Crossref Metadata Retrieval

For our information on our website we use a CC-BY-4.0 license. All metadata is CC0.

Crossref metadata is used millions of times every day by thousands of services throughout the research ecosystem such as discovery engines, library systems, and analytics platforms. People using Crossref metadata need it for things like metaresearch (researchers studying research itself such as through bibliometric analyses or for research integrity), publishing trends (such as finding citation counts in general or works from an individual author), or incorporation into specific databases and repositories (such as for discovery and search in general).

Crossref has a large community engagement program, with around 10 staff who have all taken the CSCCE Foundations course. Activities comprise:

• onboarding and education: https://www.crossref.org/members-area/
• multilingual webinars and in-person events: https://www.crossref.org/events/
• working and advisory groups: https://www.crossref.org/working-groups/
• speaking at and participating in meetings and other infrastructures' working groups
• ambassador program (51 people in 37 countries): https://www.crossref.org/community/ambassadors/
• sponsoring organisations (around 120, helping smaller organizations join for free and enrich metadata - a somewhat train-the-trainer activity): https://www.crossref.org/membership/about-sponsors/
• Global Equitable Membership (GEM) program: https://www.crossref.org/gem/
• The PLACE collaboration with COPE, OASPA, and DOAJ: https://theplace.discourse.group/
• Community forum: https://community.crossref.org
• Blog: https://www.crossref.org/blog/
• Bimonthly newsletter: https://www.crossref.org/subscribe-newsletter/
• R&D team advises others in the community and prototypes new shared solutions: https://www.crossref.org/labs/
• ORCID auto-update: https://www.crossref.org/community/orcid/
• MOUs to collaborate with several partner organisations such as PKP and DOAJ, e.g.: https://www.crossref.org/blog/doaj-and-crossref-sign-agreement-to-remove-barriers-to-scholarly-publishing-for-all/.
• We actively support PKP's community co-development of some OJS plugins
• We support or co-fund many other initiatives such as ROR (https://ror.org)

Members of Crossref's community also participate in governance through the elections process. 20,000 organisations from 160 countries have a vote in Crossref's annual and open board elections, which include more candidates than available seats, from a slate curated by a community-led Nominating Committee.

POSI, with two self-assessments and a further report due in 2024 based on the new POSI version - v1.1

SOC 2® accreditation

FOREST is under consideration

Crossref is governed by a Board of Directors, elected by its members. Their board consists of a representative balance of 16 institutions, publishers, or funders, and they are responsible for the fiduciary and strategic oversight of the organisation.

https://www.crossref.org/community/about/history/

Crossref was initially incorporated in January 2000 as Publishers International Linking Association, Inc. (PILA). The technical foundations were created in a prototype project by Academic Press, Wiley, and the DOI-X project. The Crossref system went live in June 2000 with several community loans, paid back the loans and reached sustainability in 2004. Over the years, Crossref has moved beyond its founding service to link references between articles, to include sevaral additional services, such as Crossmark for retractions and corrections, Similarity Check for text-based plagiarism screening, and more resource types beyond articles and references, most notably in 2018 with the introduction of the Crossref Grant System to link funders and their grants with the rest of the research ecosystem.

The Metadata Retrieval service, which includes APIs, and search and matching tools, is funded primarily by reinvesting Crossref membership and content registration revenue. It's all open data, but many organisations also subscribe to a premium service that gives them higher rate limits, monthly data dumps, and greater predictability. As Crossref is well-sustained financially, they fund several other infrastructure projects and are always open to collaborating or co-funding.