Crossref announces inaugural Metadata Awards

7 May 2025

Marking its 25th anniversary, Crossref has launched a series of Metadata Awards.

The Crossref Metadata Excellence Awards go to Noyam Publishers, GigaScience Press, eLife, American Society for Microbiology, and Universidad La Salle Arequipa Perú, and Instituto Geologico y Minero de España receives the Crossref Metadata Enrichment Award. These inaugural awards highlight some of the best metadata practitioners among Crossref members, who all create the research nexus together.

The awards were presented today (7 May) during the Crossref Midyear Community Update, and will be held every other year henceforth to emphasise the community’s role in stewarding the scholarly record, and to recognise the leadership of organisations that 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”. Its members co-create 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.

Kora Korzec, Crossref Director of Community, said: “Rich metadata improves discoverability of and trust in published works. Many institutions now strive to turn towards open research information sources for critical activities. We believe it’s time to give credit to organisations that are doing the best work in supporting others across the scholarly ecosystem with their metadata.”

The winners have been selected on the basis of the overall highest coverage of metadata elements included in Participation Reports as of March 2025. These public reports 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, and License URLs.