Celebrating Crossref’s 25th anniversary at our annual meeting: satellite event highlights

[rclark]

As part of this year’s Annual Meeting and Board election (crossref2025), we hosted a series of satellite events that brought local members together in Nairobi, Bogotá, Medan, London, Washington DC, and Madrid. Many of these gatherings were led by our ambassadors and offered a welcoming space to meet in person, share experiences, and explore how Crossref services and metadata practices are being used in different regional contexts as we celebrated Crossref’s 25th anniversary.

We’re grateful to everyone who helped make these events possible, and invite you to read the reflections and highlights as they’re added below.

[jobanda]

The Crossref satellite event in Nairobi brought together 25 members from across the city to a familiar space to engage while joining the livestream of the Annual Meeting. A highlight of the day was celebrating the election of Dr Rebecca Wambua from the Distance, Open and e-Learning Practitioners’ Association of Kenya to the Crossref Board, and meeting her in person for the first time right as the results were announced.

The event was moderated by our Kenya Ambassador @mercury.shitindo, with local staff @jobanda, @eatoni and Irene Mokeira on hand to welcome members, catch up, and share a moment over a wonderful cake arranged by the venue team.

Staying closely connected with members in Nairobi has made it easier to have ongoing conversations about metadata improvement and participation in Crossref services. Through touchpoints such as previous Nairobi events, metadata health check webinars, and other local and virtual engagements, members increasingly see both our staff and ambassadors as approachable. It was energising to see familiar faces, exchange updates.

[rocio.gaudioso]

The Madrid Satellite session brought together Crossref members, sponsors, metadata users, and funders. In the morning before kickstarting the main annual meeting, we had José Luis Ortega, representing the team behind Silice, an open tool for monitoring and expanding on the metadata available about Spanish scholarly content, who shared the challenges and roadmap for this tool; we heard the behind-the-scenes and more insights from Nacho Pérez, representing the winners of the Crossref Metadata Award 2025, Boletin Geologico y Minero de España, and Belén Benito, representing the Crossref sponsoring organization Gudinfo, telling us more about their contributions to lower the barriers existing in the community and enabling them to deposit more and better metadata. The community gleefully welcomed this opportunity to interact in person among them and with Crossref colleagues, @rocio.gaudioso , @lmontilla, @mkovalyova , @coelias and Nadia Turpin, highlighting that “ spaces to discuss in person anything about Crossref are always welcomed and more if they are in Spanish”. As a side note, we didn’t order a cake, but the celebratory cookies were a hit!

[amandafrench]

In central Washington, DC in the USA, Crossref Chief Operating Officer Lucy Ofiesh and ROR Technical Community Manager Amanda French hosted a collegial in-person meeting of Crossref members at the lovely conference center of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) the day after the last of the Crossref Annual Meeting online events.

Many American scholarly societies and their publishing divisions are based in DC, and so we were fortunate enough to foregather with representatives of organizations such as Optica Publishing Group, the American Psychological Association, and of course AGU itself. From the policy arena were representatives of entities such as the International Monetary Fund and the Inter-American Development Bank, both of whom have very active research programs, as well as the Senior Director of Policy for the Center for Open Science (COS).

Newer to Crossref are the funding systems and funders making use of the Grant Linking System, so we were very pleased to welcome a representative of the American Institute for Cancer Research (AICR) along with two of our friends from Altum who are helping funders such as AICR register grants with Crossref through Proposal Central.

In the first hour of the two-hour event, Lucy gave a live version of her report on Crossref’s board election, current finances, and future financial plans. We then showed selected highlights from the recordings of the annual meeting. Of particular interest to the group were the video timeline of the past 25 years of Crossref’s history (we all learned something new!) and the demo of the refreshed version of Crossref Participation Reports, which help Crossref members assess the completeness of their metadata.

Todd Carpenter, Executive Director of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) was kind enough to come down from Baltimore to reprise the lucid and thoughtful remarks he delivered at the online annual meeting sessions. Closing out the first half of the meeting, Todd reflected on Crossref’s tremendous impact over the last 25 years in helping make scholarly content discoverable and interoperable not just through technology but through extensive community collaboration and adoption of the many information standards NISO helps produce.

And then: cake!

In the second and last hour of our meeting, we heard informal lightning talks from participants who introduced their organizations and told us about some of the ways they’ve been working with Crossref both in the past and currently. One theme of these lightning talks was that Crossref provides a lot of services that members felt they might take better advantage of, including Similarity Check and Metadata Plus and the Research Organization Registry (ROR).

To close, we repaired to a local lounge for drinks and further conversation, agreeing all the while that while online events remain important, there’s nothing like gathering in person.