reinventing work that has already been done elsewhere, and reflects a collaborative community-driven approach to improving the scholarly record.

However, there are also important challenges to consider. Integrating external data often involves multiple data licenses or acquisition arrangements, and there may be less control over data quality compared to metadata that comes directly from members. There is also a risk that relying too heavily on external sources could shift responsibility away from the member stewards of the metadata. Finally, it can be difficult to determine which external datasets provide sufficient value and longevity to justify long-term integration.

Looking ahead, we plan to explore further opportunities to incorporate third-party datasets, carefully considering the value they bring, as well as issues of licensing, sustainability, and data quality.

Layer 5: Unstructured content scraping

A significant amount of scholarly information still exists in fully unstructured forms, such as full-text PDF documents and web pages. In principle, extracting information from these sources could help fill many gaps in existing metadata.

In a lighter-touch approach, analysing full-text documents can also help verify existing metadata elements. If such a check fails, the unverified element may be removed from the record — which, perhaps counterintuitively, can also count as enrichment, since improving accuracy is every bit as important as adding new information.

There are also important challenges to consider. Extracting metadata directly from unstructured sources could substantially shift responsibility away from the original data stewards or owners, weakening the current stewardship model. The results of automated extraction may also be inconsistent or of relatively low quality. In addition, there are potential legal and rights-related concerns, particularly when processing full-text materials. Finally, developing reliable extraction methods would require substantial research and engineering effort.

For all these reasons, the practical usefulness of this approach remains uncertain, and Crossref currently has no plans to run such processes in production. We will, however, keep a close eye on emerging extraction technologies and may consider adopting them in some form if future evaluations show clear value.

Summary

Metadata is far more than a technical afterthought of the publishing process. It is the connective tissue of the scholarly ecosystem, linking research objects, people, and institutions into a coherent, navigable network. At Crossref, this takes the form of a vast and continually evolving corpus of more than 180 million metadata records, all contributing to the emerging research nexus, being built through collective community effort to help the global research community discover, interpret, and reuse knowledge effectively.

The initial metadata record deposited by members is only the beginning. Its quality and completeness can improve over time through multiple enrichment layers: member-driven updates, community feedback, automated metadata matching, and the incorporation of third-party datasets. These processes help fill gaps and strengthen the reliability of the scholarly record, all while upholding a firm commitment to accuracy and stewardship.

Taken together, these layers reflect a long-term, collaborative effort across technology developments, community participation, and responsible automation, to ensure that scholarly metadata becomes richer, more interconnected, and more useful for everyone who relies on it.

ARL Letter on ADA Title II Final Rule

Last Updated on March 18, 2026, 4:30 pm ET On March 18, 2026, ARL sent a letter to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs requesting a meeting to discuss...

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Guest Post — Could AI Help Fix Peer Review, or Will it Only Make Things Worse?

Today's post asserts that peer review, which is still of vital importance to science, is clearly failing in the current age -- could AI save the day?

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NewsJunkie.net Introduces the Guide to Public Archives, 2nd Edition

From NewsJunkie.net: For the first time, journalists and researchers have a searchable directory of over 1,500 of the world’s knowledge repositories. The new publication is from Newsjunkie.net, the data-journalism resource known for its “Who’s Behind the News” reporting. Guide to Public Archives II, a fully revised and expanded directory of the world’s artifact and document […]

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Guest Post — Academic Freedom Under Pressure: What Academic Publishers Can Do

Today's post is an urgent call to push back against global trends in academic censorship and threats to free speech in scholarly communications.

The post Guest Post — Academic Freedom Under Pressure: What Academic Publishers Can Do appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.

2026 public data file now available

Once a year we release all metadata records for content registered with Crossref in a public data file. This year’s version, containing nearly 180 million records, is now available. It includes metadata associated with all Crossref-registered DOIs in JSON-lines format.

All our metadata is openly available via our REST API at all time and this file provides the same information all in one place for those who find that format useful for their tools and analysis. You can access the file via Academic Torrents at https://doi.org/10.13003/nggf-vt1j or directly from AWS. For further guidance and tips, see our documentation. The complete, compressed files are 208 GB.

