This paper describes the scholarly metadata collected and made available by Crossref, as well as its importance in the scholarly research ecosystem. Containing over 106 million records and expanding at an average rate of 11% a year, Crossref’s metadata has become one of the major sources of scholarly data for publishers, authors, librarians, funders, and researchers. The metadata set consists of 13 content types, including not only traditional types, such as journals and conference papers, but also data sets, reports, preprints, peer reviews, and grants. The metadata is not limited to basic publication metadata, but can also include abstracts and links to full text, funding and license information, citation links, and the information about corrections, updates, retractions, etc. This scale and breadth make Crossref a valuable source for research in scientometrics, including measuring the growth and impact of science and understanding new trends in scholarly communications. The metadata is available through a number of APIs, including REST API and OAI-PMH. In this paper, we describe the kind of metadata that Crossref provides and how it is collected and curated. We also look at Crossref’s role in the research ecosystem and trends in metadata curation over the years, including the evolution of its citation data provision. We summarize the research used in Crossref’s metadata and describe plans that will improve metadata quality and retrieval in the future.

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• Open research infrastructure provides the building blocks of scientific progress, which must be available to everyone, with no barriers to access. • Organizations enabling open research infrastructure must endorse these fundamental principles: equity, value, trust, interoperability, sustainability, and community governance. • Finding ways to invite co-creation and community participation engenders a strong sense of 'buy-in' and is therefore essential to developing successful research infrastructure.

The scholarly record is evolving. As a community, we are very good at convening and acting on new research objects, especially container outputs—preprints, data, software, and reviews, to name a few. We’re less good at linking those objects together. And we usually focus on the act of citation, with many excellent community-created guides for citing different types of objects. If the objects are now largely very well identifiable and citeable, Crossref, with its members and integrators, now needs to turn our collective attention to building the evidence trail. This is made up of the relationships between objects and the acts that are performed on them over time, which could be by the original creators or those reusing and building on the work in later generations. It’s all about metadata and relationships, and we call it the Research Nexus. Together with our governing board—comprising members that include publishers, funders, institutions, and tool-makers—we are exploring Crossref’s role in maintaining trust in the scholarly record. With this discussion paper, we seek advice on better managing a particular and critical area of relationship metadata: corrections, retractions, and errata (CRE metadata). Crossmark is a set of relationship metadata and a button on article pages and PDFs that alerts readers to the currency and accuracy of the object they’re looking at. Responding to the recent workshops and initiatives in the community, we discuss possible strategies for the future of Crossmark, present adoption trends and usage data, and set out some ideas and dilemmas for community advice.

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