CrossRef: a collaborative linking network
Issues in Science & Technology Librarianship
[Winter 2001]
Pentz, Ed
.
Abstract: References are at the heart of scholarly journal publishing and therefore reference links are seen as an essential feature of online scholarly journals. Scholarly publishers created CrossRef, run by the non-profit Publishers International Linking Association, Inc., in order to make broad-based linking efficient and scalable across a wide range of primary publishers, secondary publishers, abstracting and indexing services, and libraries. CrossRef runs a system that enables publishers to assign unique identifiers -- Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) -- to articles and collects standardized metadata so that the identifiers can be retrieved using bibliographic data. Once the DOI for an article is known, a persistent link to the full-text article can be created. CrossRef is a milestone for the scholarly information industry.