Our metadata has several sources:

• Primarily, it comes from records deposited by over 24,000 members spread across over 160 countries. This year, we are pleased to have added a number of new countries by expanding our GEM program, which supports participation in the Crossref community from those in the most economically disadvantaged regions.
• Second, we enrich the data by adding automated matches, for example by adding DOIs to deposited references, and organisation identifiers to funders. We are undertaking a renewal of our matching processes, starting later this year with matching funders to ROR identifiers.
• Finally, we use selected third party sources to enrich the metadata. Currently we include retractions from the Retraction Watch database.

Most of the data can be freely reused and is not subject to copyright. Some limitations are applied to abstracts. See our documentation for more details about licensing.

Why do we do this?

The community is key to everything we do. Without the thousands of members depositing metadata, we would have nothing to share. And without countless organisations and individuals making use of the metadata, it would have no impact or value. Our mission is to serve our community, and making metadata publicly and openly available is one of our key values. The public data file is just one of a number of ways in which we enable metadata retrieval.

Over the last year, there have been over 600 downloads of the public data file. In addition, we see around 2 billion hits to our public APIs each month. We are always excited to hear about the diverse and interesting ways in which metadata can be used.

What’s different this year?

Thanks to the rich metadata, the records deposited with Crossref are interconnected with many types of relationships between works, people, and organisations, that tell the story of the research endeavor. The latest public data file reflects the current status of the research nexus as we know it and we’re delighted to share it with the community.

This year’s dataset contains 12.7 million new records (a 7.6% increase since last year). Across the board, we’re also seeing richer metadata records, with more abstracts (up 15%), ORCID identifiers for authors (up 20%), ROR identifiers for organisations (up 250%), and links to grant identifiers for funding (reaching 50,000 records).

Research integrity is a current theme in our community. We can see that members increasingly look to leverage metadata in service of asserting trust in their works. An additional 27% more records have Crossmark enabled, meaning that the member responsible is open about research integrity practices, and committed to communicating corrections, retractions, and other post-publication changes. In addition, this year’s snapshot contains retractions from the Retraction Watch database. If you have any questions or feedback about the public data file, or would like to discuss how you can use it, head over to our community forum and join the conversation.

From User Stories to High-Quality Data: Implementing ROR on the Janeway Platform

Joe Muller of the Open Library of Humanities tells us in this case study how and why the Janeway platform took the time to integrate ROR in a way that reduces the burden of data entry for authors, ensuring unambiguous author affiliations by retrieving ROR IDs from ORCID profiles as well as allowing authors to find their institution with a ROR-powered search.

Irish Literature for St. Patrick’s Day

  Actor Paul Mescal reading the poem “Everything is Going to Be Alright” by the Irish poet Derek Mahon Lá Fhéile Pádraig sona daoibh! Happy…

New Issue (Vol. 21 No.1) of Evidence Based Library and Information Practice (EBLIP) is Now Available Online

Vol. 21 No. 1 (2026)  of Evidence Based Library and Information Practice) EBLIP was published today. Editorial Publishing Assessment Projects as Research Ann Medaillea [HTML] [PDF] Research Articles Developing an OPEN Framework for Asking EBLIP Questions in Open Education Emilia C. Bell, Adrian Stagg  [HTML] [PDF] Engagement Practices of Canadian Academic Libraries for the Advancement of Student […]

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A New Issue (Vol. 45 No. 1; 2026) of Information Technology and Libraries (ITAL) is Now Available Online

Here’s the Complete Table of Contents + Links to Articles Editorials Letter from the Editors Kenneth J. Varnum; Joanna DiPasquale [PDF] From the Field Librarian Leadership in the Age of AI Jeremiah Rood [PDF] ITAL & Refusal as Instruction: Equipping Patrons to Resist AI, Data Brokers, Big Tech, & More Hannah Cyrus [PDF] Articles Navigating […]

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Journal Article: “Studying with GenAI: Student Views on the Opportunities and Risks of GenAI in Higher Education”

The article linked to below was published today by Education and Information Technologies (Springer). Title Studying with GenAI: Student Views on the Opportunities and Risks of GenAI in Higher Education Authors Elida Cena, Aideen McParland, Wilhelmiina Toivo, Blinne Dalton, Megan Mundy, Patrick A. O’Connor, Ashley E. Robertson, Maxine Swingler, Paul Wilson & Connie Duncan Source […]

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AI in Peer Review: Revisiting an 8-year-old Debate

In 2018 at SSP New Directions, Neil Blair Christensen and Angela Cochran participated in an Oxford debate on the use of AI in Peer Review. Today, they revisit their main points and reflect on where they think we are today and will likely be in another 8 years.

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Plays, by Zeami Motokiyo

A collection of Zeami Motokiyo’s plays, arranged in chronological order of translation.

Reflections from the Crossref Ambassador Community

Crossref Ambassadors act as local points of contact, meeting editors, librarians, researchers, and institutions to help them navigate Crossref services and understand how strong metadata supports visibility, integrity, and trust in research. They explain how to participate in our rich network of connections between works, people, and institutions, in ways that make sense in their own contexts. And last year, being our 25th anniversary, Ambassadors also massively contributed to our celebrations!

In 2025, the Crossref Ambassador Programme continued to grow globally with 51 volunteers from 41 countries. We were delighted to welcome five new Ambassadors: Ahmet Anıl Müngen (Turkey), Mokheseng Richard Buti (South Africa), Richard Risasi (Democratic Republic of the Congo), Pedro López Casique (Mexico), and Nadia Boutaleb (Morocco).

During the year, Ambassadors promoted the value of robust metadata through webinars, including Metadata Health Check sessions in Arabic, Bahasa, French and Turkish, alongside conference participation and institutional visits across their regions. While others were more active in the Crossref Community Forum, bringing questions from their communities and contributing to discussions that helped others learn and problem-solve together.

ABEC Conference 2025 in Brazil and the 5th Latin American Scientific Journal Editors and Researchers Congress in Colombia, with Crossref Ambassadors engaging editors and researchers.

Highlights

We endeavour to stay in touch with our communities locally, and Ambassadors play a critical role in these efforts. Ambassadors joined the first Metadata Sprint in Spain, supported engagement at the Beijing International Book Fair, and co-organised local Crossref events, such as Crossref Quito and Crossref Accra. Others played active roles in the Global Equitable Membership (GEM) program, engaging communities in Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Ghana, and Senegal.

Ambassadors connecting with the scholarly community at the Beijing International Book Fair (China)(upper left), Crossref Quito (Ecuador)(upper right), and Crossref Accra (Ghana).

Dr. Lasith Gunawardena leading a GEM programme workshop at the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Some Ambassadors delivered metadata health check sessions in French, Turkish, Bahasa, and Spanish. Several institutions supported by Ambassadors went on to become new Crossref members, while others began conversations about improving their metadata completeness.

Crossref Ambassador Ahmet Anıl Müngen hosting a Metadata Health Check webinar in Turkish.

Ambassadors contribute their understanding of the industry and local contexts, and their communities’ feedback into Crossref, too. Nicolás Mejía Torres, Juan Felipe Vargas, Ahmed Moustafa, Sandra Gisela Martín and Guo Xiaofeng have recently joined our new Metadata Advisory Group, where they support us to craft our metadata for the future in tune with the community’s needs, and in particular, helping us shape how we reflect global scholarship through multilingual metadata.

To mark Crossref’s 25th anniversary, a celebratory series of Ambassador-led satellite events was hosted to coincide with the Annual Meeting. These events, held in Nairobi (Kenya), Bogotá (Colombia), and Medan (Indonesia), featured workshops, presentations, and a watch party, allowing attendees to synchronously join the main live annual meeting program.

Crossref satellite events bringing local communities together in Bogotá (top), Medan (center), and Nairobi (bottom).

