Noyam Journals, based in Accra, Ghana, was recently recognised for the completeness of its metadata through the Crossref Metadata Award, part of our 25th anniversary celebrations. Noyam was one of six publishers worldwide to receive the award and stood out as a leader among members of our Global Equitable Membership (GEM) Program.
Wednesday 22nd October 2025—Crossref, the open scholarly infrastructure nonprofit, today releases an enhanced dashboard showing metadata coverage and individual organisations’ contributions to documenting the process and outputs of scientific research in the open. The tool helps research-performing, funding, and publishing organisations identify gaps in open research information, and provides supporting evidence for movements like the Barcelona Declaration for Open Research Information, which encourages more substantial commitment to stewarding and enriching the scholarly record through open metadata.
Welcome back to our series of case studies of research funders using the Grant Linking System. In this interview, I talk with Cátia Laranjeira, PTCRIS Program Manager at FCCN|FCT, Portugal’s main public funding agency, about the agency’s approach to metadata, persistent identifiers, Open Science and Open Infrastructure.
With a holistic approach to the management, production and access to information on science, FCCN|FCT’s decision to implement the Grant Linking System within their processes was not simply a technical upgrade, but a coordinated effort to continue building a strong culture of openness. With the mantra “register once, reuse always”, FCCN|FCT efforts to embrace open funding metadata was only logical.
Repositories are home to a wide range of scholarly content; they often archive theses, dissertations, preprints, datasets, and other valuable outputs. These records are an important part of the research ecosystem and should be connected to the broader scholarly record. But to truly serve their purpose, repository records need to be connected to each other, to the broader research ecosystem, and to the people behind the research. Metadata is what makes that possible. Enhancing metadata is a way to tell a fuller, more accurate story of research. It helps surface relationships between works, people, funders, and institutions, and allows us as a community to build and use a more connected, more useful network of knowledge - what Crossref calls the ‘Research Nexus’.
For Reference Linking, you need to find the existing DOIs for each work in your reference list, and then display the DOI for that item in your reference list.
Step 1: Find DOIs for the referenced works.
There are a few different options:
Crossref Reference Linking plugin in the OJS platform - if you’re using the OJS platform, make sure to add and enable the Crossref Reference Linking Plugin. The plugin will use the Crossref API to check against your plain-text references and locate possible DOIs. It will then display the reference lists with DOIs on the article landing page.
Simple Text Query - paste your reference lists into this web form, and it will return matches. This is a manual interface, and is suitable for low-volume querying.
XML API - submit XML formatted according to the query schema section to our system as individual requests or as a batch upload. This method requires API skills, and allows you significant control over your query execution and results.
Step 2: Display the DOIs in your reference lists.
Once you have retrieved the relevant DOIs, display them as URLs in your reference lists (following our DOI display guidelines).
Page maintainer: Maryna Kovalyova Last updated: 2025-August-15