About us

We envision a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organisations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society.

We’ve been progressing towards this vision for two decades so far. And “we” means 22,000+ members from 160 countries, 170+ million records, 2 billion monthly metadata queries from thousands of tools across the research ecosystem.

Take a look at our strategic agenda to see the planned work that aims to achieve the vision. The sustainability area aims to make transparent all the processes and procedures we follow to run the operation for the long term, including our financials and our ongoing committment to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure POSI. The governance area describes our board and its role in community oversight.

It also takes a strong team. We are a distributed group of 45 dedicated people who like to play quizzes, talk about celery (sometimes cucumber), measure coffee intake, and create 100s of custom slack emojis. Our fascination with expired mints has been described as obsessive by some but we prefer to think of it as a passionate hobby. We enthusiastically support the Oxford comma but waver between use of American or British English. Occasionally we do some work to improve knowledge sharing worldwide—which we take a bit more seriously than ourselves.

Take a look at our organisation chart.

Our mission

Crossref makes research objects easy to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse.

We’re a not-for-profit membership organisation that exists to make scholarly communications better. We rally the community; tag and share metadata; run an open infrastructure; play with technology; and make tools and services—all to help put research in context.

It’s as simple—and as complicated—as that.

Rally

Getting the community working together to make scholarly communications better

Tag

Structuring, processing, and sharing metadata to reveal relationships between research outputs

Run

Operating a shared, open infrastructure that is community-governed and evolves with changing needs

Play

Engaging in debate and experimenting with technology to solve our members’ problems

Make

Creating tools and services to enable connections and give context

How do we work?

These are the Crossref ’truths’, the principles that guide everything we do. Read our truths page, with full descriptions for each.

Come one, come all
Smart alone, brilliant together
One member, one vote
Love metadata, love technology
What you see, what you get
Here today, here tomorrow

How we started

We started in January 2000 with one employee, Ed Pentz, as Executive Director. Read about our history in Ed’s words. Since we started we’ve grown to (as of 2022) forty five and over 22,000 members coming from 160 countries.

Read our background story, with an overview of our current services, in this document:

Read or download this background story as a PDF in English, Spanish or Brazilian Portuguese.

Please contact our outreach team with any questions.

Operations & sustainability

We are a not-for-profit organization, registered in the United States of America as a 501(c)6 (a “trade association”). We are sustained by annual membership fees that are tiered according to organizational size. We also charge a Content Registration fee for each item of content whose metadata is registered with us. We also provide both free and paid-for metadata retrieval options for access to this metadata. Members can and do participate in many ways and contribute to our global network of linked scholarly content. We are governed by sixteen of our members that form our board serving three-year terms.

Board & governance

Crossref is registered as Publishers International Linking Association, Inc. (PILA) in New York, USA. You can view our certificate of incorporation and by laws. We have tax exempt status in the US as a 501(c)6 organization. Here is our antitrust policy (pdf) and our conflict of interest policy (pdf). The board of directors governs Crossref. They meet three times a year and oversee the organization, set its strategic direction and make sure that Crossref fulfills its mission. A list of motions from every board meeting is available.

Strategic agenda and roadmap

This page presents all our high-level activities, from open governance and sustainability, collaborative projects with different parts of the ever-diversifying scholarly community, work to expand metadata, and delivery of tools and APIs to retrieve works, entities, and their relationships—all while fostering a strong global team. View our live and detailed roadmap at the bottom of this page. Read on to learn more about where Crossref is heading and let us have your thoughts by starting or joining a discussion in the strategy section of our community forum. Review the archived strategic narratives for 2020-2022 and 2018-2020, and read background on our strategic planning approach on our blog.

Our truths

These are the Crossref truths. These are the principles that guide us in everything we do. They were tested with members and adopted by our board in 2016. We tweaked and added “What you see, what you get” in 2017. Come one, come all We define publishing broadly. If you communicate research and care about preserving the scholarly record, join us. We are a global community of members with content in all disciplines, in many formats, and with all kinds of business models.

Our people

We are a distributed team of dedicated people who mostly like to play quizzes, talk about celery (sometimes cucumber), measure coffee intake, and create 100s of custom slack emojis. Our fascination with expired mints has been described as obsessive by some but we prefer to think of it as a passionate hobby. We enthusiastically support the Oxford comma but waver between use of American or British English. Occasionally we do some work to improve knowledge sharing worldwide, which we take a bit more seriously than ourselves.

Organisation chart

Here is our organisational chart. Also take a look at our people directory and click through to read about each of our roles and areas of responsibility. If you’re using Firefox and can’t view the interactive chart below, here is static image, correct as of January 2025. Interactive org chart

Jobs

Help us achieve our mission to make research outputs easier to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse. We’re a small but mighty group working with over 20,000 members from 160 countries, and we have thousands of tools and services relying on our metadata, which sees over 2 billion queries every month on average. We are fully remote and have 49 staff spanning California to Hong Kong and we all like to interact with and co-create with our engaged community.

Get involved

Find a service

Documentation

2025 June 17

Evolving the preprint evaluation world with Sciety

2025 June 05

Destacando nuestra comunidad en Colombia

2025 May 14

Our annual open call for expressions of interest to join our board

2025 May 11

Notice of amendments to Crossref membership terms and bylaws