The workshop "Strides towards co-creating the research nexus" was held at Munin Conference 2025. In this workshop we discussed how the community can harness the latest developments in Crossref metadata to support solutions to key challenges of transparency, reproducibility, and trust. Crossref exists to make scholarly communications better by making works easy to find, cite, assess, and reuse. Like others in the community, we envisage a rich and reusable network of relationships connecting research organizations, people, things, and actions, woven collectively by contribution and curation of metadata. This research nexus represents a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society. We’ve recently seen addition of new information in our REST API, such as Retraction Watch data, and enabled in the schema new types of relationships that aid discoverability of data and software through citation types, transparency of the research process and progress with contributor roles and versions, and funding relationships. We will briefly present these developments, alongside Crossref’s approach to automated metadata enrichment, including opportunities and strategies related to matching journal articles to preprints and matching affiliations to ROR IDs, and plans for further enrichments. The workshop had three parts – following the presentation, we proceeded to explore use cases for this metadata in reaching participants’ current key objectives, discussing tools that help effectively tap into the metadata. Finally, we invited all to scan the horizon of gaps and upcoming needs together, and brainstorm suggestions for future metadata and tools developments in this space. This workshop welcomed participants from all skill levels, involved in the wider scholarly publishing activities to provide diverse perspectives and collaborative learning.