10 minute read.Meet six winners of the first ever Crossref Metadata Awards
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. These inaugural awards highlight the leadership of members who show dedication to the best metadata practices.
Crossref exists to make scholarly communications better by making research objects easy to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse. Our members weave the research nexus: a rich and reusable open network of connections between works resulting from the scholarly process and the people and institutions engaged in it.
Rich metadata improves discoverability of and trust in published works. Many institutions now strive to turn towards open research information in their reporting, assessment and evaluation. And so we believe it’s time to give credit to members that are doing the best work in supporting others across the scholarly ecosystem with their metadata.
The awards presented today will be followed by a series of blog interviews, where the winners will share how they achieved their high level of metadata completeness.
Starting in 2025, we will hold the awards every other year.
Read on to get more acquainted with the winners, learn about other high performing organisations and overall trends in metadata practices we see at Crossref.
Noyam Publishers is based in Ghana. Colleagues had the pleasure of meeting them in person, during the Crossref Accra event this March. Striving for visibility motivates Noyam’s high performance when it comes to metadata. With 57% coverage of key metadata elements across their records, they are a leader among the members in our Global Equitable Membership (GEM) program.
Among other GEM members who show high participation in the research nexus, we see more than 40% coverage of key metadata elements for the records registered by University of Sierra Leone Teaching Hospitals Complex in Sierra Leone, Queen Arwa University in Yemen, Kathmandu University School of Education in Nepal, and International Journal for Innovation Education and Research in Bangladesh.
GigaScience Press, based in Hong Kong, is the leader among small members (organisations of less than USD 1 mln of publishing revenue or expenses). Discoverability drives their high metadata standards, and GigaSciencePress sees those having advantages in terms of service integrations and development too. They are quick to credit the expertise of their technology partner, River Valley Technologies as the strategic contributor to them achieving 82% coverage of key metadata elements across their records.
It’s worth highlighting that the competition among our small members was much closer than in any other category! Stichting SciPost (Netherlands) also show more than 80% coverage across their records, followed by Life Science Alliance, LLC (United States), National Institute for Health and Care Research (United Kingdom), and Universidad La Salle Arequipa (Peru), each of which achieved more than 70% metadata coverage across their registered works.
eLife leads among our medium members (organisations between USD 1 mln and 10 mln of publishing revenue or expenses) with 85% coverage of key metadata elements. They have shown dedication to metadata quality and consistently high performance over the years. They are also the first publisher to include Crossref grant IDs in their records, adopting the Grant Linking System.
Other medium-sized organisations to note are MDPI AG in Switzerland, and XMLink in South Korea – while there’s a significant gap to the leader, each of these organisations has more than 50% coverage of key metadata elements across their records.
It appears that large members (organisations with more than USD 10 mln of publishing revenue or expenses) struggle to achieve consistency in metadata quality across all of their records. Yet, we are delighted to recognise the American Society for Microbiology in the United States, who have embarked on a large metadata quality improvement project several years ago, and it continues to bear fruit as we see 56% of metadata coverage across ASM’s records. They’ve shared their experience on our blog already, so this time we’ll invite them to follow up with the latest updates on their metadata practices.
American Geophysical Union (AGU), Public Library of Science (PLOS), SAGE Publications, and Wiley, all based in the United States, are ASM’s closest runners up. While the gap is significant – still each of these organisations has more than 40% of metadata coverage across their records. PLOS has an impressive proportion of Crossmark-enabled works (99%), and American Geophysical Union and Wiley are registering a significant proportion of abstracts for their records (87% and 59% respectively).
It often takes time to hone new processes and learn about metadata practices, so we decided to recognise metadata excellence among our new members: organisations that joined Crossref within the past two years. Our inaugural award for excellence among new members goes to Universidad La Salle Arequipa Perú, who joined Crossref in May 2023, and have 71% metadata coverage across their records.
Our members don’t just register their records with us – they also steward and maintain their metadata over time. As new technical capabilities and metadata elements become available, members have the ability to update their metadata. We decided to recognise the member who achieved the biggest transformation to their records in the past two years: Instituto Geologico y Minero de España, based in Spain, jumped from just over 1% to more than 40% metadata coverage for their records in the space of the past two years.
Others who made more than 30% jump in their metadata completeness in the past two years are Cabrera Research Lab (United States), Centro de Investigaciones Sociologicas (Spain), Bon View Publishing PTE (Singapore), Asociacion Colombiana de Neurologia (Colombia), Instituto Superior Tecnológico Almirante Illingworth (Ecuador), and Tashkent State University of Economics (Uzbekistan).
How did we select the winners?
Our Metadata Excellence Awardees have been selected on the basis of the overall highest coverage of metadata elements included in Participation Reports as of March 2025, and the Metadata Enrichment Award was based on the comparison between performance on the same criteria between March 2023 and March 2025. Participation Reports are openly available and provide information about the proportion of a given member’s records that include the following high-value metadata elements:
- References
- Abstracts
- ORCID iDs
- Affiliations
- ROR IDs
- Funder Registry IDs
- Funding award numbers
- Crossmark enabled
- Text mining URLs
- License URLs
The report also includes Similarity Check URLs. However, since Similarity Check is an optional service that attracts a separate fee – it wouldn’t be equitable to include it in our analysis.
