Crossref makes research outputs easy to find, cite, link, and assess.
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 scholarly content in context.
It’s as simple—and as complicated—as that.
These are the Crossref ‘truths’, the principles that guide everything we do. Read our truths page, with full descriptions for each.
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 2018) thirty eight people, 12437 members, coming from over 114 different countries.
Read our story. Discover our origins; find out why and how we have evolved into an indispensable, community-governed infrastructure for research. Learn why we exist and persist, who we fundamentally are, what we believe in, what we do, and how—with the help of our extended community—we do it.
Read or download this brochure as a PDF in English, Spanish or Brazilian Portuguese.
We are a not-for-profit organization, registered in the United States of America as a 501©6 (a “trade association”). We are sustained by annual membership fees that are tiered according to size of publishing revenue. We also charge a content registration fee for each item of content whose metadata is deposited with us. We also provide both free and paid-for metadata delivery 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. We invite from each of the elected sixteen organizations, one main person as board member, and one alternate person. We also have other committees that help us set fees and policies, audit us, and an Executive Committee that meets more regularly and supports the Executive Director in making some decisions.
You can read more about our finances and governance as well as what we worked on most recently, by viewing our annual report.
Crossref was awarded the SOC 2® accreditation in 2017 after an independent assessment of our controls and procedures by the American Institute of CPA’s (AICPA).
The SOC 2® accreditation is awarded to service organizations that have passed standard trust services criteria relating to the security, availability, and processing integrity of systems used to process users’ data and the confidentiality and privacy of the information processed by these systems.
The AICPA’s assessment also reviewed our vendor management programs, internal corporate governance and risk management processes, and regulatory oversight.
Find out more about the SOC accreditation structure
Please contact our outreach team with any questions.