CURRENT QUALITY OF CROSSREF METADATA IN MACEDONIAN SCIENTIFIC JOURNALS (2025)

Introduction: When a publisher registers a DOI with Crossref, they are also expected to submit associated metadata—structured information about the content, such as the title, authors, publication date, abstract, funding data, references, ORCID iDs, and more. We aimed to analyse the current quality of Crossref Metadata in Macedonian scientific journals, and to suggest mechanisms for increase of the Crossref metadata quality in Macedonian scientific journals. Methods: On February 15, 2025, an analysis was conducted using Crossref's "Participation Reports – How good is your metadata?" tool (https://www.crossref.org/members/prep/) to identify publishers from the Republic of North Macedonia depositing Crossref metadata. The analysis, which focused exclusively on journal articles using the “All time” option (excluding books, book chapters, proceedings, and conference papers), revealed a total of 37 publishers and one co-publisher—Sciendo, De Gruyter Poland Sp. z o.o., based in Warsaw, Poland. Altogether, 37,595 registered content items from these Macedonian publishers were included in the evaluation. Results: The 2025 analysis of Crossref metadata in Macedonian scientific journals shows limited participation, with only 37 out of around 140 publishers represented. DOI deposits are led by a few key institutions, but reference, ORCID iD, affiliation, funding, and Crossmark metadata are largely missing, especially from major public universities. Abstracts are more widely deposited, though inconsistently across institutions. Text mining, license URLs, and similarity checks are poorly implemented, and no publishers have submitted ROR identifiers. Only three journals published via De Gruyter demonstrate strong metadata quality in several areas, but still lack key elements like ORCID, ROR, and funding data. Discussion: Current Crossref metadata quality in Macedonian scientific journals (2025) is very low. Only smaller part of Macedonian scientific journals uses DOI numbers. Most of the Macedonian scientific journals do not deposit Crossref metadata services (Metadata Retrieval, Content Registration, Reference linking, Cited-by, Funder Registry, Similarity Check, Crossmark).