Using the Crossref Metadata API to explore publisher content

Abstract

Crossref is a not-for-profit membership association for scholarly publishers, founded in 2000. It is the largest digital object identifier (DOI) registration agency and provides publisher members with the capacity to deposit DOIs and their associated metadata to support persistent linking between different types of academic content. In a previous paper in Science Editing [1], Crossref mentioned a newly-created interface (http://search.crossref.org) that allowed publishers, libraries and researchers to search across nearly 50 million Crossref metadata records for items such as journal articles, books and conference proceedings. Since that paper was published, the search service has graduated into a live production service covering over 81 million DOIs, and Crossref has documented and made available the application programming interface used to build and support the search interface. This paper will provide information on this Crossref Metadata API, which is being widely adopted and used by many different stakeholders in the scholarly community, and give examples of how it is being employed by these parties.