Latest blog posts
Isaac Farley
2022 July 25

Flies in your metadata (ointment)

Quality metadata is foundational to the research nexus and all Crossref services. When inaccuracies creep in, these create problems that get compounded down the line. No wonder that reports of metadata errors from authors, members, and other metadata users are some of the most common messages we receive into the technical support team (we encourage you to continue to report these metadata errors). We make members’ metadata openly available via our APIs, which means people and machines can incorporate it into their research tools and services - thus, we all want it to be accurate.

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Amanda French
2022 July 08

How I think about ROR as infrastructure

The other day I was out and about and got into a conversation with someone who asked me about my doctoral work in English literature. I’ve had the same conversation many times: I tell someone (only if they ask!) that my dissertation was a history of the villanelle, and then they cheerfully admit that they don’t know what a villanelle is, and then I ask them if they’re familiar with Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do not go gentle into that good night.

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Kornelia Korzec
2022 June 22

Seeing your place in the Research Nexus

Having joined the Crossref team merely a week previously, the mid-year community update on June 14th was a fantastic opportunity to learn about the Research Nexus vision. We explored its building blocks and practical implementation steps within our reach, and within our imagination of the future. Read on (or watch the recording) for a whistlestop tour of everything – from what on Earth is Research Nexus, through to how it’s taking shape at Crossref, to how you are involved, and finally – to what concerns the community surrounding the vision and how we’re going to address that.

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Geoffrey Bilder
2022 June 10

Announcing our new Head of Strategic Initiatives: Dominika Tkaczyk

TL;DR A year ago, we announced that we were putting the “R” back in R&D. That was when Rachael Lammey joined the R&D team as the Head of Strategic Initiatives. And now, with Rachael assuming the role of Product Director, I’m delighted to announce that Dominika Tkaczyk has agreed to take over Rachael’s role as the Head of Strategic Initiatives. Of course, you might already know her. We will also immediately start recruiting for a new Principal R&D Developer to work with Esha and Dominika on the R&D team.

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About us

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.

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

What we stand for

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 2021) forty one, over 15,000 members, coming from 140 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.

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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 15,000 members from 140 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