Crossref

Founded in at the beginning of 2000 Publishers International Linking Association, Inc. (PILA), which operates Crossref was established to promote the cooperative use & development of innovative, new technologies to facilitate, and speed scholarly research in electronic form. Crossref is a collaborative reference linking service functioning as a digital switchboard of sorts effecting linkages through Crossref's Digital Object Identifiers, which are tagged to article metadata supplied through participating publishers; ensuring an efficient, scalable linking system through which a researcher can click on a reference citation in a journal and access the cited article.