It takes a village. Crossref only works as long as the scholarly research community wants to work together globally, across all disciplines, for integrity and openness of the scientific record. Our community includes tens of thousands of organisations and systems in over 160 countries. Over 24,000 organisations create identifiers for metadata records that describe and locate their research. They share them through Crossref so that they don’t have to duplicate the information for the many thousands who consume and use it downstream throughout the research ecosystem. 

Crossref was founded in 2000 by some established scientific societies and publishers. Now, our membership comprises just 35% publishers or societies, with the largest membership group (40%) self-identifying as research institutions and universities. The other 25% is made up of funders (who started joining to record grants, use of facilities, and other support) alongside hundreds of museums, government organisations, libraries, data and subject repositories, conference providers, standards bodies, individual scholars, and news outlets. Our members register any research object that might be part of the scholarly evidence trail - from grants, articles, books, preprints, and reports to data, software, video, and physical objects. 

Crossref is the world’s largest registry of Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) and metadata for the scholarly research community. Unlike other DOI agencies, we encompass all research stakeholders and all geographies. We facilitate an average of 1.1 billion DOI resolutions (clicks of a DOI link) every month, which is 95% of all DOI activity. And our APIs see over 2 billion queries of our metadata every month.