Your journal has thousands of DOIs. Where do you start?

In March 2026, Galoa was one of the organizations invited to three days of work at the Crossref Metadata Sprint in São Paulo. More than fifty professionals, including publishing-platform developers, journal editors, and Crossref staff, looking at the same problem: why, with all the infrastructure available today, does the metadata of scientific articles remain incomplete and unevenly preserved?

More than the slides, what stayed with me from that week were the conversations with Brazilian editors about Crossref’s Participation Report. You open the report and see that a metadata field sits at 78% coverage. The gap report lists 213 DOIs without abstracts and 487 without ORCID iDs. And then… what?

The honest answer: the report itself does not prioritize. It shows coverage percentages and can list the affected DOIs, but it does not say which articles you should fix first. A highly cited paper with 300 citations in 10 years and no deposited abstract hurts your journal’s discoverability and preservation in a way that a paper with no citations simply does not. The report treats both the same.

That was the motivation for the Galoa Metadata Refiner, the audit we built during the Sprint and launched publicly on April 22, at Crossref’s online showcase.

What does the Galoa Metadata Refiner solve?

You paste a Crossref prefix, an ISSN, or a DOI, and within seconds you get:

• A list of the DOIs ordered by citation impact. Articles with many citations and missing metadata rise to the top, because that is where a correction delivers the greatest discoverability gain.
• A Health Score from 0 to 100 for the queried scope, calculated from the four fields the audit currently covers: abstracts, references, ORCID iDs, and license URLs.
• A report by email, in Portuguese if the address ends in .br and in English otherwise. It can be forwarded to your editorial board without any preprocessing.

Free, no account needed. Queries are not stored beyond the 25-hour cache window.

Why an independent audit of Crossref metadata

Galoa has been a Crossref Sponsor since 2015 and an ORCID institutional member since 2025. Those ten years tracking how Crossref and ORCID define their fields and schemas are what allow our audit to follow exactly those definitions. The difference from the Participation Report is in the output: it shows coverage by field and can list the affected DOIs; our audit prioritizes those DOIs by citation impact, an order of action.

A journal editor does not have a free Saturday to review 500 DOIs. They have two hours one afternoon, between a class and a committee meeting. Those two hours are worth more on the ten most important articles than spread across all 500.

Roadmap: monitoring, alerts, an OJS plugin

During the Sprint we heard dozens of feature ideas that would make a difference in editorial work. We opened a public board where researchers and editors can vote on the ones that matter most. The roadmap is ordered by the votes that come in.

Among the six under evaluation now: scheduled monitoring of your prefix, alerts when a new deposit drops the score, an OJS plugin running the audit right in the administrative interface, and suggested Crossref patch XML ready for re-deposit.

Audit your journal’s Crossref metadata now

Paste your journal’s prefix or ISSN at galoascience.com/metadata-refiner. The first query on a new scope can take a few minutes; the report arrives by email. Repeating the query within the next 25 hours returns instantly, from cache.

The full technical writeup, with the 60-second demo video, is on the Crossref Community forum.

Thanks to Susan Collins, Luis Montilla, Isaac Farley, Jason Portenoy, Leandro Contreras, and Rosa Clark, from Crossref, for three dense days in São Paulo. And to the SciELO Brasil team and the participants whose questions throughout the week shaped what the Refiner actually does.