Connecting the scholarly record through community action: ways of leveraging Crossref’s open relationship metadata

Abstract

The scholarly metadata openly available through Crossref’s interfaces materialises the sustained efforts of the academic community to build a permanent scholarly record. While often viewed as a technical utility, the global open metadata infrastructure provided by Crossref is fundamentally a community-led effort in shared governance and collective responsibility (Hendricks et al. 2020).

Members of Crossref act as stewards of their records and have the responsibility for metadata quality and completeness. Crossref facilitates improvements by supporting a social process of feedback loops and by operating technical enrichment mechanisms, such as metadata matching and the inclusion of information from external sources. For example, among 2 billion citation links between records in Crossref, more than half are generated through automated matching (Korzec et al. 2026).

These records do not exist in isolation; instead, the relationships between them can be surfaced via Crossref’s interfaces for humans and machines, providing rich contextual information on the network of connections between works, actors, institutions, and processes involved.

Relationship metadata are contextual bridges that enable communication between distinct communities. These links demystify the research lifecycle, allowing the community to trace research news through the funding stream, the underlying dataset, or the early manuscript versions before revisions (e.g. Tkaczyk 2023; Portenoy 2026). Open metadata also enables collaboration and innovation, inviting the creation of tools that help peers make the most of the data.

Recent developments further illustrate Crossref’s commitment to community integration. The introduction of the Data citations API endpoint enables the systematic retrieval of citation relationships between datasets and scholarly publications, supporting dedicated efforts for enhancing data citation practices (Rittman and Cousijn 2026).

Dedicated datasets are another way to surface community-relevant information. Such as the regularly released funding metadata set, and the latest one on citation relationships (Portenoy 2026), which covers over 2 billion connections, and is also a testament of the growing network of works that the community can use for any research or development purposes. Further, Crossref actively invites the community to find new ways to leverage metadata in its corpus through in-person Metadata Sprints and online competitions, resulting in tools, dashboards, and combined datasets that address the community’s questions and needs.

Here, we highlight the (often untapped) potential of the open relationships metadata available through Crossref’s interfaces, how the community is making contributions, and how they can continue developing integrations to leverage this metadata. We encourage the community to actively engage with Crossref’s open metadata relationships and discover new ways in which this can support transparency, foster collaboration, deepen their understanding of the scholarly landscape, and extend the societal impact of their work.

Related items

References

Hendricks, Ginny, Dominika Tkaczyk, Jennifer Lin, and Patricia Feeney. 2020. “Crossref: The Sustainable Source of Community-Owned Scholarly Metadata.” Quantitative Science Studies 1 (1): 414–27. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00022.

Korzec, Kornelia, Dominika Tkaczyk, and Jason Portenoy. 2026. Two Billion Citation Links in Crossref Help Research Travel Further. May. https://doi.org/10.64000/2gvhh-a7g21.

Portenoy, Jason. 2026. Matching Funders in Scholarly Metadata: Linking Names to ROR IDs. April. https://doi.org/10.64000/d3f5t-g5017.

Rittman, Martyn, and Helena Cousijn. 2026. Strengthening Support for Data Citations and Saying Goodbye to Event Data. March. https://doi.org/10.64000/rzbn5-wjy58.

Tkaczyk, Dominika. 2023. Discovering Relationships Between Preprints and Journal Articles. December. https://doi.org/10.64000/dpcc9-k4564.

Citation

BibTeX citation:

@online{montilla2026,
  author = {Montilla, Luis and Korzec, Kora},
  title = {Connecting the Scholarly Record Through Community Action:
    Ways of Leveraging {Crossref’s} Open Relationship Metadata},
  date = {2026-09-11},
  url = {https://www.luismmontilla.com/events/zadar2026/},
  langid = {en},
  abstract = {The scholarly metadata openly available through Crossref’s
    interfaces materialises the sustained efforts of the academic
    community to build a permanent scholarly record. While often viewed
    as a technical utility, the global open metadata infrastructure
    provided by Crossref is fundamentally a community-led effort in
    shared governance and collective responsibility
    {[}@Hendricks\_2020{]}. Members of Crossref act as stewards of their
    records and have the responsibility for metadata quality and
    completeness. Crossref facilitates improvements by supporting a
    social process of feedback loops and by operating technical
    enrichment mechanisms, such as metadata matching and the inclusion
    of information from external sources. For example, among 2 billion
    citation links between records in Crossref, more than half are
    generated through automated matching {[}@Korzec\_2026{]}. These
    records do not exist in isolation; instead, the relationships
    between them can be surfaced via Crossref’s interfaces for humans
    and machines, providing rich contextual information on the network
    of connections between works, actors, institutions, and processes
    involved. Relationship metadata are contextual bridges that enable
    communication between distinct communities. These links demystify
    the research lifecycle, allowing the community to trace research
    news through the funding stream, the underlying dataset, or the
    early manuscript versions before revisions {[}e.g. @Tkaczyk\_2023;
    @Portenoy\_2026{]}. Open metadata also enables collaboration and
    innovation, inviting the creation of tools that help peers make the
    most of the data. Recent developments further illustrate Crossref’s
    commitment to community integration. The introduction of the Data
    citations API endpoint enables the systematic retrieval of citation
    relationships between datasets and scholarly publications,
    supporting dedicated efforts for enhancing data citation practices
    {[}@Rittman\_2026{]}. Dedicated datasets are another way to surface
    community-relevant information. Such as the regularly released
    funding metadata set, and the latest one on citation relationships
    {[}@Portenoy\_2026{]}, which covers over 2 billion connections, and
    is also a testament of the growing network of works that the
    community can use for any research or development purposes. Further,
    Crossref actively invites the community to find new ways to leverage
    metadata in its corpus through in-person Metadata Sprints and online
    competitions, resulting in tools, dashboards, and combined datasets
    that address the community’s questions and needs. Here, we highlight
    the (often untapped) potential of the open relationships metadata
    available through Crossref’s interfaces, how the community is making
    contributions, and how they can continue developing integrations to
    leverage this metadata. We encourage the community to actively
    engage with Crossref’s open metadata relationships and discover new
    ways in which this can support transparency, foster collaboration,
    deepen their understanding of the scholarly landscape, and extend
    the societal impact of their work.}
}

For attribution, please cite this work as:

Montilla, Luis, and Kora Korzec. 2026. “Connecting the Scholarly Record Through Community Action: Ways of Leveraging Crossref’s Open Relationship Metadata.” PUBMET2026 Conference, September 11. https://www.luismmontilla.com/events/zadar2026/.