This page presents all our high-level activities, from open governance and sustainability, collaborative projects with different parts of the ever-diversifying scholarly community, work to expand metadata, and delivery of tools and APIs to retrieve works, entities, and their relationships—all while fostering a strong global team.
Crossref’s role in the scholarly landscape
We envision a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organisations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society.
Crossref makes research objects easy to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse. We’re a not-for-profit membership organisation that exists to make scholarly communications better. We rally the community; tag and share metadata; run an open infrastructure; play with technology; and make tools and services—all to help put scholarly content in context.
Governments, funders, institutions, publishers, and researchers all have a role in shaping how research is recorded, shared, contextualised, and assessed. As the scholarly record evolves, Crossref is capturing provenance and relationships through metadata. We are scaling our systems, tools, and resources to collect, enrich, and deliver metadata in context, supporting our diverse global community and making it easy for members to participate and share and use as much metadata as possible.
With a more complete picture of the scholarly record available in the open, everyone is able to examine the integrity, impact, and outcomes of our collective efforts to progress science and society.
We want to contribute to an environment in which the scholarly research community identifies shared problems and co-creates solutions for broad benefit
Our cross-functional program ‘Co-creation and community trends’ enables us to build and foster relationships so that we can respond to and lead community trends. We co-create to tackle emerging challenges, develop best practices, and explore new ideas for meeting Crossref’s mission.
Under consideration
- Exploring: Integrate with open repository software DSpace to allow seamless registration of metadata records
- Exploring: Improvements to the design and functionality of the Crossmark button following community consultation and design recommendations
- Exploring: Monitoring research integrity community developments and tools we could align with
In focus
- Developing a new Metadata Advisory Group to hone and enact the roadmap
- Working on metadata ingest schema v.5.5 to include support for the CRediT taxonomy of contributor roles
- Co-creating interactive resources for using metadata, e.g. interviews, demos, and tutorials for working with our API
- Developing a new Matching service to improve and integrate matches for preprints/versions, affiliations, funding, grants, references, titles, and more
- Ongoing bug fixes and metadata completeness checks for our the API
- Running a series of API sprints to encourage the community to build tools with Crossref metadata
We want to manage Crossref openly and sustainably, modernising and making transparent all operations so that we are accountable to the communities that govern us.
The cross-functional program ‘Open and sustainable operations’ is centred on transparency and sustainability of our technical systems, our governance, and all our operations. We work to broaden board representation, manage finances responsibly and openly, and improve organisational resilience through modernising systems, processes, and policies, while controlling or reducing costs - whether to Crossref, our community, or the environment.
In focus
- Working with the other POSI-adopting infrastructure organisations to develop v2 of the Principles, also based on community input via a survey
- Increasing transparency of more of our employment practices and general operations
- Move from data center to cloud
- Improving the technical structure of our API to gain efficiencies
- Project, technology, and resource planning underway to decouple and open up all components of our primary system, starting with the Matching service (see above) and Authentication/Identify and Access Management (IDAM).
Up next
- Enact the plan to decouple and open up all components of our primary system
- Establish test environments in AWS
- Conduct penetration tests in 2025 and publish a report on the findings
- Make billing code changes based on Membership & Fees Committee recommendations and board vote re fee changes stemming from the outcome of the RCFS research
We want to foster a strong team—because reliable infrastructure needs committed people who contribute to and realise the vision, and thrive doing it
We do this through fair policies and working practices, a balanced approach to resourcing, and accountability to each other. By making our people operations more transparent and ethical, we can hold ourselves to account and ensure consistency and equity. Potential candidates can get a sense of how we work, and other organisations can adapt and reuse policies if needed.
Recently completed
- Reviewed and revised our leadership structure to set up our teams to reflect and accommodate Crossref’s growth and expansion
- Set up cross-functional program teams to manage our work more collaboratively
- Hired two new Director positions: Technology; and Programs and Services. See org chart
- Established and recruited a new Data Science team whose focus is be to analyse and improve how we collect, match, and deliver scholarly metadata
- Reviewed recruitment and compensation practices
In focus
- Pursuing a program to better understand how resourcing supports Crossref’s sustainability
- Continuously (re-)prioritising our product roadmap using a rubric of 12 prioritisation drivers to ensure we’re well-resourced and working on the right things at the right times
- Continuously (re-)assessing our risk register to ensure long-term sustainability, reduce technical debt, and organisational resilience
- Automating membership processes to support continued growth (such as new member-application processing, new-member invoicing, and DOI prefix allocation)
- Tracking staff carbon emissions and considering ways to reduce our environmental impact
Up next
- Plan 2025 in-person all-staff event
- Close our last remaining physical office in Lynnfield, MA (USA)
Under consideration
- Exploring: how do we adapt to working in a fully remote environment as a growing organisation?
Recently-completed activities are listed on our strategic roadmap above per theme. The following projects and initiatives have been completed since we last revisited our high-level strategy but are no longer considered recent:
See a timeline of completed, running, and planned projects embedded below or visit the full roadmap.
