Helena joined Crossref in February 2025 as Director of Programs and Services. She is passionate about open research and open infrastructure and joined us from DataCite, where she served as the Community Engagement Director for over 6 years. Before then, she worked at Elsevier, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), and the Dutch Brain Bank. Helena holds a DPhil in Neuroscience from the University of Oxford. Outside of work, she enjoys spending time with her family (including dogs and horses), camping, rowing, and other outdoor activities.
Leandro Contreras, Tuesday, Oct 20, 2026
As we approach the end of 2026, research integrity remains a critical focus for the scholarly publishing ecosystem: fast technological advancements are constantly pushing the boundaries of integrity, impacting how everyone in this space interacts with the scholarly record.
Helena Cousijn, Wednesday, Aug 12, 2026
In BoardInfrastructureSystem RedesignProgramsSustainabilityTechnology
The infrastructure that registers and distributes Crossref metadata has been running and growing for more than two decades. It now does considerably more than it was built to do, and it shows: two large, tightly coupled monoliths (Content System and REST API), where a change in one place risks breaking something in another.
In its July meeting, the Crossref board approved the use of Crossref surplus funds for a three-year project to accelerate the redesign of the Crossref system. Our plan is to use $1.6 million a year for three years (~USD $4.9M in total) from our surplus funds, which will help us set up a modern infrastructure consisting of separate services for the different functionalities that the Crossref system offers.
We are pleased to announce the re-launch of the Crossref Service Providers program. From today, we are accepting applications from organisations providing tools for metadata registration to Crossref members. Participation in this program is free and the application involves an accreditation process to determine eligibility and the appropriate participation tier.
We’re excited to announce a new data citation API endpoint and are seeking your feedback. The new service makes existing data citation relationships in our metadata available, thereby surfacing this part of the research nexus. At the same time, we’ve decided that it’s time to move on from Event Data.
Ginny Hendricks, Thursday, Dec 18, 2025
In Annual ReportCollaborationCommunityFinanceSustainabilityMembershipMetadataResearch NexusStaffStrategy
As we finish celebrating our 25th anniversary, we can look back on a truly transformational year, defined by the successful delivery of several long-planned, foundational projects—as well as updates to our teams, services, and fees—that position Crossref for success over the next quarter century as essential open scholarly infrastructure. In our update at the end of 2024, we highlighted that we had restructured our leadership team and paused some projects. The changes made in 2024 positioned us for a year of getting things done in 2025. We launched cross-functional programs, modernised our systems, strengthened connections with our growing global community, and streamlined a bunch of technical and business operations while continuing to grow our staff, members, content, relationships, and community connections.
