Crossref: the first ten years

January 2010

Crossref: the first ten years

When Crossref was incorporated on 19 January 2000, the founders set out a simple promise: persistent, cross-publisher links between scholarly works. Ten years later, this booklet reflected on what that decision had built — the members who had joined, the DOIs registered, and the infrastructure that had taken shape.

Published in 2010 in English and Japanese editions, both reproduced below.

English edition

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Download the English edition (PDF)

Japanese edition / 日本語版

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Download the Japanese edition / 日本語版をダウンロード (PDF)

What the booklet covers

  • The founding — how a group of competing publishers agreed in 1999–2000 to run shared linking infrastructure, and why the not-for-profit, membership model was chosen from the start
  • First DOIs — the publishers, journals, and reference lists that made up the first wave of registered content
  • Membership growth — how participation expanded across publisher sizes, regions, and disciplines through the decade
  • Cross-publisher reference linking — the practical workflows that made citations work between members
  • Looking ahead from 2010 — what the founders and early members saw on the horizon for the second decade

For the Crossref at 25 short film (2025), see the 25th-anniversary video that picks up where this booklet left off.

Authors

  • Crossref

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Published
19 January 2010

Page maintainer: Crossref
Last updated: 2010-January-19