On behalf of the Nominating Committee, I’m pleased to share the slate of candidates for the 2026 board election. Every active member organisation is invited to submit a ballot to elect the incoming board class.
We’re providing a summary of the board’s July 2026 meeting. The July board meeting is our only in-person meeting. The board gathers for two days of strategic thinking and long-range planning, as well as conducting annual board business. This year, we focused on allocating surplus funds we have on hand to invest in a three-year project to redesign the content system. In a related discussion, we decided to lower content registration fees starting in 2027 because we’ve had a demonstrated history of generating surpluses, exceeding what we need to run Crossref. We also discussed the board structure, as part of our regular review of stakeholder governance. And we conducted annual board business, such as approving the audited financial statements and reviewed our risk register and mitigation plans.
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.
We also managed to squeeze in watching a World Cup game over dinner.
Starting today, funder names deposited in Crossref metadata without an identifier will be matched to ROR IDs, to support an open and connected Research Nexus. Funding information is an increasingly important part of the scholarly record. The improved matching strategy supports researchers, funders, institutions, and meta-researchers, who rely on that information to understand how research is supported and what outcomes that support produces.
Strengthening Scholarly Publishing in Africa is a collaborative webinar series bringing together ASSAf, Crossref, DOAJ, EIFL, and PKP to share practical guidance, resources, and approaches for strengthening the publishing ecosystem in the region. This series responds to the growing interest in open access, digital publishing, stronger editorial practices, and greater visibility of research publishing across Africa. Each partner organisation has long experience of building that capacity in the area of their expertise. In this series, we’re coming together to offer a more holistic learning experience to the community of African publishers, putting different aspects of the publishing process in their broader context.
Following up on his earlier post (which was also blogged to CrossTech here), Leigh Dodds is now [Following up on his earlier post (which was also blogged to CrossTech here), Leigh Dodds is now]3 the possibility of using machine-readable auto-discovery type links for DOIs of the form
These LINK tags are placed in the document HEAD section and could be used by crawlers and agents to recognize the work represented by the current document. This sounds like a great idea and we’d like to hear feedback on it.
Concurrently at Nature we have also been considering how best to mark up in a machine-readable way DOIs appearing within a document page BODY. Current thinking is to do something along the following lines:
which allows the DOI to be presented in the preferred Crossref citation format (doi:10.1038/nprot.2007.43), to be hyperlinked to the handle proxy server (<a href="http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.baylor.edu/10.1038/nprot.2007.43">http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.baylor.edu/10.1038/nprot.2007.43</a>), and to refer to a validly registered URI form for the DOI (info:doi/10.1038/nprot.2007.43). Again, we would be real interested to hear any opinions on this proposal for inline DOI markup as well as on Leigh’s proposal for document-level DOI markup.
(Oh, and btw many congrats to Leigh on his recent promotion to CTO, Ingenta.)