Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day, and accessibility has been on our minds lately. We’ve recently completed an internal audit of all our user interfaces, and have added a new accessibility page to our website, where you can find the accessibility documentation that we put together as part of the audit.
For a funder with over thirty years of funding history, making all of their funding metadata openly available is no small undertaking. In this conversation, I chat with Guntram Bauer, Chief Scientific Officer at the Human Frontiers Science Program (HFSP), about how the organisation is working to register decades of grant data with Crossref, the challenges of linking historical awards to published research outputs, and what open, structured funding metadata means for accountability to member countries and the wider scientific community.
We’re providing a summary of the board’s March 2026 meeting. At the meeting, the board reviewed progress in our key programs and initiatives, the strategic outlook for 2026, filled a vacancy on the Board, considered an additional legal entity for Crossref, and reviewed our governance structures. The resolutions are available on the dedicated section of our website, which also lists the members of the Board and offers further information about our governance.
In April 2025, we launched the metadata matching project, in order to add missing relationships to the scholarly metadata. We will do this by consolidating all existing and planned matching workflows, which enrich member-deposited metadata in Crossref. This unified service will result in a more complete research nexus. In this blog post, we share our latest milestone: developing and evaluating a strategy for matching funder metadata to Research Organization Registry (ROR) identifiers.
Registering your DOI records using OJS version 3.3
You can register your DOI records with us using the OJS (Open Journal Systems) platform with two extra plugins - the DOI plugin, and the Crossref XML plugin for OJS. We highly recommend including your references in the metadata you send to us, too - you can do this by adding the OJS references plugin. The instructions below are for configuring OJS version 3.3.
Ask your OJS administrator to install the DOI plugin, and add the DOI prefix that we gave to you. Your prefix will start with 10. and is in the format 10.xxxx (e.g., 10.1234).
You can check whether the DOI Plugin is already set up by following these steps:
Go to ‘Settings’ on your dashboard and click ‘Website’
Switch to the ‘Plugins’ tab
Search ‘Public Identifier Plugins’ and find ‘DOI’
Click the checkbox on the right side of the DOI plugin description to enable it
Step 2: Set up the Crossef XML plugin for OJS
To make best use of the plugin, make sure you’re using OJS version 3 or higher.
You can start by finding the Crossref plugin from your dashboard:
Click ‘Tools’
Choose the ‘Import/Export’ tab
Click ‘Crossref XML Export Plugin’
You can deposit content with us in one of three ways:
Register your content with us automatically using the OJS plugin
Register the content with us manually, from the plugin interface
Simply click the checkbox at the bottom of the DOI plugin settings to enable automatic deposits.
You’ll then need to add information into the plugin:
Here’s what to enter into each of the fields shown in the screenshot above:
Depositor name - the name of the organisation registering the DOIs (note: this field is not authenticated with Crossref)
Depositor email - the email address of the individual responsible for registering content with Crossref (note: this field is not authenticated with Crossref)
Username - this is the username element of your Crossref depositor credentials. It will be passed to us to authenticate your submission(s). Your username might be just a collection of letters (role credentials), or it might be an email address (user credentials) - there is more information on role versus user credentials below.
Password - this is the password associated with your Crossref depositor credentials
Note: if the combination of username and password is incorrect, OJS will return a ‘401 unauthorized status code’ error at the time of registration. This error indicates that the username and password are incorrectly entered. That is, they do not match the username and/or password set with Crossref.
If you are using organisation-wide, shared role credentials (i.e. your username is a collection of letters), you can simply add in your shared username and password.
If you are using personal user credentials that are unique to you (i.e. your username is your email address), you’ll need to add your email address and your role into the username field, and your personal password into the password field. Here’s an example of what this will look like:
The OJS references plugin is available from OJS 3.1.2 onwards. The plugin will use the Crossref API to check against plain text references and locate possible DOIs for articles. The plugin will also allow the display of reference lists on the article landing page in OJS and deposit them as part of your metadata deposit. Linking references is a requirement of Crossref membership.
Two things need to be set up to activate the references plugin:
a) Workflow Settings
Click ‘Settings’ and then ‘Workflow’ from your dashboard
Under the ‘Submission’ tab, choose ‘Metadata’!
Scroll down to the bottom and to find the ‘References’ section Make sure you enable references metadata by clicking the checkbox ‘Enable references metadata’. You also need to select the option ‘Ask the author to provide references during submission’.
Click save!
b) Website Settings
Then you need to activate the references plugin on the website, too, by following the instructions here:
Click ‘Settings’ and then ‘Website’ from your dashboard
Choose the ‘Plugins’ tab.
Search ‘Crossref reference linking’
Click the ‘Crossref reference linking checkbox
This plugin will deposit the references that you enter into the XML deposit.
Additional OJS plugins for Crossref
In addition to the Crossref XML plugin for OJS, there are also other important plugins that can be enabled in OJS to enrich your metadata records:
Funding Metadata plugin - as of OJS 3.1.2, it is possible to enable a funder registry plugin for submitting funding information to Crossref. The plugin will use the Open Funder Registry to check against existing funding agencies. The plugin will include funding information in your Crossref DOI deposits.
Similarity Check plugin - if you are using OJS 3.1.2 or above, you are able to use the Similarity Check plugin. This will enable you to automatically send manuscripts to your iThenticate account to check their similarity to already published content. You will need to be subscribed to Crossref’s Similarity Check service for this to work.
ROR plugin - the ROR Plugin for OJS enables authors to add the ROR ID for the organization they are affiliated with.
Getting help with OJS plugins
The team at Crossref didn’t create these plugins - they were either created by the team at PKP, or by third-party developers. Because of this, we aren’t able to give in-depth help or troubleshooting on problems with these plugins.