Many of our Ambassadors routinely organise virtual meetings and webinars. Recognising the growing need for effective online engagement, we partnered with the Centre for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement (CSCCE) to deliver a targeted training program focused on the advanced skills of convening and facilitating highly engaging and interactive online events. This intensive training was designed to provide our Ambassadors with practical techniques and resources for maximising participant involvement, fostering dynamic discussions, and ensuring that their online gatherings are both productive and stimulating. Equipping Ambassadors in this way ultimately strengthens the overall effectiveness of their outreach and community-building efforts.

Challenges & lessons learned

Alongside successes in their roles as Crossref Ambassadors, many balanced the role alongside demanding professional responsibilities, while others encountered language gaps or uneven awareness of Crossref across their regions. In some contexts, limited institutional readiness or infrastructure meant that engagement required more foundational work and patience.

These experiences offered valuable lessons, including the importance of demonstrations, translated reference and training materials, and more regionally tailored support.

The impact of the programme was also reflected through Ambassador feedback. In the annual survey, most reported feeling that their work had significantly increased their community’s capacity to understand and use Crossref services. Similarly, Ambassadors reported that their role helped Crossref reach new people and institutions that were previously unaware of Crossref.

Survey results showing how Ambassadors increased community capacity around Crossref services and helped reach new institutions (40 of 51 responses).

In 2025, Ambassadors delivered 43 activities, including training sessions, webinars, events, translations, and feedback on tools and services both individually and collaboratively, reaching more than 1,200 people worldwide.

In 2026, the priority for the program includes strengthening regional and multilingual outreach, increasing visibility of the Ambassador role, expanding access to up-to-date resources and tools, and creating more opportunities to connect with Crossref staff.

Black No More, by George Schuyler

A medical process that makes black people look white revolutionizes American society.

Cakes and Ale, by W. Somerset Maugham

An author is placed in a dilemma when he’s approached to provide background for a biography of a novelist with whom he’s had a relationship.

Sycophancy in AI: the risk of complacency

Sycophancy is a behavior exhibited by artificial intelligence since it prioritizes agreeing with the user rather than the truthfulness of the facts. This tendency arises from training processes designed to maximize human satisfaction, which can validate serious errors in critical sectors such as healthcare. The behavior, described as a form of “digital flattery”, means that AI can validate errors, reinforce biases, or avoid necessary criticism in order to be pleasant or useful according to the user's immediate perception. To mitigate these risks, strategies such as ethical fine-tuning, the design of systems that encourage dissent, and the use of prompts that are neutral with respect to users have been proposed.

…Read More →

The post Sycophancy in AI: the risk of complacency first appeared on SciELO in Perspective.

eLife Receives £2.4m ($3.17m/USD) Grant From Wellcome to Build Open Publishing Ecosystem

From an eLife Post: eLife is pleased to announce funding from Wellcome which will support a new initiative, called eLife Pathways, in building an open and collaborative ecosystem for alternative approaches to scholarly communication. A founding funder and long-term supporter of eLife, Wellcome has awarded the non-profit a grant of £2.4m, including cover for indirect […]

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SSP’s Early Career Development Podcast Episode 23: Interview with SSP President Rebecca McLeod

This episode of SSP’s Early Career Development Podcast checks in with current SSP President Rebecca McLeod on her career and “wartime” tenure thus far, what she is looking forward to in 2026, and her advice for early career professionals. Hosted by Meredith Adinolfi (Cell Press).

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Conference Report: OA Publishing Negotiations & Agreements Community Connection Roundtable

Electronic Resources & Librarianship Conference 2026 Community Connection Roundtable on Open Access Publishing Negotiations and Agreements March 2, 2026 Written by Dr. Kanu A. Nagra, Professor & E-resources Librarian @ CUNY Borough of Manhattan Community College The Open Access Publishing Negotiations & Agreements: Community Connection roundtable, led by Dr. Kanu A. Nagra, brought together librarians, […]

The post Conference Report: OA Publishing Negotiations & Agreements Community Connection Roundtable first appeared on Electronic Resources and Libraries.

Mary Olivier: A Life, by May Sinclair

A gifted young woman born into a strict upper middle class Victorian family struggles for decades to balance duty to her controlling mother with a driving need to learn and to create her art.

