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.
We run open infrastructure to link research objects, entities, and actions, creating a lasting and reusable scholarly record that underpins open science. Together with our 26,500 members in 171 countries, we drive metadata exchange and support over 2 billion monthly API queries, facilitating global research communication, for the benefit of society.
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.
Up next
- Add conference proceedings registration form to Metadata Manager
- Support schema 5.5 (CRedIT, etc.) in Metadata Manager
- System redesign research and planning: member self-service site
Under consideration
- Improve design and functionality of the Crossmark button to meet community and design recommendations
In focus
- Schema 6.0 release
- Grants schema 0.3.0
- Grant matching
- Research: optimise API features, including collecting user stories from the community
- Provide Metadata Plus snapshots in parquet format
- Run sprints to support tool builders using our metadata
Up next
- Affiliation matching
- Preprint matching
- Online Kaggle sprint competition
Under consideration
- Develop a training program and resources on metadata registration best practices
- Optimisation of REST API Elasticsearch implementation
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
- Draft policy for AI use
- Reduction of Content Registration fees for all members, and removal of fees for back-year records as of January 2027
- Increase transparency of more of our employment practices and general operations
- Improve the technical structure of our API to gain efficiencies
- Project, technology, and resource planning to decouple and open up all components of our primary system, starting with the Matching service (see above) and Authentication
- Staging environment set up in Frankfurt, Germany
- SOC 2 type II audit
- 2026 POSI self-audit
Up next
- Grant schema 0.3.0 update
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
- Planned our 2026 in-person all-staff event
- Closed our last remaining physical office in Lynnfield, MA (USA)
- Improved and reported on hiring processes and global staff management
- Planned and completed our 2026 cultural all-staff training
- Drafted our first HR Control guidelines to support sustainable global growth
- Automate membership processes to support continued growth (such as new member-application processing, new-member invoicing, and DOI prefix allocation)
In focus
- Ongoing RCFS (Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability) projects to support global participation and resource planning
- Continuously (re-)prioritise 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-)assess and mitigate for items on our risk register to ensure long-term sustainability, reduce technical debt, and organisational resilience
- Track staff carbon emissions and consider ways to reduce our environmental impact
- Recruit for new positions; see our jobs page
Under consideration
- Explore: 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.
