A free Crossref metadata audit with citation-weighted priorities
The Galoá Metadata Refiner is a free Crossref metadata audit, no signup. Paste a prefix or ISSN and get back a Health Score plus a citation-weighted list of the DOIs most worth fixing first. We started building it at the Crossref Metadata Sprint in São Paulo, March 2026.
Why Crossref Participation Reports aren’t enough
Crossref’s Participation Report tells editors which of their DOIs are missing abstracts, references, ORCIDs, or licenses. What it does not tell them is which of those gaps matter most. You get thousands of flagged DOIs with no ranking, and the Participation Report treats a heavily-cited paper with broken metadata the same as an uncited one, even though the damage to discoverability is nowhere near the same.
So editors see the gaps but have no way to tell which fix pays off first.
What the Metadata Refiner does
You paste a Crossref prefix, an ISSN, or a single DOI. The audit returns:
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A prioritized article list ranked by citation impact, so heavily-cited articles with metadata gaps surface first.
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A Health Score (0 to 100) for that scope, based on four essential fields: abstract, references, ORCID, license.
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An emailed report, localized (PT-BR if your email ends in
.br, EN elsewhere). Shareable with your editorial board by forwarding. -
Rollups at any level: DOI, ISSN, prefix, and publisher member, with automatic merging of print + online ISSN clusters.
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Up to the 10,000 most recent DOIs per scope, ordered by deposit date.
The audit identifies itself via the Crossref Polite Pool on every query.
60-second demo
How to audit your journal’s Crossref metadata
Try the free Crossref metadata audit on your own prefix or ISSN.
No signup. No account. Queries aren’t stored beyond the 25-hour cache window. The first run for a new scope may take a few minutes; repeat queries in the next 25 hours are instant from cache.
What’s coming, open for voting
Six items on the roadmap, ordered by community votes. Follow a feature on the board and you get an email when it ships.
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Scheduled Monitoring: re-audit a prefix or ISSN on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly cadence.
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OJS Plugin: run audits directly inside OJS admin, without bouncing out to a separate tool.
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DOI Regression Alerts: same-day email, webhook, or Slack when a new deposit drops your Health Score, pointing at the exact DOI and field that regressed.
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Live Compliance Badges: embed an SVG badge on your journal site that shows the current Health Score and updates as deposits come in.
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DOI-Level Drill-down: sort the offending articles by severity, missing field, deposit date, or author. Export to CSV for your editorial team.
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Crossref XML Patch Suggestions: ready-to-submit deposit XML patches for DOIs with missing fields, so less manual work between finding a gap and fixing it.
Vote and suggest ideas on the Galoá Metadata Refiner feature board.
FAQ
Is this an official Crossref audit?
No. It is an independent audit built by the Galoá team during the official Crossref Metadata Sprint in São Paulo. Galoá has been a Crossref Sponsoring Member since 2015 and an ORCID Institutional Member, and the audit follows the same field definitions and schemas Crossref publishes.
How is this different from the Crossref Participation Report?
The Participation Report shows your overall percentages of metadata completeness, but doesn’t tell you where to start. The Metadata Refiner ranks the DOIs by citation impact so you can see exactly which ones to fix first.
Do I need to sign up?
No. The audit is free and requires no login.
Which metadata fields are checked today?
Four: abstracts, references, ORCIDs, and licenses. The set will grow based on what the community votes on.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Susan Collins, Luis Montilla, Isaac Farley, Jason Portenoy, and Leandro Contreras from Crossref for running three days of hands-on work in São Paulo. Thanks also to the SciELO Brazil team, and to every Sprint participant whose questions during the week shaped what this tool actually does.
Feedback
Best way: use the feature board above to vote and suggest. If you’d rather write privately, send me an email!
Or reply right here on this topic; I’m monitoring. 