Crossref is a non-profit membership organization that exists to make scholarly communications better. We make research objects easy to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse.
We provide infrastructure to preserve and curate metadata – that is data underpinning and describing scholarly outputs and processes (such as authorship, funding, modifications etc., and links between these works and actions). Our community develops and promotes standards and best practices for such documentation in keeping with the changing world of scholarly infrastructure and communication.
Membership in Crossref is open to organizations that produce professional and scholarly materials and content. The community includes more than 18,000 members across 146 countries (and counting)! Being a member of Crossref helps you preserve your content and makes it more discoverable.
You need to be a member in order to get a DOI prefix so you can create Crossref DOIs and register your content with us. This means you can create a persistent identifier for each citeable object that you publish, and – importantly – register metadata about them. That metadata is then freely and openly shared with hundreds of organizations in the scholarly ecosystem – and the mutual linking makes your content easier to find.
Crossref is funded by members and subscribers. We’re committed to lowering barriers for global participation in the research enterprise. We offer frequent webinars, often in partnership with others in the community, that explain and facilitate access to our services. One way of learning more about joining Crossref and the use of our services is to connect with one of our Ambassadors in your region or connect with us on our own Community Forum.
We hope this post gives you an overview of Crossref. Post any questions below. Please reach out if you’d like to get involved and aren’t clear how.