Strategic agenda and roadmap
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This page presents all our high-level activities, from open governance and sustainability, collaborative projects with different parts of the ever-diversifying scholarly community, work to expand metadata, and delivery of tools and APIs to retrieve works, entities, and their relationships—all while fostering a strong global team. View our live and detailed roadmap at the bottom of this page . Read on to learn more about where Crossref is heading and let us have your thoughts by starting or joining a discussion in the strategy section of our community forum. Review the archived strategic narratives for 2020-2022 and 2018-2020 , and read background on our strategic planning approach on our blog. Crossref’s role in the scholarly landscape 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. Crossref makes research objects easy to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse. We’re a not-for-profit 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 scholarly content in context. We run open infrastructure to link research objects, entities, and actions, creating a lasting and reusable scholarly record that underpins open science. Together with our 25,000 members in 167 countries, we drive metadata exchange and support over 2 billion monthly API queries, facilitating global research communication, for the benefit of society. Governments, funders, institutions, publishers, and researchers all have a role in shaping how research is recorded, shared, contextualised, and assessed. As the scholarly record evolves, Crossref is capturing provenance and relationships through metadata. We are scaling our systems, tools, and resources to collect, enrich, and deliver metadata in context, supporting our diverse global community and making it easy for members to participate and share and use as much metadata as possible. With a more complete picture of the scholarly record available in the open, everyone is able to examine the integrity, impact, and outcomes of our collective efforts to progress science and society. Contribute to an environment where the community identifies and co-creates solutions for broad benefit A sustainable source of complete, open, and global scholarly metadata and relationships Manage Crossref openly and sustainably, modernising and making transparent all operations so that we are accountable to the communities that govern us Foster a strong team—because reliable infrastructure needs committed people who contribute to and realise the vision, and thrive doing it We want to contribute to an environment in which the scholarly research community identifies shared problems and co-creates solutions for broad benefit Our cross-functional program ‘Co-creation and community trends’ enables us to build and foster relationships so that we can respond to and lead community trends. We co-create to tackle emerging challenges, develop best practices, and explore new ideas for meeting Crossref’s mission. Recently completed Launched Crossref-hosted interim pages for grants (see example ) Announced plans for aligning the Open Funder Registry with ROR Community consultation about Crossmark Released Participation Reports v1.1 together with CWTS at Leiden University Extended the grant record registration form to accept journal articles Integrated with Rogue Scholar for archiving and metadata registration of all posts on the Crossref blog Determined the winners of, and announced, the inaugural Crossref metadata awards Conducted an audit of the accessibility of our interfaces Sunset legacy Metadata Manager In focus Surveying small members to better understand fee accessibility Hosting a series of webinars to support members’ metadata quality improvements with Participation Reports Extending engagement around our Integrity of the Scholarly Record (ISR) program with editors, institutions, and research integrity sleuths Forming a new ISR expert community group to help categorise member practices and for ‘for-cause’ revocation reasons Developing Similarity Check to improve the user experience and add features Growing adoption of the Grant Linking System (GLS) with more funders becoming members Working with the Barcelona Declaration signatories to prioritise open metadata efforts Broad adoption of the GEM Program to include more of the world’s metadata Expand and relaunch our Service Provider program Review the information architecture of the Crossref website for better usability and navigation Conduct pilots with tool that monitor research integrity Make improvements to the accessiblity of our interfaces Up next Re-introduce faceted search to Crossref Metadata Search Extend the list of metadata elements that can be registered using our helper tools Rewrite the Participation Reports frontend to allow for future feature development Adoption campaign for publishers and their service providers to participate in the GLS i.e. include Crossref Grant IDs in their publication records Under consideration Exploring: Integrate with open repository software DSpace to allow seamless registration of metadata records Exploring: Improvements to the design and functionality of the Crossmark button following community consultation and design recommendations We want to be a sustainable source of complete, open, and global scholarly metadata and relationships Our cross-functional program ‘Contributing to the research nexus’ helps us build flexible, clearer assertions of metadata provenance to improve the accuracy, transparency, and downstream usage of the metadata we collect and ingest from a range of sources. We work to expand metadata for all research objects from multiple sources and deliver tools and APIs so the whole community can discover works, entities, and their relationships. Recently completed Completed initial blog series and released software and methods used in metadata matching explorations , including open datasets of preprint and affiliation . Launched metadata ingest schema v5.4 to include citation types, versions, and contributor roles Incorporated Retraction Watch data into our API In focus Developing a new Metadata Advisory Group to hone and enact the roadmap Working on metadata ingest schema v.5.5 to include support for the CRediT taxonomy of contributor roles Co-creating interactive resources for using metadata, e.g. interviews , demos, and tutorials for working with our API Developing a new Matching service to improve and integrate matches for