The Documents in the Case, by Dorothy L. Sayers and Robert Eustace

A man’s apparently accidental death soon arouses suspicions.

María, by Jorge Isaacs

A young man and his distant cousin, who suffers from a mysterious affliction, fall in love in the idyllic Colombian countryside.

The Princess and Curdie, by George MacDonald

A young miner accepts a mysterious commission that will test his faithfulness and restore justice to a faltering kingdom.

Aligning State Dollars with Workforce Opportunity

Much of the policy conversation about postsecondary-workforce alignment has focused on appropriations: how should state dollars be distributed across institutions, and can performance-based funding models incentivize credential production in priority fields? But state agencies also control a second major lever: student financial aid. Unlike appropriations, financial aid—and especially targeted aid—can influence students’ enrollment and program choices at the outset.

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Celebrating Seven Years of By the People

The ‘By the People’ crowdsourced transcription program recently turned 7. We’re celebrating this anniversary by marking another major occasion: our volunteers have officially completed over one million transcriptions! Click through to learn more about what the program has planned as we enter another exciting year.

Guest Post — Gen Z and Academic Libraries: Reading, but Differently

Today's guest blogger asks: How much do we read today? How do reading habits vary across generations? What should libraries and publishers do to encourage reading?

The post Guest Post — Gen Z and Academic Libraries: Reading, but Differently appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.

The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James

A philospher and psychologist surveys direct religious experiences, including healthy-mindedness, saintliness, conversion and mysticism.

Renewed partnership: DOAJ and Crossref focus on equitable scholarly metadata and global support

We have renewed our partnership with DOAJ to focus on a new set of objectives that reflect both organisations’ commitment to improving sustainable and equitable services and infrastructure. This renewed collaboration focuses on improving the quality of scholarly metadata while expanding support for journals in low- and middle income- countries.

We have worked together since 2021, primarily to encourage the dissemination and use of scholarly research using online technologies, and regional and international networks, partners and communities. This partnership has helped to build local institutional capacity and sustainability within the global scholarly communication ecosystem. A continued partnership also reflects that we have a shared community; currently almost 90% of DOAJ journals are represented in Crossref.

Our renewed collaboration will support:

Article Metadata Enhancements: DOAJ will improve the ingestion, processing, storage, and display of article-level metadata. Improvements include:

• Author affiliations and persistent identifiers
• Open references
• Expanded metadata harvesting

These enhancements are expected to benefit both direct users of DOAJ and downstream discovery, aggregation, and research analytics services that rely on DOAJ metadata.

Ambassador Programme: Our collaboration with DOAJ will support the continued development of DOAJ’s Ambassador programme. This global network of ambassadors primarily based in low- and middle-income countries:

• Support journal editors in understanding and applying good practices in open access publishing
• Organise and deliver workshops, webinars, and local events
• Collaborate with regional partners and policymakers
• Raise awareness of DOAJ and publishing standards within local scholarly communities

Crossref’s contribution will support ambassador travel and the organisation of workshops and events.

We value our longstanding collaboration with Crossref. As fellow open scholarly infrastructures, we share a commitment to strengthening the systems that support trusted, global research discovery. This new partnership enables DOAJ to move forward with important work around interoperability. Improving how infrastructures connect and exchange information is a priority for us, and this support helps ensure we can continue to serve the community in line with the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure—with openness, collaboration, and long-term sustainability at the centre.

– Joanna Ball, Managing Director of DOAJ

The collaborations with DOAJ so far only reaffirmed our shared goal to help make the global scholarly communications system more equitable wherever we can. Our joint projects aim to seek out and devise support for resource-constrained journals in multiple ways. DOAJ’s work is essential in helping journals to adopt good practice, while Crossref offers an open infrastructure to ensure all journals can be included and discoverable in the global scholarly record.

