Crossref
Crossref is a popular scholarly infrastructure website and membership organization that helps register DOIs, connect research metadata, and make scholarly works easier to find and cite.
What Crossref is
Crossref is a scholarly infrastructure website at crossref.org. It helps members register persistent identifiers, share metadata, connect references, and make research outputs easier to discover, cite, and link across the web.
DOIs and metadata
Crossref is closely associated with Digital Object Identifiers, or DOIs. A DOI gives a scholarly work a persistent link, while the metadata around it describes titles, authors, publication dates, journals, funders, licenses, references, and other details that help systems understand the work.
Membership model
Crossref works through a membership model. Publishers and other organizations join so they can register content, deposit metadata, and participate in shared scholarly linking infrastructure rather than treating citation data as isolated records.
Services and linking
Crossref services support activities such as reference linking, metadata retrieval, funder information, similarity-check workflows, and updates to registered records. The practical result is that a citation, database entry, journal page, or repository record can point to richer information about a scholarly object.
REST API and documentation
The Crossref documentation and REST API are important for developers, librarians, analysts, and research tools. They provide structured ways to retrieve metadata and build services that search, reconcile, display, or analyze scholarly records.
Who uses Crossref
Crossref is used by academic publishers, journal editors, conference proceedings, repositories, libraries, indexing services, citation tools, funders, research analytics teams, and software developers. Researchers often encounter Crossref indirectly whenever a DOI link resolves or a citation tool pulls publication metadata.
Strengths and cautions
Crossref's strength is shared infrastructure: many organizations can register and retrieve metadata through a common system. The caution is that metadata quality depends on deposits from members, so records can be incomplete, inconsistent, delayed, or corrected over time.
Why it matters
Crossref matters because scholarship depends on reliable links between works. Persistent identifiers and shared metadata make it easier to cite papers, connect datasets, follow references, build discovery tools, and keep research findable even when publisher pages move.
WHOIS domain data
Data pulled: May 20, 2026View current WHOIS record
- Domain
- crossref.org
- IP address
- 44.198.206.161
- Registrar
- Register.com - Network Solutions, LLC
- WHOIS server
- whois.register.com
- Referral URL
- http://www.register.com
- Created
- December 1, 1999
- Updated
- November 6, 2025
- Expires
- December 1, 2028
- Nameservers
- ns-1052.awsdns-03.org (205.251.196.28); ns-1629.awsdns-11.co.uk (205.251.198.93); ns-473.awsdns-59.com (205.251.193.217); ns-659.awsdns-18.net (205.251.194.147)
- Domain status
- clientTransferProhibited