DOI: 10.25012/blog.13.11.2018

People often think of Crossref as providing digital object identifiers (DOIs) for journal content, and while content registration is one of our core services, it is just the beginning of the tools and resources we offer to help the research community discover, link, cite, and assess scholarly content.

Crossref was founded in 2000 by a group of publishers who needed an efficient method to connect their journal articles, and so began the use of DOIs to provide a way to link references between articles, making it easier for a reader to locate items that are cited.  Using a DOI to identify content provides a unique and persistent link that stays with the item even it if its website changes.

As a membership organization we are governed by a 16 member board of directors, who are elected by our members, and reflect our globally diverse membership. As equally representative of our members, the board is comprised of commercial and non-profit, university and society, open access and subscription-based publishers.

Our first members were primarily from the US and Western Europe and were mostly larger commercial and society publishers. Over the next 18 years, our membership continued to grow and evolve; we now have over 11,000 members and affiliated organizations that work with us. With that growth we are also now seeing a greater diversity in our membership, with organizations from over 118 countries, the majority in our smallest member category.

Today, our membership is very broadly defined, and includes publishers, societies, universities, libraries, government agencies. And we have members with content in a number of formats – journals, books, proceedings, standards, preprints and most recently, peer reviews –  covering all disciplines, and who use a variety of business models.

We currently have over 1200 members from Latin America with nearly 1000 of these organizations joining in just the the past three years. Our first members from Colombia joined in 2012 and today they total over 130, both individual members and those which are sponsored by another organization, like Journals and Authors. Most are university-based or government agencies, and have registered over 70,000 content items with us.

We hear from members that discoverability of their content is a priority though this can often be a challenge given available resources, however taking the time to register content with Crossref can increase its visibility to the research community. When a member registers an item with Crossref they submit the bibliographic metadata of that item, such as the title, contributors, publication dates, online location, and the DOI. Additional identifying information should also be included, such as the authors’ ORCID iDs, funding organization and license data, and references, to name a few. This metadata, relating to over 100 million content items is publically available using our various search tools, such as https://search.crossref.org.

The National Museum of China has just over 1 million artifacts, the British Library has around 25 million books, Napster has 40 million tracks, and Wikidata currently contains 50 million+ items. Source: https://www.crossref.org/blog/100000000-records—thank-you/

We encourage members to add as much metadata as possible – the more metadata that is included, the greater chance that piece of content will be discovered by another researcher or one of the many groups that use Crossref metadata in their tools and services.

Building on the ability of metadata to make connections, we developed additional services for our members to further enhance the scholarly record.

Our Cited-by service lets readers know which articles cite the paper they are reading;

Crossmark provides the current status of a content item as well as additional metadata that the publisher has included;

Similarity Check is tool for editors to check originality by comparing the text of submitted manuscripts.

There’s a lot to learn about Crossref that will help your content get discovered and used by the research community. More blogs are coming soon and members are also welcome to join our free Spanish webinar series. As a sponsor, Journals & Authors are also happy to take your questions (info@jasolutions.com.co).

Susan Collins, Community Outreach Manager. Based in the US office, Susan has been with Crossref since 2008 and is part of the Member & Community Outreach Team. She works closely with our global community of small publisher members, focusing on the tools and resources that address their specific needs. In collaboration with her colleagues on the Outreach team, she also works with many of our Sponsoring Organizations and Ambassadors to better support the growing number of smaller organizations.  Twitter: @collinssu E-mail: scollins@crossref.org