Latest blog posts
Patrick Polischuk
2022 May 13

2022 public data file of more than 134 million metadata records now available

In 2020 we released our first public data file, something we’ve turned into an annual affair supporting our commitment to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI). We’ve just posted the 2022 file, which can now be downloaded via torrent like in years past. We aim to publish these in the first quarter of each year, though as you may notice, we’re a little behind our intended schedule. The reason for this delay was that we wanted to make critical new metadata fields available, including resource URLs and titles with markup.

...Find out more
Ed Pentz
2022 May 12

Announcing our new Director of Product: Rachael Lammey

Unfortunately, Bryan Vickery has moved onto pastures new. I would like to thank him for his many contributions at Crossref and we all wish him well. I’m now pleased to announce that Rachael Lammey will be Crossref’s new Director of Product starting on Monday, May 16th. Rachael’s skills and experience are perfectly suited for this role. She has been at Crossref since 2012 and has deep knowledge and experience of all things Crossref: our mission; our members; our culture; and our services.

...Find out more
Fabienne Michaud
2022 May 10

Similarity Check: what’s new with iThenticate v2?

Since we announced last September the launch of a new version of iThenticate, a number of you have upgraded and become familiar with iThenticate v2 and its new and improved features which include: A faster, more user-friendly and responsive interface A preprint exclusion filter, giving users the ability to identify content on preprint servers more easily A new “red flag” feature that signals the detection of hidden text such as text/quotation marks in white font, or suspicious character replacement A private repository available for browser users, allowing them to compare against their previous submissions to identify duplicate submissions within your organisation A content portal, helping users check how much of their own published content has been successfully indexed, self-diagnose and fix the content that has failed to be indexed in iThenticate.

...Find out more
Vanessa Fairhurst
2022 April 14

Do you want to be a Crossref Ambassador?

A re-cap We kicked off our Ambassador Program in 2018 after consultation with our members, who told us they wanted greater support and representation in their local regions, time zones, and languages. We also recognized that our membership has grown and changed dramatically over recent years and that it is likely to continue to do so. We now have over 16,000 members across 140 countries. As we work to understand what’s to come and ensure that we are meeting the needs of such an expansive community, having trusted local contacts we can work closely with is key to ensuring we are more proactive in engaging with new audiences and supporting existing members.

...Find out more
  • Menu
search

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.

more

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.

more

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.

more

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.

more

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.

more

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.

more

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).

more

Last updated: 2021-February-26