What is Crossref?
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.
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.
How can we become Crossref members?
Membership in Crossref is open to organizations that produce professional and scholarly materials and content. The community includes more than 20,000 members across 150 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. There is an annual membership fee to Crossref dependent on your publishing revenue, for most members this the lowest category of $275, and there is also a fee per content item you register, $1 per current journal article for example.
You can also join Crossref through a sponsor. Read more about working with a sponsor at this link.
What is Metadata?
Metadata is the way that machines exchange information about information. It’s a communication mechanism.
You can read about metadata principles at Metadata2020 initiative .
You can learn more about how metadata connects and relates scholarly works and actors to one another, and how that network can be created and explored in the community vision of a Research Nexus at Crossref .
