Are you keen to connect with the community of knowledge-sharing organisations world-wide, to drive greater visibility of research and improve trust in science? Come and join the world of open scholarly infrastructure as our new Communications Manager.
The Communications Manager will play a crucial role in ensuring the success of Crossref’s programs and initiatives. It’s a new role in the Community Team, and we think it’s going to be a busy one, with interfaces across the entire organisation. You will be responsible for communicating nuanced messages to diverse audiences globally – from scholarly publishers, to research performing institutions, to researchers, research funders, and probably more.
Communications Management - management of communications across Crossref programs and audiences; leading on development, execution and evaluation of communication campaigns; creation and solicitation of content resonating with the Crossref community in support of key messages and developments, supporting consistency of our messages, tone of voice, and company style across Crossref communications.
Multichannel communications – determination and management of an appropriate mix of channels and tactics in support of organisational priorities, including programs and services developments, and strategic initiatives, across multiple channels from emails, newsletters and landing pages, to discussion forums, and social media.
Social media management – ensure Crossref is approachable and engaging on relevant social media – including curation and delivery of timely messages, responsiveness, pro-active identification and amplifying relevant messages across the community, facilitating participation of wider Crossref team in relevant communities and conversations on social media, including relevant community fora; identifying emerging topics for community engagement, escalating and coordinating responses internally to issues raised by the community on social media such as for technical support; setting up and adjusting internal policies to ensure adequate guidance for staff engaging with the community in the changing landscape of social media.
Monitoring and evaluation – monitors engagement and statistics for channels in use, proposes appropriate action to improve engagement, and develops sensitivity and responses to community sentiment and perception of Crossref and our programs.
We’re looking for someone with experience of carrying out communications across cultures, who’s able to articulate complex ideas clearly and accessibly. If you are a skilled campaigns manager this role will suit you. It helps if you are enthusiastic about social media management and have an established presence on some of the leading networks (mind you we mostly use LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Mastodon these days). Please note that there are many opportunities to shape this new role for the right person, so whether you feel strong in content planning and creation, designing marketing automations, or more technical product and service communication, you can count on utilising those skills as our Communications Manager.
Familiarity with the knowledge-sharing industry would be a plus but is not essential. However, we’d love for you to engage with our resources to learn a little about scholarly metadata before you consider applying – especially to get excited by our research nexus vision.
You will need:
Nice-to-have:
The role is based within the Community team, with one experienced Events and Communications Manager already embedded, and a group of Community Engagement Managers. We work collaboratively within the team, as well as across a variety of programs. We adopt an approachable, community-appropriate tone and style in our communications. In addition to the predominant online events, we organise a number of face-to-face opportunities to engage with our community, so the post-holder will have their share of travel (accordingly with our latest thinking on travel and sustainability).
Our primary aim is to engage colleagues from the member organisations and other stakeholders to be actively involved in capturing documentation of the scholarly progress and making it transparent. This contributes to co-creating a robust research nexus.
We’re a nonprofit 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 research in context.
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. We are working towards this vision of a ‘Research Nexus’ by demonstrating the value of richer and connected open metadata, incentivising people to meet best practices, while making it easier to do so. “We” means 23,000+ members from 160+ countries, 170+ million records, and nearly 2 billion monthly metadata queries from thousands of tools across the research ecosystem. We want to be a sustainable source of complete, open, and global scholarly metadata and relationships.
Take a look at our strategic agenda to see the planned work that aims to achieve the vision. The sustainability area aims to make transparent all the processes and procedures we follow to run the operation long-term, including our financials and our ongoing commitment to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI). The governance area describes our board and its role in community oversight.
It also takes a strong team – because reliable infrastructure needs committed people who contribute to and realise the vision, and thrive doing it. We are a distributed group of 50 dedicated people who take our work seriously, but don’t take ourselves seriously - we like to play quizzes, measure coffee intake, and create 100s of custom slack emojis. We do this through fair policies and working practices, a balanced approach to resourcing, and accountability to each other.
We can offer the successful candidate a challenging and fun environment to work in. Together we are dedicated to our global mission and we are constantly adapting to ensure we get there. Take a look at our organisation chart, the latest Annual Meeting recordings, and our financial information here.
We especially encourage applications from people with backgrounds historically under-represented in research and scholarly communications. You can be based anywhere in the world where we can employ staff, either directly or through an employer of record.
Please remember to include a brief cover letter as well as CV with your application.We would welcome a brief description of a selected project of yours that demonstrates skills required for this job. We also suggest that if you include links to examples of your work that you might describe in either the cover letter or CV these need to be publicly available. We won’t be able to request permissions for accessing unpublished materials during the recruitment process.
We will invite selected candidates to an initial call to discuss the role. Following that, shortlisted candidates will be invited to an interview. You will receive all information in advance, and the interview will include some questions and/or exercises you’ll have a chance to prepare for. All interviews will be held remotely on Zoom.
Click here to apply!
Applications close on December 9th, 2025.
Anticipated salary for this role is approximately 72-76k USD-equivalent, paid in local currency. Crossref offers competitive compensation, benefits, flexible work arrangements, professional development opportunities, and a supportive work environment. Check out our Employee Handbook for more details on paid time off, unlimited sick time, paid parental and medical leaves, and more.
Crossref is committed to a policy of non-discrimination and equal opportunity for all employees and qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, colour, religion, sex, pregnancy or a condition related to pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, ancestry, age, physical or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, uniform service member status, or any other protected class under applicable law. Crossref will make reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with known disabilities in accordance with applicable law.
