Hello,

Since the start of 2026, we have a lot to share. From GEM program expansion and a new schema update, to a community roundtable on author affiliation and a spotlight on Indonesia, there’s plenty going on in the first two months of the year. Oh, and save the date for our upcoming community update call.

As always, I welcome your feedback.

Rosa

The Global Equitable Membership (GEM) program is expanding in 2026 to include 18 new countries, bringing the total to 77 countries. At the start of 2026, we have 1,339 participating organisations. The program removes membership and record registration fees for organisations in the world's least economically advantaged countries.Since launching in 2023, it has grown from 214 to 628 members — contributing around 334,000 works to the research nexus so far.

See which countries are joining the program

We kicked off 2026 with a schema update that's been a long time coming: Grant IDs are now supported as a dedicated field across all record types. This means members can directly link research outputs to the grants that funded them using a persistent identifier, rather than relying on unstructured award number fields. If you're a member who collects funding information from authors, we'd encourage you to start asking for the Grant ID alongside the funder name.

Find out how to add Grant IDs to your metadata, and if you want to go deeper on funding transparency in your organization, join our upcoming webinar - COPE & Crossref Best practices webinar: Funding transparency.

In November, we partnered with OA Switchboard to bring together over 40 organizations — including community members, service providers, data scientists, and librarians — to discuss the state of author affiliation metadata. The conversation covered why affiliation data matters, where the gaps are, and what publishers, submission systems, and infrastructure providers can each do to improve things. The full write-up includes the identified challenges, proposed practical solutions, and links to all the presentations.

See what the community had to say

Indonesia has been our fastest-growing region every year since 2017, and now has over 4,400 members who have registered metadata for more than 2.6 million works. This post takes a closer look at what's driving that growth — from national policies requiring student publication to the work of our eight sponsors and two dedicated ambassadors on the ground — as well as the challenges members still face and how we're working to address them. The post is also available in Bahasa Indonesia.

Take a closer look at our community in Indonesia

2025 was a year of getting things done — from moving our entire infrastructure to the cloud and launching a new data science team, to releasing updates to metadata schemas, expanding the GEM program, creating a new fee tier for our smaller members, and welcoming over 2,700 new members. Read the full annual report for a detailed look at everything the community helped us accomplish, and what we're building toward in 2026.

Read the 2025 annual report