We encourage all members to periodically monitor their participation reports, and we offer frequent drop-in metadata health-check sessions, where we review the reports together and offer advice on making improvements in areas where our members experience challenges.
In a membership of more than 22,000 organisations, it’s difficult to recognise just one organisation as a model of best practices. There are many nuances that influence the performance and we would like to be transparent about some considerations we made in our awarding process.
First of all, we considered volume of publishing as a key variable, and decided to qualify organisations with a minimum of 20 items of registered content.
We also recognise that size matters – and decided to award our Metadata Excellence Awards in four categories corresponding with organisational size and resourcing.
The scholarly communications landscape is always evolving, and new types of content arise all the time. Crossref schema enables rich metadata collection about journal articles, books, book chapters, preprints, conference proceedings, technical reports, as well as grants, and more.
At this point, the most prolific way of sharing scholarship - at least judging by the number of records registered with Crossref – is a journal article. There are 112,982,290 journal articles in the Crossref database, and in 2024 alone our members created 6,747,031 journal articles records with us.
When it comes to books (2,212,221 total records) and book chapters (22,892,785 total records), publishers with the richest metadata records include Universitatsbibliothek Kiel (Germany) with more than 50% coverage of key metadata elements across their book records, and 70% for their book chapters. RTI Press (US) also has strong metadata for books (52%), while Firenze University Press (Italy) has 56% of metadata coverage across their book chapters. Incidentally, Universitatsbibliothek Kiel (Germany) are also leaders in metadata for conference proceedings (53% metadata coverage of those records).
Preprints and posted content (including preprints, eprints, working papers, reports) are relatively new on the scene and growing rapidly – Crossref has 1,683,351 preprint records (413,742 registered in 2024). The richest metadata records for preprints belong to eLife (UK) - they cover more than 50% of key metadata elements across their preprints records in Crossref. Springer Science and Business Media LLC (Netherlands) have 48% metadata coverage for their preprints, American Chemical Society (ACS; United States) with 46%, and UNISA Press (South Africa) and PeerJ (US) follow with 44% coverage.
The newest of record types that can be registered with us are grants. At present this is an early adopters domain, with 152,810 registered grants so far. The European Union (represented in Crossref by the Publications Office of the European Union) registered the most grants to date.
When speaking about key metadata elements reflected in our Participation Report, the coverage varies widely. For example, overall 21% of records in Crossref have abstract metadata; 2,000 members have a full coverage of their records with abstracts, while 1,000 don’t include any. Deposition of ORCID iDs is growing but still very low, with only 10% of records including ORCID iDs.
Affiliation metadata, broadly sought after by many stakeholders in the scholarly ecosystem - not least because of its role as a key marker of trust - is growing steadily but slowly: only 16% of records included it at the end of March 2025. With recent improvements in our helper tools (especially the latest version of the record registration form), and the upcoming developments in other publishing software (notably the upcoming 3.5 version of OJS), which support affiliation metadata better – we’re expecting a significant improvement in the coming months.
As with affiliations, when research integrity judgements are concerned, another key element is the funding information. The growing interest in metadata among funders further strengthens the case for increasing inclusion of funder information in this way, ideally including Crossref grant DOIs that funders are registering in the hope of using the Grant Linking System to help their assessment and evaluation work. At the moment the space for improvement is vast, with only 6% of Crossref metadata including funder IDs and award numbers.
We support ROR IDs in both affiliation and funding metadata, but adoption among our members is slow. So far the top five contributors of ROR IDs to Crossref are Fonds de recherche du Québec, eLife, American Physical Society (APS), Optica Publishing Group, and Wellcome.
Licence metadata is currently included for 43% of records in Crossref, and we see that thousands of members don’t include it. Not all members realise that this is a practical challenge for their authors, as it hinders institutions and funders who seek to monitor compliance with their openness mandates.
Finally, references metadata is the lifeblood of the research nexus, supporting transparency and discoverability of scholarship. We’ve got 44% coverage of reference metadata across records registered in Crossref. While reference linking is a member obligation, including references in the metadata is a recommended best practice. The way references are recognised and included in works varies by publication type and discipline, which makes it harder for some members to provide it.
There’s an ongoing need to raise awareness about the role of metadata among the wider community, including editors and researchers. We have collaborated with practitioners, supporters, and users of metadata to develop relevant resources as part of the Metadata 20/20 initiative.
We make efforts to educate our members about best practices when it comes to registering their metadata with us and offer a range of support options, including technical support on our Community Forum. Recognising the leaders in metadata participation is part of that process too. With the upcoming blog series from our awardees, we hope to spur peer-to-peer learning to facilitate widespread improvements and to raise the profile of metadata quality among the community.