– Ginny Hendricks, Chief Program Officer at Crossref

About DOAJ

DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer reviewed journals. DOAJ deploys around one hundred carefully selected volunteers from the community of library and other academic disciplines to assist in curating open access journals. This independent database contains over 20,400 peer-reviewed open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts and humanities. DOAJ is financially supported worldwide by libraries, publishers and other like-minded organizations. DOAJ services (including the evaluation of journals) are free for all, and all data provided by DOAJ are harvestable via OAI/PMH and the API. See https://doaj.org/ for more information.

Contact: DOAJ - Joanna Ball, Managing Director - joanna@doaj.org.

About Crossref

Crossref is a non-profit organisation that runs an open infrastructure to link research objects, entities, and actions, creating a lasting and reusable scholarly record that underpins open science. Together with their 24,000 members in 166 countries, Crossref drives metadata exchange and supports nearly 2 billion monthly API queries, facilitating global research communication, for the benefit of society.

Contact: Crossref - Kora Korzec, Director of Community – kkorzec@crossref.org.

The Inspector General, by Nikolai Gogol

Corrupt officials in a small Russian town are thrown into disarray by the arrival of an Inspector General from the central government.

Does the Internet Archive Have an Onion Address?

Yes, the Internet Archive has an onion address. The Internet Archive can be accessed via the Tor network at its onion address: archivep75mbjunhxc6x4j5mwjmomyxb573v42baldlqu56ruil2oiad.onion What is an onion address? Tor (The […]

Expanding Access. Improving Outcomes. Advancing Knowledge.

At Ithaka S+R, we work with leaders and policymakers to expand access to postsecondary education, improve student and workforce outcomes, and strengthen the systems that sustain scholarship and knowledge creation. We do this by providing strategic advice, conducting rigorous research, evaluating initiatives, and developing and sustaining nonprofit tools and services.

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Report From Missouri: St. Charles County Libraries Ban LGBTQ Flags, Other ‘Personal Belief’ Decor

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Library employees here have been ordered to remove flags — including LGBTQ pride flags— and other decor that “promotes personal beliefs” from their workspaces, officials said on Tuesday. St. Charles City-County Library CEO John Greifzu said the move is part of a push to make the library “welcoming to everyone.” In […]

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What Publishing Leaders Say About AI When They’re Not on Panels: A Pulse on All Things AI

Today's post explores issues facing scholarly publishers around AI — using it, layering it, competing against it, and licensing to it.

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Hit refresh: redesigning our technical infrastructure

With key milestones achieved in 2025, including the appointment of new Directors of Technology and Programs, a move to the cloud, and some key schema updates, we now have a firm foundation for our next challenge: a redesign of our core technical systems to make them more modern, robust, and easier to maintain and scale.

At a high level, our systems serve our community well. The deposit system handles over 107,000 DOI deposits and updates per day, and the REST API responds to 2 billion requests per month, serving up nearly 180 million open metadata records. These systems are reliable: since December 2025, the REST API pools exceeded 99.94% uptime, and the submission queue, since January 2024, has had an uptime of 99.90%.

Uptime for REST API pools and the submission queue, with minimal service interruption since January 2024.

It’s this reliability, we think, that has kept us from tackling this redesign earlier. But the reality is that when these systems were first built, some as long ago as 2005, Crossref and our community looked very different. In 2005, we had 318 members, and were creating DOIs and depositing metadata exclusively for journal articles, all supported by 5 Crossref staff. Today, we have 24,000+ members, representing publishers, societies, funders, universities, service providers, sponsors, and sponsored members; and we are assigning DOIs to >17 content types, from journal articles to book chapters, grants, conference proceedings, dissertations, and more. All supported by 50+ Crossref staff.

Like a stone monolith, a tightly coupled system can be solid, but hard to adapt.

Over the years, we’ve accumulated quite a bit of technical debt building support for new features and functions into one monolithic codebase.

We haven’t always been great at paying down that technical debt (because, as some say, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it), but we have made big strides in the last 18 months. Our main database moved to Postgres from Oracle and we migrated from a physical data centre to the cloud.

