Crossref

Background: Crossref is a registry of Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) and metadata for the scholarly research community. Founded in 2000 by scientific societies and publishers, Crossref is now a community-governed organization led by its members—most of which are research institutions and universities.

Mission: Crossref makes research objects easy to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse. It is a not-for-profit membership organization that exists to make scholarly communications better. The community shares DOIs through Crossref so that they don’t have to duplicate the information for those who consume and use it downstream throughout the research ecosystem.

Community over Commercialization:

“There is a whole swath of organizations that have realized that trust and community are key to alternative financial models for open access. Crossref is an organization that relies on trust at its core. The second that we betray that, trust is lost instantly and we’re back to zero. "If you can make the case that you are doing things out of goodwill, with good intentions, to a trusted third party—that kind of community approach that is less transactional, less commercialized, and less focused on an individual payment approach, really can take off and work."

“Crossref is about linking and about metadata. It's about getting good metadata and ensuring that we can make connections between organizations and between research papers. If we are not a connected organization, what we do doesn't work.”

“We’re basically a community—a set of people who come together with a common goal with a set of rules so that everybody behaves in a way that benefits everybody else mutually.”

“Crossref infrastructure is now so central to everything that is done in scholarly communications that we're well embedded. We've got good practices for that community-controlled, democratic governance.”

“I'm more optimistic about academics embracing open access than I was, even five years ago. If an academic now can get their article open access, without having to change publishers or get too much funding, they’re actually okay with it. That’s a shift.”

-Martin Paul Eve, Principal R&D Developer Crossref