Crossref and the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) have been working closely together for many years, sharing resources and supporting our overlapping communities of organisations involved in communicating research. Now we’re delighted to share that we have agreed on a new set of objectives for our partnership, centred on further development of the tools that our shared community relies upon, as well as building capacity to enable richer metadata registration for organisations using the Open Journal Systems (OJS).
To mark Crossref’s 25th anniversary, we launched our first Metadata Awards to highlight members with the best metadata practices.
GigaScience Press, based in Hong Kong, was the leader among small publishers, defined as organisations with less than USD 1 million in publishing revenue or expenses. We spoke with Scott Edmunds, Ph.D., Editor-in-Chief at GigaScience Press, about how discoverability drives their high metadata standards.
What motivates your organisation/team to work towards high-quality metadata? What objectives does it support for your organisation?
Our objective is to communicate science openly and collaboratively, without barriers, to solve problems in a data- and evidence-driven manner through Open Science publishing. High-quality metadata helps us address these objectives by improving the discoverability, transparency, and provenance of the work we publish. It is an integral part of the FAIR principles and UNESCO Open Science Recommendation, playing a role in increasing the accessibility of research for both humans and machines. As one of the authors of the FAIR principles paper and an advisor of the Make Data Count project, I’ve also personally been very conscious to practice what I preach.
On behalf of the Nominating Committee, I’m pleased to share the slate of candidates for the 2025 board election.
Each year we do an open call for board interest. This year, the Nominating Committee received 51 submissions from members worldwide to fill five open board seats.
We have four large member seats and one small member seat open for election in 2025. We maintain a balanced board of 8 large member seats and 8 small member seats. Size is determined based on the organization’s membership tier (small members fall in the $0-$1,650 tiers and large members in the $3,900 - $50,000 tiers).
In 2022, we wrote a blog post “Rethinking staff travel, meetings, and events” outlining our new approach to staff travel, meetings, and events with the goal of not going back to ‘normal’ after the pandemic and said that in the future we would report on our efforts to balance online and virtual events, work life balance for staff, and track our carbon emissions. In December 2024, we wrote a blog post, “Summary of the environmental impact of Crossref,” that gave an overview of 2023 and provided the first report on our carbon emissions. Our report on 2023 only just made it into 2024, so we are happy to report on 2024 a little sooner in the year.
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.
At its core, Crossref Accra 2025 was about showing up for the community in Ghana - listening, learning, and building together. On the 20th of March, we welcomed 66 participants: journal editors, university staff, librarians, and researchers. People who are doing the real work of making scholarly publishing happen in the region.
Photo: Participants from across Ghana’s research and publishing landscape.
We started the day with a walkthrough of Crossref’s services, then shifted into more tailored conversations - talking metadata quality, improving discoverability, and making Crossref tools work for the local context. The panel featuring AJOL, WACREN, and CARLIGH was a key moment. We heard honest reflections about journal sustainability, the barriers to indexing, and how Open Access can grow if local infrastructure is supported. Each organisation shared how they’re working to strengthen research communities and where they see Crossref fitting into that bigger picture.
Photo: Crossref Ambassador Richard Lamptey moderates a panel with WACREN’s Effah Amponsah, CARLIGH’s Mac Anthony Cobblah, and AJOL’s Kylie van Zyl on sustaining journals and advancing Open Access in the region.
During the dedicated listening session, participants spoke candidly about the cost burden of APCs, the over-reliance on foreign journals for recognition, and the uphill battle local journals face, from limited resources to slow workflows. There was a clear push for stronger local publishing platforms and more training around tools like OJS. People want technical clarity: How does Crossref fit into their workflows? What’s involved in registering metadata and DOIs? What’s the actual value? Many also voiced interest in strengthening relationships with indexing services, and connecting university presses more directly with Crossref. The afternoon breakout sessions were hands-on. One group explored how to use the Participation Reports to check metadata completeness, while the other dove into using the Crossref API. People started swapping tips, asking questions, and brainstorming ways to improve how their institutions handle metadata. Several wanted to know how to automate more of their workflows through OJS, boost reference linking, and pull better reports from the Crossref system.
Photo: A collage of snapshots capturing activities at the Crossref Accra event.
Outside the main event, we also visited some of our members and stopped by the Association of African Universities. These visits gave us more time for deeper conversations about publishing workflows, ORCID uptake, metadata visibility, and the bigger picture of Open Access in Ghana. We heard a lot about the potential for more equitable partnerships and stronger local ownership of publishing infrastructure.
Post-event feedback made one thing clear: people want more opportunities to learn - more practical workshops, more guidance on using Crossref tools, and more support navigating the technical side of things. There’s growing interest in forming a local user group, a space to keep sharing, troubleshooting, and moving forward together. And the desire to improve indexing and visibility was a recurring theme. People see registering identifiers for content as an essential step on that journey. There’s also a broader concern about long-term sustainability and ethical publishing practices. Many journals are doing their best in tough conditions, and there’s a real appetite for honest conversations about quality, trust, and resilience.
Photo: Crossref staff and ambassadors with member Amy Asimah from Regional Maritime University. Pictured: Johanssen Obanda, Oumy Ndiaye, Evans Atoni, Patience Mbum, Audrey Kenni Nganmeni, Ginny Hendricks, and Richard Lamptey.
Crossref Accra 2025 reminded us how valuable these local gatherings are - not just for sharing tools and workflows, but for building lasting connections. We’re grateful to our Ambassadors and team who helped make it happen, and we’re committed to deepening our support across the region. There’s so much potential in Ghana’s scholarly community, and in West Africa more broadly, as we’ve seen again at WACREN in Senegal a couple of weeks later. We’re committed to working with local partners to help it grow.
