Welcome to our strategic roadmap—finalised January 2023—which sets out Crossref’s priorities through 2025 so everyone can see our focus areas and upcoming projects.
Like others, 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.
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 scholarly content in context.
This page presents all our high-level activities, from open governance and sustainability, collaborative projects with different parts of the ever-diversifying scholarly community, work to expand metadata, and delivery of tools and APIs to retrieve works, entities, and their relationships—all while fostering a strong global team.
Read on to learn more about where Crossref is heading and let us have your thoughts by starting or joining a discussion in the strategy section of our community forum. Review the archived strategic narratives for 2020-2022 and 2018-2020, and read background on our strategic planning approach on our blog.
View our live and detailed product roadmap at the bottom of this page
Governments, funders, institutions, and researchers—groups who once had tangential involvement in scholarly publishing—are taking a more direct role in shaping how research is recorded, shared, contextualised, and assessed.
We now have more members that self-identify as universities or research institutions than as publishers, and we have seen a rise in library- and academic-led publishing. Many research funders are playing their part by supporting open infrastructure, registering their records with Crossref as members, and seeing this as a direct way of measuring reach and return on their grants and awards.
As more people contribute to an evolving scholarly record, Crossref must capture provenance and relationships through metadata, and broaden it’s scope even further to collect, clean, and deliver metadata in context.
We are scaling our systems, tools, and resources to manage this and we are doing it in the open, to demonstrate our committment to POSI and add some assurance that research is being properly supported, and so we can more easily integrate and co-create with other open infrastructures, whilst making it easy for members to participate and share as much metadata as they have.
With a more complete picture of the scholarly record available in the open, everyone will be able to examine the integrity, impact, and outcomes of our collective efforts to progress science and society.
We do this in all teams through research and engagement with our expanding global community, responding to and leading trends in scholarly communications.
Some problems benefit from collective action. As scholarly communications evolves, we need to be proactive within our community to understand how we can help solve shared problems. We continue to focus on collaboration with new and long standing partners, developing programs through cross-team working groups to allow us to move nimbly and involve the community as we do.
We are working towards this vision of a ‘Research Nexus’ by demonstrating the value of richer and connected open metadata, incentivising people to meet best practices, while making it easier to do so.
Building a more complete picture of the scholarly record means thinking about our metadata outside the more rigid structures once provided by content containers. In line with community needs, we are building flexibile, clearer assertions of metadata provenance, and charge ourselves with improving the accuracy, transparency, and downstream usage of the metadata we collect and ingest from a range of sources. We will support our members in improving the provision of key metadata fields so that they can easily contribute to the growing network of metadata and relationships.
We do this by actively broadening board representation, managing the finances responsibly and openly, and improving organisational resilience through modernising systems, processes, and policies.
We invest time and resources in embedding open practices in our organisation so that you know what we know. We continuously address technical debt and work to make the infrastructure robust and resilient for the future. We use POSI as a decision framework to help improve ways of working and together with the other adoptees, we uncover more ways to be open and accountable to the community as we evolve.
We do this through fair policies and working practices, a balanced approach to resourcing, and accountability to each other.
Our commitment to collaboration and transparency in the community is reflected in how we operate as a team as well. By making our people operations more transparent, we can ensure that our approach is applied consistently and equitably; potential candidates can get a sense of how we operate; and other organisations can adapt and reuse policies if they wish.
Recently completed activities are listed on our strategic roadmap above. The following projects and initiatives have been completed since we last revisited our high-level strategy but are no longer considered recent:
We are not currently actively pursuing the following projects, either because other things have taken priority or because they have been taken as far as they can for now:
See the full link at Productboard.
