Crossref

Crossref: Scholarly Publishing Organization

A not-for-profit organization enabling easy publication, citation, linking, and assessment of academic works across platforms and publishers.

What is Crossref?

Crossref is a not-for-profit membership organization for scholarly publishing, established in 2000. It aims to make research outputs easy to find, cite, link, and assess. Crossref provides services and infrastructure that enables researchers to easily find content relevant to their work, no matter where it is published. This allows seamless connections to be made across platforms, publishers, and repositories.

One of the core services Crossref offers is reference linking between works that cite each other, which accounts for billions of online scholarly interactions each year. This reference linking is facilitated through the use of persistent identifiers, specifically Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). Crossref assigns DOIs to research outputs, allowing them to be permanently identified and accessible even if their location changes. This ensures that citations and links to content remain intact over time.

In addition to reference linking and DOI services, Crossref collects and aggregates a wealth of metadata on research outputs. This includes bibliographic information, funding details, license and access status, affiliations, references, and more. The metadata is made available through public APIs for others to build additional services upon. Some examples of metadata-based services enabled by Crossref include plagiarism screening, citation analysis, impact tracking, and identification of funding sources.

Overall, Crossref plays a crucial behind-the-scenes role in connecting research across the scholarly communication ecosystem. Its infrastructure and services aim to make scholarly content easy to identify, cite, link, and evaluate in order to facilitate discovery and collaboration.

Crossref Features

Official Links