CrossRef Web Services: structured, cross-publisher metadata for your indexing and linking services.

CrossRef Web Services, or CWS, offers an easy-to-use suite of tools for authorized partners
to collect metadata on a cross-publisher basis to streamline their own crawling, indexing, and
linking services. CWS includes a variety of metadata dissemination tools and provides
standard terms and conditions for partners using the cross-publisher metadata available
through CrossRef. Just as the core CrossRef linking service removes the need for bilateral
linking agreements among publishers, the CWS program removes the need for bilateral
agreements covering use of metadata between publishers and partner service providers.

One way to access the 29 million+ metadata records now registered in CrossRef is via our
OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) interface. The CrossRef
OAI-PMH repository interface serves as the central point for the distribution of metadata from
participating publishers, utilizing a robust and widely adopted technology targeted at
consumers of large quantities of metadata. Access to the CrossRef’s metadata repository is
controlled by IP authentication and can be tailored to provide specific content from select
publishers to each authorized recipient.

Here are links to some sample CWS metadata. Please note that our metadata holdings are not a comprehensive, error-free set of all publisher article-level data because in the past we did not require publishers to submit complete bibliographic information. We have recently begun to take measures to ensure higher quality data, but the current data is highly variable from publisher to publisher.

metadata sample 1

metadata sample 2

Authorized CWS partners will be charged $2,500-60,000 per year depending upon the gross
revenues of the partner and the number of CrossRef members who agree (by not opting out)
to have their metadata included in the service. To view the fee table and CWS Authorized
Partner agreement, please see:
http://www.crossref.org/04intermediaries/web_services_fees.html.

According to Ed Pentz, Executive Director of CrossRef. “CWS was developed to standardize
how published content is crawled, indexed, and linked to on the Web. Participation by
CrossRef member publishers is optional. CrossRef’s mission is to enable researchers and
scholars to get to authoritative primary content and CWS will enable this to happen by
streamlining the delivery of Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for persistent linking and
authoritative metadata.”

Current CWS subscribers include:

EMBL
GREENDATA
MESUR
MICROSOFT
NASA ADS
SCIRUS