Crossref members register around 37,000 records daily. All this metadata is openly shared with the global scholarly community through our free APIs. We receive over two billion calls to our API each month, signalling its use by hundreds of tools and services worldwide, supporting the discovery and assessment of scholarly metadata. As part of a new series in our blog, we will spotlight the diversity of tools and integrations that rely on Crossref metadata to serve the scholarly community. In this initial post, we chat to Luca Foppiano, the developer and maintainer of Grobid1, to learn about how Grobid uses Crossref metadata to improve the extraction and enrichment of bibliographic information from scholarly PDFs.
On behalf of the Nominating Committee, I’m pleased to share the slate of candidates for the 2026 board election. Every active member organisation is invited to submit a ballot to elect the incoming board class.
We’re providing a summary of the board’s July 2026 meeting. The July board meeting is our only in-person meeting. The board gathers for two days of strategic thinking and long-range planning, as well as conducting annual board business. This year, we focused on allocating surplus funds we have on hand to invest in a three-year project to redesign the content system. In a related discussion, we decided to lower content registration fees starting in 2027 because we’ve had a demonstrated history of generating surpluses, exceeding what we need to run Crossref. We also discussed the board structure, as part of our regular review of stakeholder governance. And we conducted annual board business, such as approving the audited financial statements and reviewed our risk register and mitigation plans.
The resolutions are available on the dedicated section of our website, which also lists the members of the Board and offers further information about our governance.
We also managed to squeeze in watching a World Cup game over dinner.
Starting today, funder names deposited in Crossref metadata without an identifier will be matched to ROR IDs, to support an open and connected Research Nexus. Funding information is an increasingly important part of the scholarly record. The improved matching strategy supports researchers, funders, institutions, and meta-researchers, who rely on that information to understand how research is supported and what outcomes that support produces.
Cited-by supports members who display citations, enabling the community to discover connections between research outputs.
Scholars use citations to critique and build on existing research, acknowledging the contributions of others. Members can include references in their metadata deposits which Crossref uses to create links between works that cite each other. The number of citations each work receives is visible to anyone through our public APIs. Through our Cited-by service, members who deposit reference metadata can retrieve everything they need to display citations on their website.
Members who use this service are helping readers to:
easily navigate to related research,
see how the work has been received by the wider community,
explore how ideas evolve over time by highlighting connections between works.
Watch the introductory Cited-by animation in your language:
Cited-by begins with references deposited as part of the metadata records for your content. Learn more about depositing references.
A member registers content for a work, the citing paper. This metadata deposit includes the reference list. Crossref automatically checks these references for matches to other registered content. If this is successful, a relationship between the two works is created. Crossref logs these relationships and updates the citation counts for each work. You can retrieve citation counts through our public APIs.
Members can use the Cited-by service to retrieve the full list of citing works, along with all the bibliographic details needed to display them on their website.
Note that citations from Crossref may differ from those provided by other services because we only look for links between Crossref-registered works and don’t share the same method to find matches.
Obligations and fees for Cited-by
Participation in Cited-by is optional, but encouraged.
There is no charge for Cited-by.
Depositing references is not a requirement, but strongly encouraged if you are using Cited-by.
Best practice for Cited-by
Because citations can happen at any time, Cited-by links must be kept up-to-date. Members should either check regularly for new citations or (if performing XML queries) set the alert attribute to true. This means the search will be saved in the system and you’ll get an alert when there is a new match.
Depositing your own references is strongly encouraged if you use Cited-by. If you don’t, the citations you retrieve will not include those from your own works. This is likely to lead to under-reporting of citations counts by at least 20% and you are missing the opportunity to point readers to other similar works on your platform.
Also in the metadata is the number of citations a work has received, under the tag "is-referenced-by-count".
To retrieve the full list of citations you need be a member using Cited-by. While anyone can use an API query to see the number of citations a work has received, members can retrieve a full list of citing DOIs and callback notifications informing them when one of their works has been cited. Details of the citing works can be displayed on your website alongside the article.
Page maintainer: Martyn Rittman Last updated: 2021-February-09
