Our REST API makes all of the metadata we hold publicly available. It receives the majority of our API traffic, with around 1 billion hits per month. It’s one of the key ways that we fulfil our mission to make research objects easy to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse. From 1 December 2025, we will be revising the rate limits for the public and polite pools of the REST API to ensure that we can maintain a stable and reliable system, and that metadata is freely available to everyone.
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.
Pending publication is a way of creating a DOI and depositing metadata for a content item any time after a manuscript has been accepted but before it is published online. This is possible for all standard record types (such as articles, books, conference proceedings).
Because a pending publication has not yet been published, its DOI will resolve to a publicly-available Crossref-hosted landing page. Once the work is published online, this same DOI will resolve to the URL for that content.
The pending publication record type serves as a temporary placeholder for your content - like a “coming soon” or preview of the great work to come. For a pending publication, you register basic metadata for your content item before registering all the formal metadata that comes with a version of record. Take care not to share a DOI before it has been deposited with us, or it will not resolve for your readers, and will lead to a failed resolution in your resolution report. Learn more about the pending publication consultation.
Use cases for pending publication
Before the pending publication record type existed, we recommended you to register DOIs at the time content was published online, or shortly after. As the communication needs of our members (researchers, funders, institutions, and publishers) evolve, we have created this new solution to aid you and your work, and allow you to register DOIs before content is published online. With pending publication:
Members can:
address timing issues related to press embargos
publicly establish scholarly precedence for their articles
meet the conditions in full for new funder policies and mandates, which focus on acceptance as a key event to report on
ensure that institutional repositories use the DOI to link to the member-stewarded copy
Researchers can provide formal evidence of all publications in employment and grant applications
Funders can fully track all publications funded by their research grants
Institutions can fully track the scholarly output of their faculty members
Technology vendors that support scholarly research management can account for all outputs
How does pending publication work?
When registering your publication as pending there are two things you need to do:
Register a subset of the metadata (as a minimum: member name, journal title, and accepted date) under the Pending Publication record type.
After you do this, the DOI will resolve to a Crossref-hosted landing page displaying your logo, a banner showing the manuscript has been accepted for publication, and the metadata you’ve provided. As with all registered content, pending publication metadata will be publicly available in our XML API (and updated as you update your metadata records). Unfortunately, we do not yet support pending publications in our REST API.
Once your work is published, you need to register the full metadata for the work - this is not an automatic process. You must update the metadata for each pending publication DOI, so that each DOI will resolve directly to the content (and not the pending publication landing page).
Pending publication workflow diagram
Crossmark participants please note that you can deposit Crossmark metadata at any point, but during the Beta version of the pending publication rollout, the Crossmark badge will not be displayed to readers.
Fees for pending publications
Content Registration (metadata deposit) fees still apply, but there are no additional fees for using pending publication. So, you’ll be charged once when you register the pending publication, but any subsequent updates, including the update on publication, are not charged.
History
Pending publication has been supported since 2019 and was designed in response to community feedback:
