A DOI registered through Crossref, the DOI Registration Agency for scholarly publications (journals, books, conference proceedings, preprints, peer reviews, grants), accompanied by metadata deposited in Crossref's XML schema.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 10 Jul 2026

Examples

Worked examples

Is an instance
10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2 (a Nature research article).
Is an instance
10.31219/osf.io/abcde (an OSF preprint).

Counter-examples

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance
10.5281/zenodo.* is a DataCite DOI, not a Crossref DOI.
Not an instance
A figshare dataset's DOI is registered through DataCite, not Crossref.

Editorial commentary

Crossref is a not-for-profit membership organisation that registers DOIs for the bulk of scholarly publishing. Member publishers deposit metadata (titles, authors, ORCID iDs, affiliations with ROR IDs, references, funder data, licences, CRediT roles) when they mint a DOI. Crossref exposes the deposited metadata through its REST API, OAI-PMH endpoint, and bulk public data file. Crossref also operates Cited-by, Crossmark, Funder Registry, and Similarity Check services on top of the DOI metadata corpus.

References

Crossref, 'About Crossref' (crossref.org).
Hendricks G. et al., 'Crossref: The sustainable source of community-owned scholarly metadata', Quantitative Science Studies 1(1), 2020.

Also known as

Crossref identifier

Machine-readable encodings

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="Crossref DOI"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/crossref-doi" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/crossref-doi",
  "name": "Crossref DOI",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/crossref-doi",
  "description": "A DOI registered through Crossref, the DOI Registration Agency for scholarly publications (journals, books, conference proceedings, preprints, peer reviews, grants), accompanied by metadata deposited in Crossref's XML schema.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/persistent-identifiers#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/crossref-doi",
  "sameAs": [
    "Crossref identifier"
  ],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
  },
  "dateModified": "2026-07-10T02:06:19",
  "inLanguage": "en"
}

Referenced across the research world

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