Crossref's general purpose is to promote the development and cooperative use of new and innovative technologies to speed and facilitate scholarly research. Crossref's specific mandate is to be the citation linking backbone for all scholarly information in electronic form. Crossref is a collaborative reference linking service that functions as a sort of digital switchboard. It holds no full text content, but rather effects linkages through Crossref Digital Object Identifiers (Crossref DOI), which are tagged to article metadata supplied by the participating publishers. The end result is an...

We are Crossref, a not-for-profit membership organization for scholarly publishing working to make content easy to find, link, cite and assess. We do it in five ways: rallying the community; tagging the metadata; running a shared infrastructure; playing with new technology; and making tools and services to improve research communications.