preprints/versions, affiliations, funding, grants, references, titles, and more Ongoing bug fixes and metadata completeness checks for our the API Running a series of API sprints to encourage the community to build tools with Crossref metadata Up next Incorporate new preprint matching approach in our API Under consideration Develop a training program and resources on metadata registration best practices Develop the next steps for transitioning the Open Funder Registry into ROR We want to manage Crossref openly and sustainably, modernising and making transparent all operations so that we are accountable to the communities that govern us. The cross-functional program ‘Open and sustainable operations’ is centred on transparency and sustainability of our technical systems, our governance, and all our operations. We work to broaden board representation, manage finances responsibly and openly, and improve organisational resilience through modernising systems, processes, and policies, while controlling or reducing costs - whether to Crossref, our community, or the environment. Recently completed Released the 2025 public data file Published our employee manuals and policies publicly for transparency Released the 2024 self-assessment update on POSI compliance Updated our by-laws to create a new category of membership to broaden participation Published our patent non-assertion policy Migrated all databases to an open-source database management system (Postgres) Aligned bylaws and membership terms to clarify processes for membership revocation - see notification to members Worked with the other POSI-adopting infrastructure organisations to develop v2 of the Principles, also based on community input via a survey Conducted penetration tests and SOC 2 Type I audit Complete the move from data center to cloud Make billing code changes based on Membership & Fees Committee recommendations and board vote re fee changes stemming from the outcome of the RCFS research In focus Increasing transparency of more of our employment practices and general operations Improving the technical structure of our API to gain efficiencies Project, technology, and resource planning underway to decouple and open up all components of our primary system, starting with the Matching service (see above) and Authentication. Establish test environments in AWS Conduct another round of penetration testing in 2026 Up next Enact the plan to decouple and open up all components of our primary system Under consideration Exploring: Is our governance structure representative and are the processes efficient? (see: Governance ) Continue opening up our technical support conversations and processes Following our SOC 2 audit with an ISO 27001 audit We want to foster a strong team—because reliable infrastructure needs committed people who contribute to and realise the vision, and thrive doing it We do this through fair policies and working practices, a balanced approach to resourcing, and accountability to each other. By making our people operations more transparent and ethical, we can hold ourselves to account and ensure consistency and equity. Potential candidates can get a sense of how we work, and other organisations can adapt and reuse policies if needed. Recently completed Reviewed and revised our leadership structure to set up our teams to reflect and accommodate Crossref’s growth and expansion Set up cross-functional program teams to manage our work more collaboratively Hired two new Director positions: Technology; and Programs and Services. See org chart Established and recruited a new Data Science team whose focus is be to analyse and improve how we collect, match, and deliver scholarly metadata Reviewed recruitment and compensation practices In focus Pursuing a program to better understand how resourcing supports Crossref’s sustainability Continuously (re-)prioritising our product roadmap using a rubric of 12 prioritisation drivers to ensure we’re well-resourced and working on the right things at the right times Continuously (re-)assessing and mitigating for items on our risk register to ensure long-term sustainability, reduce technical debt, and organisational resilience Automating membership processes to support continued growth (such as new member-application processing, new-member invoicing, and DOI prefix allocation) Tracking staff carbon emissions and considering ways to reduce our environmental impact Recruiting for new positions; see our jobs page Plan 2026 in-person all-staff event Up next Close our last remaining physical office in Lynnfield, MA (USA) Under consideration Exploring: how do we adapt to working in a fully remote environment as a growing organisation? Completed activities Recently-completed activities are listed on our strategic roadmap above per theme. The following projects and initiatives have been completed since we last revisited our high-level strategy but are no longer considered recent: Acquired and opened Retraction Watch database ; entered an agreement to grow the service together with Center for Scientific Integrity Brought operational management of ROR in-house , shared across DataCite, CDL, and Crossref Added metadata records with ROR IDs to our API Launched Global Equitable Membership (GEM) program Released new form for funders to register grant records Opened references by default New recommendations from the Preprints Working Group Discovery work on metadata matching and relationships Investigated patterns in and matching of article and preprint metadata Explored preservation coverage among Crossref membership Developed a framework to better track our carbon emissions Developed v2 of the experimental Labs participation reports Explored preservation coverage among Crossref membership and partnering with preservation services Celebrated five years of the Crossref Grant Linking System (GLS) Launched Crossref-hosted interim pages for grants (see example ) Shared metadata development plans in response to community feedback Developed clear metadata development strategy, priorities, and roadmap Retired the inconsistent and unreliable subject codes and removed them from our API Investigated and shared strategies for matching affiliation strings to ROR IDs Agreed and published our new travel and events policy Reached our 12-month contingency goal (see: Sustainability ) Worked with the other POSI-adopting infrastructures to release v1.1 of the Principles together Live roadmap See a timeline of completed, running, and planned projects embedded below or visit the full roadmap .