But still, the codebase has become hard to maintain; it’s not always clear that fixing something in one place won’t break something else. A more modern approach, breaking apart the monolith into separate, smaller services, will enable us to seamlessly maintain services, identify and debug issues efficiently, and build new features to support the ever-changing needs of our growing community.

Paul has recently started a new role at Crossref as the Product Manager for the Open and Sustainable Operations Program and will play a big role in this cross-functional effort. Having moved over from the technical support team, he brings a wealth of experience with all of our systems, how they work in detail, and where the pain points exist for internal users as well as members. We will rely on this experience to bring a better suited system to our members and colleagues.

Oh, the things he’s seen (and heard!). Here’s what rises to the top of his pain points list:

• Our authentication service is difficult to administer with manual processes still in place for change requests
• Title management causes headaches for our members and staff: members can’t modify or transfer titles between each other in our system themselves and rely on manual intervention from the Support team.
• Members don’t have access to all of the details about their own records that we have in our system. This creates unnecessary barriers to stewarding their metadata.
• Members can’t currently programmatically check the status of their submission in the system to learn in real-time whether it has been deposited or remains in the queue, which would be really useful.

How are we going to do this?

This won’t be one big bang – the scale is way too big, and it’s far too risky. We will instead break the work into a series of (many!) smaller projects, chipping away at the large monolith of Crossref code and building smaller, free-standing components which will be easier to maintain. We also don’t see this work as a separate project with a cleanly defined beginning and end - rather, gradually replacing parts of the system with more modern, better-designed components is simply part of ongoing maintenance.

We’ve already taken a hard look at what our system does (and it’s a lot!) and developed a list of ~14 core “functions” it serves, things like authentication and authorization, metadata deposit and validation, metadata distribution, and so on. We’ll work on replacing those functions with free-standing services, then pull out the (then-unnecessary!) code from the codebase. At each step, the monolith gets smaller and less complex.

We’ve already started doing this, and it feels great! Most recently, we rebuilt a component we lovingly call the ‘Pusher.’ Its function is to push the XML our members deposit to the REST API, where it can be distributed to users, and to keep citation counts updated. We deployed the new Pusher in two phases, in October 2025 and February 2026. It uses modern code libraries, is open source, and runs independently rather than being tangled up with the rest of the core system.

Another project that is currently underway is rebuilding of our metadata matching workflows using modern software development and data science practices. The goal is to create a dedicated, consolidated matching service that will eventually replace all existing matching processes, with results made available through the REST API. This project will start with matching funder names to ROR IDs, and eventually cover also bibliographic reference matching, preprint matching, affiliation matching, grant matching, and title matching.

We have yet to decide on the exact order of things, but that will likely be determined by the complex dependencies we touched on earlier. We’ll also consider urgency and risk - is something falling over too often and causing too much work to maintain it and keep it stable? That’s the reason we bumped up the priority on the Pusher work and rewrote it when we did. We’ll also consider benefits: quicker upgrades which will help both ourselves and our members will naturally have a higher priority than less impactful projects.

We do know that the top priority is the authentication service. The current one was not meant to be permanent, but rather a bridge until we build a permanent solution. It’s now beyond its useful life: it’s quite confusing, it doesn’t scale (and we are scaling), and it’s painful for sponsors, members, and Crossref staff. Tackling this piece of work first unblocks a lot of other important things we want to get done. It’s a big undertaking that we are excited to get started on to improve the user experience for everyone. Importantly, we will be consulting with the community along the way so that we get this right.

Dominika Tkaczyk, Crossref Director of Technology, emphasized the importance of maintaining open scholarly infrastructure at the Crossref annual meeting in October 2025. She said that, just as we maintain roads and bridges to make sure they’re safe, we must maintain scholarly infrastructure so it continues to serve the community far into the future.

This is a long road, but it’s one we’re excited to be on. We’ll have periodic updates on our progress as this work goes forward: what we’re getting done, where we need input, and what we’re tackling next. We’ll need a lot of feedback from you, our community, about what’s working well and where we might make improvements.

February 2026

Last Updated on March 10, 2026, 4:58 pm ET ARL Public Policy Briefing (February 2026) Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week Edition! For Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week, ARL teamed up with the Re:Create...

