12 May 2025
eLife has been named a recipient of the inaugural Crossref Metadata Excellence Awards, highlighting its sustained commitment to producing complete, high-quality metadata for the research it publishes. The award was announced during Crossref’s Midyear Community Update, where eLife was recognized among six organizations honored across two categories: metadata excellence and metadata enrichment.
The awards, launched to celebrate exemplary metadata practices among Crossref members, support Crossref’s broader initiative to build the Research Nexus—an open, interconnected network that improves the discoverability, traceability, and reuse of scholarly outputs. eLife was recognized in the metadata excellence category for consistently high levels of metadata completeness across its publications.
According to Crossref, 98% of eLife journal articles include ROR identifiers for author and editor affiliations, while 99% contain authenticated ORCID iDs. eLife also makes extensive use of Crossref’s relationship metadata, linking journal articles to related research outputs such as preprints, datasets, and software in machine-readable formats.
In 2023, eLife introduced a new publishing model that restructured how peer-reviewed research is shared. Under this model, all articles that undergo peer review are published as Reviewed Preprints, accompanied by public reviews and eLife Assessments. Authors may submit revised versions, each assigned a unique DOI alongside a persistent ‘umbrella’ DOI that always links to the latest version. These identifiers are systematically connected using Crossref’s relationships service to trace version history and link back to the original preprint, ensuring transparency and accurate citation.
eLife was also the first publisher to incorporate grant DOIs into its metadata, establishing clearer connections between research outputs and the funding sources behind them.
Crossref stated that high-quality metadata supports discoverability, trust, and reproducibility across the research ecosystem. The awards aim to spotlight organizations that demonstrate exceptional stewardship of scholarly metadata and contribute meaningfully to the integrity of the scientific record.