name: Crossref Vocabulary
description: >-
  Controlled vocabulary describing the entities, identifiers, and
  relationships exposed by the Crossref scholarly metadata API.
url: https://www.crossref.org/documentation/
version: '1.0'
modified: '2026-04-28'
terms:
  - term: Work
    description: >-
      A scholarly content item registered with Crossref, identified by a
      DOI and described by metadata such as title, authors, publication
      date, container, and references.
    relatedTerms:
      - DOI
      - Member
      - Journal
      - Funder
  - term: DOI
    description: >-
      A Digital Object Identifier registered through Crossref or another
      DOI registration agency that provides a persistent, resolvable link
      to a scholarly object.
    relatedTerms:
      - Work
      - Prefix
      - Agency
  - term: Member
    description: >-
      An organization, typically a publisher or society, that registers
      content and metadata with Crossref under one or more prefixes.
    relatedTerms:
      - Prefix
      - Work
  - term: Prefix
    description: >-
      The leading numeric component of a DOI (for example 10.1016) that
      indicates the registering organization. A single Member may control
      multiple prefixes.
    relatedTerms:
      - Member
      - DOI
  - term: Journal
    description: >-
      A serial publication identified by ISSN(s) that contains scholarly
      works registered with Crossref.
    aliases:
      - Container
    relatedTerms:
      - ISSN
      - Work
  - term: ISSN
    description: >-
      An International Standard Serial Number identifying a journal or
      other periodical, with separate values for print and electronic
      versions.
    relatedTerms:
      - Journal
  - term: Funder
    description: >-
      An entry in the Crossref Open Funder Registry that identifies an
      organization that funds research, allowing works to declare their
      funding sources.
    relatedTerms:
      - Work
      - FunderRegistry
  - term: Type
    description: >-
      A classification of scholarly works such as journal-article,
      book-chapter, dataset, preprint, or proceedings-article.
    relatedTerms:
      - Work
  - term: License
    description: >-
      A license URI declared in a Work's metadata, describing reuse and
      redistribution permissions for the registered content.
    relatedTerms:
      - Work
  - term: Agency
    description: >-
      The DOI registration agency (Crossref, DataCite, mEDRA, etc.) that
      registered a particular DOI.
    relatedTerms:
      - DOI
  - term: ORCID
    description: >-
      An Open Researcher and Contributor ID identifying an author,
      contributor, or chair on a scholarly work.
    relatedTerms:
      - Work
  - term: ROR
    description: >-
      A Research Organization Registry identifier identifying an
      institution affiliation in a Work's contributor metadata.
    relatedTerms:
      - Work
  - term: Cursor
    description: >-
      A continuation token used to deeply paginate large Crossref result
      sets without offset limits.
    relatedTerms:
      - Work