CrossRef is a not-for-profit membership association dedicated to enabling easy identification and access to reliable electronic content by fostering the collaborative development and application of a sustainable infrastructure.
The primary purpose of CrossRef is to advance the development and cooperative use of innovative technologies that accelerate and facilitate scholarly research. Specifically, CrossRef serves as the citation linking backbone for all scholarly information in electronic form. It operates as a collaborative reference linking service, functioning like a digital switchboard. Although CrossRef itself does not host full-text content, it creates linkages through CrossRef Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), which are tagged to article metadata provided by participating publishers. This results in an efficient, scalable linking system, allowing researchers to click on a reference citation in a journal and access the cited article seamlessly.
In early 2000, the world's leading scholarly publishers came together to establish the non-profit, independent organization, Publishers International Linking Association, Inc. (PILA), which operates CrossRef. The Board of Directors today includes representatives from AAAS (Science), AIP, APA, Elsevier, IEEE, IOP, Informa UK, Wolters Kluwer Health, Nature, Sage, Springer, Thieme, University of California Press, University of Chicago Press, and Wiley-Blackwell.
At the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 1999, several representatives from leading scientific, technical, and medical publishers witnessed the demonstration of the DOI-X project. Recognizing the potential of this prototype lookup system based on the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for creating a broad-based and efficient journal reference linking system, they joined forces to form the non-profit, independent Publishers International Linking Association, Inc. (PILA). CrossRef went live as the first collaborative reference linking service in June 2000.
JAAI is a voting member of CrossRef. The DOI prefix allocated to JAAI is 10.5120.
Two months (60 days) after the publication date, JAAI assigns a unique Digital Object Identifier (DOI) to each article in partnership with CrossRef. This two-month period allows time to address any claims of copyright infringement from external parties.