The Principles of CrossRef
People often consider CrossRef a provider of digital object identifiers (DOIs) for journal content. While content registration is one of their core services, it is just the beginning of the tools and resources they provide to help the research community discover, link, cite, and evaluate the scientific content.
CrossRef was founded in 2000 by a group of publishers who needed an efficient model for linking their journal articles together and also began using DOIs to provide a way to link references between articles and make it easier for readers to find the cited items. Using DOIs to identify content creates a unique, permanent link that stays with the recipient item even if its website changes.
As a membership organization, CrossRef is governed by a board of 16 members elected by its members which reflects the global diversity of its members. The board is the representative of its members and is equally composed of commercial and non-profit, university and society, open access and subscription-based publishers.
Its early members were mostly from the United States and Western Europe, as well as commercial and social publishers. During 18 years, its members have continued to grow and develop. It currently has more than 11,000 members and affiliates working for it. With this growth, its members have also become more diverse, so that it now has more than 118 member countries, the majority of which are in the smallest member category.
Today, its membership is widely defined and includes publishers, communities, universities, libraries, and government agencies. Because it has members with content in a variety of formats-journals, books, proceedings, standards, preprints, and more recently, peer reviews-that cover all disciplines and use a variety of business models.
It currently has more than 1,200 members from Latin America, and nearly 1,000 of these organizations have joined it over the past three years. Its first member was from Colombia and joined it in 2012. Now it has over 130 members, both individual members and those sponsored by other organizations, such as journals and writers. Most of its members are government or academic agencies and have registered more than 70,000 content on its website.
Registering on CrossRef can increase the visibility of your article by the research community. When a member registers an item in CrossRef, the bibliographic metadata of that item is provided, such as title, contributors, publication date, online location, and DOI. Further identifying information should also be included, such as the author’s ORCID iDs, funding organization, license data, and references. This metadata, which relates to more than 100 million content items, is made available to the public using various search tools, such as https://search.crossref.org.
The National Museum of China has more than 1 million artifacts. The British Library has about 25 million books. Napster has 40 million tracks, and Wikidata currently holds 50 million items. Source:https://www.crossref.org/blog/100000000-records—thank-you/
They encourage members to add as much metadata as they can. The more metadata is added, the more likely it is that the content will be used by other researchers or will be discovered by one of the many groups that use CrossRef metadata in their tools and services.
By using the ability of metadata to establish connections, they have created more services for their members to further enhance their academic background. Their Cited-by service lets readers know which articles have cited the paper they are currently reading.
Crossmark shows the current status of the content items as well as the additional metadata provided by the publisher.
Similarity Check is a tool for editors to find out if an article is original by comparing it to previously submitted manuscripts.
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