Latest blog posts
Amanda Bartell
2022 September 22

What is our role in preserving the integrity of the scholarly record?

The integrity of the scholarly record is an essential aspect of research integrity. Every initiative and service that we have launched since our founding has been focused on documenting and clarifying the scholarly record in an open, machine-actionable and scalable form. All of this has been done to make it easier for the community to assess the trustworthiness of scholarly outputs. Now that the scholarly record itself has evolved beyond the published outputs at the end of the research process – to include both the elements of that process and its aftermath – preserving its integrity poses new challenges that we strive to meet… we are reaching out to the community to help inform these efforts.

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Lucy Ofiesh
2022 September 16

2022 Board Election

I’m pleased to share the 2022 board election slate. Crossref’s Nominating Committee received 40 submissions from members worldwide to fill five open board seats. We maintain a balance of eight large member seats and eight small member seats. A member’s size is determined based on the membership fee tier they pay. We look at how our total revenue is generated across the membership tiers and split it down the middle. Like last year, about half of our revenue came from members in the tiers $0 - $1,650, and the other half came from members in tiers $3,900 - $50,000.

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Jennifer Kemp
2022 September 06

Accessibility for Crossref DOI Links: Call for comments on proposed new guidelines

Our entire community – members, metadata users, service providers, community organizations and researchers – create and/or use DOIs in some way so making them more accessible is a worthy and overdue effort. For the first time in five years and only the second time ever, we are recommending some changes to our DOI display guidelines (the changes aren’t really for display but more on that below). We don’t take such changes lightly, because we know it means updating established workflows.

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Geoffrey Bilder
2022 August 26

Martin Paul Eve is joining our R&D group as a Principal Developer

I’m delighted to say that Martin Paul Eve will be joining Crossref as a Principal R&D Developer starting in January 2023. As a Professor of Literature, Technology, and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London- Martin has always worked on issues relating to metadata and scholarly infrastructure. In joining the Crossref R&D group, Martin can focus full-time on helping us design and build a new generation of services and tools to help the research community navigate and make sense of the scholarly record.

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About us

We envision a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organizations, 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 17,000+ members from 146 countries, 130+ million records, 600+ million monthly metadata queries from thousands of tools across the research ecosystem. An ecosystem that includes several other foundational infrastructure organisations we collaborate with.

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 organization chart.

Our mission

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

We’re a not-for-profit membership organization 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.

  1. Come one, come all
  2. Smart alone, brilliant together
  3. One member, one vote
  4. Love metadata, love technology
  5. What you see, what you get
  6. 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 17,000 members coming from 146 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.

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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.

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Strategic agenda

Welcome to our new strategic narrative—published June 2021—which sets out our agenda through 2025. It encompasses all our plans, from governance and sustainability, our work with different parts of the scholarly community, through to new and existing product development as well as strategic initiatives. We have six overarching goals, two more than the previous set, now archived; ‘bolster the team’ and ’live up to POSI’ are the 2021 additions. Historic strategy information can be found on our blog.

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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.

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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.

more

Organization chart

Here is an overview of our team’s structure, also take a look at our people directory and click through to read about each of our roles and interests.

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Jobs

Come work at Crossref. It’ll be fun! 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 17,000 members from 146 countries, and we have thousands of tools and services relying on our metadata. We take our work seriously but usually not ourselves. We have offices in Oxford, UK, and Lynnfield, MA, USA, but actively seek remote/home-based people too.

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Fee assistance

Finding ways to help organizations participate in our services is an important part of what we exist to do. We know that cost and technical capabilities can be barriers to participation, and we aim to provide assistance with these in a number of ways: Sponsor arrangement. Our Sponsors can help members join Crossref by providing billing, technical and administrative support. The Sponsor pays a membership fee to cover the organizations it works with (some may charge for the services they offer).

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Last updated: 2021-February-26