The basics of CrossRef extensible markup language

Abstract

CrossRef is an association of scholarly publishers that develops shared infrastructure to support more effective scholarly communications. Launched in 2000, CrossRef's citation-linking network today covers over 68 million journal articles and other content items (books chapters, data, theses, and technical reports) from thousands of scholarly and professional publishers around the globe. CrossRef has over 4,000 member publishers who join as members in order to avail of a number of CrossRef services, reference linking via the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) being the core service. To deposit CrossRef DOIs, publishers and editors need to become familiar with the basics of extensible markup language (XML). This article will give an introduction to CrossRef XML and what publishers need to do in order to start to deposit DOIs with CrossRef and thus ensure their publications are discoverable and can be linked to consistently in an online environment.