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Stories Everywhere: An Interview with David Neil

In this interview, David Neil discusses his experience working as a User Experience Designer in Design and Development at the Library of Congress. He shares behind-the-scenes insights about some favorite Library products, advice for practitioners, reflections on the past and future of technology, and his own near-term plans as he retires.

Cleveland Public Library and Digital Public Library (DPLA) Formally Announce New Partnership To “Chart a New Vision For the National Digital Collection”;  Four Foundations (Sloan, Mellon, MacArthur, Ford) Contribute $3.25 Million Towards Expansion of Collection

Here’s the Full Text of Today’s Announcement: Cleveland Public Library (CPL) and the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) today announced a partnership to chart a new vision for the national digital collection. The collection comprises over 50 million books, photos, maps, videos and more that document America’s cultural heritage. In July, Cleveland Public Library […]

The post Cleveland Public Library and Digital Public Library (DPLA) Formally Announce New Partnership To “Chart a New Vision For the National Digital Collection”;  Four Foundations (Sloan, Mellon, MacArthur, Ford) Contribute $3.25 Million Towards Expansion of Collection appeared first on Library Journal infoDOCKET.

Brewster Kahle (Internet Archive Founder and Director) is the Guest on the Latest Episode of ATG The Podcast

From the Charleston Hub Channel on YouTube: Today’s episode features guest host Michael Upshall (guest editor, Charleston Briefings) who talks with Brewster Kahle, Founder & Director, Internet Archive. Brewster says that back in the 1980’s he believed that everything would eventually become digital. He dreamed of building a Library of Alexandria where humanity’s knowledge would […]

The post Brewster Kahle (Internet Archive Founder and Director) is the Guest on the Latest Episode of ATG The Podcast appeared first on Library Journal infoDOCKET.

Guest Post — Societies 2030: The Community Advantage in an AI-First World

Today's guest bloggers call for society publishers to recognize their unique role in shaping the systems researchers use to discover and evaluate knowledge.

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Spring Fever: Books, music, and movies to embrace the season

Welcome the Spring season with these book and media recommendations from the CSUN University collection! In Special Collections and Archives (SC/A) The CSUN Special Collections…

The Lusiads, by Luís de Camões

A Portuguese fleet becomes the object of conflict between Roman gods.

ARL Daily Intelligence (March 9–12)

Last Updated on March 12, 2026, 3:37 pm ET The ARL Daily Intelligence is the trusted source of news and analysis for library leaders and advocates. Released Monday through Thursday, the ARL Daily...

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Remix, Reimagine, Record: Internet Archive Partners with WNYC for the 2026 Public Song Project

The 2026 Public Song Project is here — and for the first time, WNYC’s Public Song Project is partnering with the Internet Archive! ⁠ ⁠Here’s what you need to know: […]

Guest Post — The Perils of Using Generative AI to Perform Research Tasks: Editors’ and Publishers’ Viewpoints

Today's guest post offers a review of a panel of publishers and editors discussing the pros and cons of using Generative AI, along with ethical and policy implications.

The post Guest Post — The Perils of Using Generative AI to Perform Research Tasks: Editors’ and Publishers’ Viewpoints appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.

Women Leading the Charge - Resources on Display at the Caltech Library

This Women's History Month, we celebrate and commemorate all women who continue to lead the charge for change and a more sustainable future.

Repositories: SocArXiv Releases AI Policy

From a Post by Philip N. Cohen, SocArXiv Director: In November 2025, we paused new submissions about AI topics. For about three months, we turned away papers about AI models, testing AI models, proposing AI models, theories about the future of AI and so on. We accepted some empirical social science research about AI in […]

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The Venetians, by M. E. Braddon

A man is forced to kill his assailant and go on the run, resulting in lifelong guilt entangled with secrecy, jealousy, vengeance, and love.

Guest Post — Who Owns Our Knowledge? An African University Press Perspective

Today's guest post asks readers to reckon with the idea that knowledge reflects power, and the global knowledge economy excludes the Global South.

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