SciELO and Crossref are joining forces to spotlight the Brazilian open research community next March

After hearing strong interest from the community in the region during our first Metadata Sprint, we wanted to bring the opportunity to participate and co-create directly to Latin America. Brazil’s rich experience as a leader in open research sharing offers a unique groundwork for the success of the event.

Image: Crossref.

We will begin our visit by meeting our members at the Crossref local event – it’s our third in the country. This space will be focused on exchanging the latest news, refreshing the basics about participating in Crossref, and gathering real-time feedback from the community. There are over 2,000 Crossref members in Brazil, who contribute open metadata, connecting their records with our global network of scholarly communications. We also highlight the importance of the six sponsoring organizations in Brazil who work with Crossref to lower local barriers and increase participation in the open scholarly ecosystem, and the local Crossref ambassadors, who voluntarily help us stay connected with the community and represent us in different events.

SciELO’s participation is also on the agenda, with a focus on sharing its latest updates and perspectives on the interconnections among the different components of the scholarly record, which have gained momentum in recent years. The Scielo network is an important source of metadata. As a Crossref member since 2004, Scielo Brazil has provided over half a million records, which are available via the Crossref API, including articles from more than 600 journals, books, book chapters, and preprints. When we include Scielo Chile and Scielo Spain, the total exceeds 570,000 records from more than 700 journals, including dissertations, datasets, and reports. The fundamental relevance of these general statistics is that each of those records is a contribution to the Spanish and Portuguese language corpus of the scholarly record, discoverable and easily integrated into open search databases.

Following the local event, we will hold our second ever Metadata Sprint in São Paulo. You might be wondering, what is a Metadata Sprint? What does Scielo or Crossref have to do with it? The term is used in various contexts, and here we use it to describe an event style in which participants have a fixed amount of time to complete a task or achieve a specific goal of their choosing, typically working in small teams.

This is a markedly different space compared to our regular Crossref local events, which mostly serve the purpose of exchanging information and strengthening relationships with our members and partners. In the Metadata Sprint it’s all about action: participants  bring a question or a problem, team up and tackle it over the course of a few days to start shaping a solution in the context of open scholarly metadata and infrastructure.

Crossref APIs provide public access to over 177 million metadata records deposited and curated by over 31 thousand members worldwide. This massive dataset provides visibility, context, and traceability to the scholarly record. If you are using scholarly metadata or related tools, it’s very likely that you are using metadata available in the Crossref infrastructure. We launched the Metadata Sprints to spark ideas, conversations, and collaboration across the community, to highlight and facilitate novel and community-centric ways of utilising that data, to tap into a wealth of experience and expertise, addressing local challenges more effectively. Here, Scielo as a network also perfectly fits into the picture. Scielo’s role in the recognition, promotion, and enhancement of academic content has been fundamental in Latin America since its inception (both organizations have been around for more or less the same amount of time!); therefore, Crossref’s focus on open metadata and Scielo’s focus on open content make a powerful synergy for the community.

In this second edition of the Crossref Metadata Sprint, we will bring together over 34 participants from Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, and Argentina, with profiles spanning journal editors, researchers, developers, librarians, and scholarly community managers. The topics of interest include interconnecting preprints to versions of record, improving OJS integrations and editorial practices, validating metadata quality before being deposited, integration of Wikidata metadata, metadata integration between Scielo and Crossref, work on XML-based flows for editors, visibility of retractions across citations and the use of multidimensional indicators to analyse the visibility of the scholarly record. As we can see from the list of projects from the first edition¹, the range of ideas and topics is ever-growing and under constant evolution.

We invite you to follow our community forum for Crossref news and updates on upcoming events. Let us know your questions, ideas and more!

Note

1. MONTILLA, L., and CLARK, R. M. Sprinting to Progress: Behind the scenes of our first metadata sprint. 2025 [viewed in 27 February 2026]. https://doi.org/10.64000/30m1m-e8477. Available from: https://www.crossref.org/blog/sprinting-to-progress-behind-the-scenes-of-our-first-metadata-sprint/ ↩

Reference

MONTILLA, L., and CLARK, R. M. Sprinting to Progress: Behind the scenes of our first metadata sprint. 2025 [viewed: 27 feb. 2026]. https://doi.org/10.64000/30m1m-e8477. Available from: https://www.crossref.org/blog/sprinting-to-progress-behind-the-scenes-of-our-first-metadata-sprint/

About Luis Montila

Luis was a researcher-turned-publisher before joining Crossref as a Technical Community Manager in 2022. He is busy educating our community about using the Crossref API, collaborating with API users, including Plus subscribers, to help them make the most of our metadata. Additionally, he partners with service integrators, such as publishing platforms, to realise opportunities to make that metadata even richer and workflows even efficient.

About Susan Collins

Susan has been with Crossref since 2008 and is part of the Community Engagement Team. She works closely with our global community of small publisher members, focusing on tools and resources that support their specific needs. As part of this work she manages the Global Equitable Membership and Sponsor Programs which aim to make membership benefits available to smaller organizations who often face financial, administrative, and technical barriers. Outside of work she loves long distance running, travel, and spending time with her family and dogs.