Alternatives and competitors
Sites like Crossref
The 20 closest scholarly metadata infrastructure alternatives to Crossref, ranked by what they actually offer, and the 14 technologies behind it.
Looking for an alternative to Crossref? The closest matches are DOI.org query endpoint, OSF and Zenodo. We match sites by what they actually offer, from their homepages, Wikidata and a summary by Claude, in any language. Vote on each alternative and leave a short note to help the next person choose.
- Neighbours
- k = 20
- Sites searched
- 4,032
- Vector
- 384-d
- Query
- 18 ms
01 · Entity
About Crossref
Crossref crossref.org
Crossref
Crossref is open infrastructure linking the world's research. 26,500 members, 171 countries, 2.1 billion monthly API queries.
Wikidata: one of the official Digital Object Identifier Registration Agencies of the International DOI Foundation
Summary by Claude
Crossref is a nonprofit DOI registration agency that lets publishers, funders and research institutions register persistent identifiers and metadata for scholarly works, and shares that metadata openly through free APIs for citation and reference linking.
- Who it’s for
- Scholarly publishers, libraries, research institutions, funders
- Business model
- Membership and registration fees
02 · Embedding space
Competitor map
Each alternative by how close its vector is to Crossref’s (x) and how much traffic it gets, how much of the stack it shares, or where it sits in the embedding space itself (y). Lines split each axis at the median. Hover for the numbers, click to jump to it in the list.
similarity × popularity
03 · Nearest neighbours
Alternatives to Crossref
Thumbs up if it’s a real alternative to Crossref, thumbs down if it isn’t.
- 01
Home Page
API endpoint
Very close cos 0.895 - 02
OSF
tools that make open science practice easier
Close cos 0.890 - 03
Zenodo
research data repository
Close cos 0.887 - 04
Zotero | Your personal research assistant
Zotero is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share research.
Close cos 0.879 - 05
ORCID
non-profit organization that issues ORCID Identifiers
Close cos 0.875 - 06
Content Blocked
online digital archive for electronic preprints of scientific papers and related content
Close cos 0.878 - 07
ResearchGate - Temporarily Unavailable
commercial scientific social network
Close cos 0.878 - 08
bioRxiv.org - the preprint server for Biology
bioRxiv - the preprint server for biology, operated by openRxiv, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing scientific communication
Close cos 0.875 - 09
NSF - U.S. National Science Foundation
NSF is an independent federal agency that supports science and engineering in all 50 states and U.S. territories.
Close cos 0.874 - 10
Making sure you're not a bot!
French research institution in computer science
Close cos 0.872 - 11
Client Challenge
distributor of eBooks and other digital media
Close cos 0.874 - 12
Our World in Data
Research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems.
- Google Workspace
- Cloudflare
- Cloudflare DNS
- Cloudflare Web Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Google Tag Manager
Close cos 0.872 - 13
medRxiv.org - the preprint server for Health Sciences
medRxiv - the preprint server for biology, operated by openRxiv, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing scientific communication
Close cos 0.872 - 14
Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS)
Le Centre national de la recherche scientifique est le plus grand organisme public français de recherche scientifique. Il exerce son activité dans
Close cos 0.871 - 15
Semantic Scholar | AI-Powered Research Tool
Semantic Scholar uses groundbreaking AI and engineering to understand the semantics of scientific literature to help Scholars discover relevant research.
Close cos 0.869 - 16
Ahrefs—AI Marketing Platform Powered by Big Data
We help marketers drive visibility across AI search, SEO, content, and social – with the largest AI and search databases online.
Close cos 0.867 - 17
国立研究開発法人科学技術振興機構
国立研究開発法人科学技術振興機構（略称ＪＳＴ）は、知の創出から研究成果の社会還元とその基盤整備を担うわが国の中核的機関です。世界トップレベルの研究開発を行うネットワーク型研究所として、未来共創イノベーションを先導します。
Close cos 0.867 - 18
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics
RePEc is a central index of economics research, including working papers, articles and software code
Close cos 0.866 - 19
Welcome to RIPE and the RIPE NCC — RIPE Network Coordination Centre
The RIPE NCC is one of five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) providing Internet resource allocation and registration, and coordination activities.
Close cos 0.864 - 20
Expanding the online frontier | Google Registry
More and more people make websites every day, but not everyone knows how to stay safe and secure online. Learn what you need to be aware of to keep your data safe online.
Close cos 0.865
Ranked by score: the cosine similarity of each site’s vector to crossref.org’s, less a small penalty for generic sites that are close to everything. Highlighted technologies are ones Crossref uses too. Votes and comments come from visitors and don’t change the ranking.
04 · Fingerprints
Technology
What Crossref is built with, and what its closest competitors use, from its homepage’s code and its DNS records.
Built with
- JavaScript libraries
- jQuery asset https://www.crossref.org/js/jquery.min.js
- CSS & UI
- Bootstrap asset https://www.crossref.org/js/bootstrap.min.js
- Font Awesome asset https://www.crossref.org/fontawesome/css/all.min.css
- Analytics
- Matomo page source: _paq.push(
- Live chat & support
- Zendesk TXT v=spf1 ip4:208.254.38.64/27 ip4:108.26.163.24 ip4:18.233.120.246 incl…
- CDN
- Amazon CloudFront header x-amz-cf-id: BkAXA8mwE1DbolpDB6-t6MH7TzUR_cuK7i0BW7hPk6nWQXliHw5Fgg==
- cdnjs asset https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/masonry/4.1.0/masonry.pkgd.js
- jsDelivr asset https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/algoliasearch/3/algoliasearch.min.js
- Hosting
- Amazon Web Services header server: AmazonS3
- Site search
- Algolia page source: algoliasearch
- Email hosting
- Google Workspace MX aspmx3.googlemail.com
- Microsoft 365 TXT MS=ms40313232
- Email delivery
- Amazon SES TXT v=spf1 ip4:208.254.38.64/27 ip4:108.26.163.24 ip4:18.233.120.246 incl…
- DNS hosting
- Amazon Route 53 NS ns-1629.awsdns-11.co.uk
Stack changes
No changes yet. Each new crawl is compared with the last one, and what Crossref adds or drops shows up here.
What competitors use
Across the 20 closest sites.
- Google Search Console · not on crossref.org 15/20
- Microsoft 365 12/20
- Cloudflare · not on crossref.org 8/20
- Cloudflare DNS · not on crossref.org 8/20
- Google Workspace 7/20
- Google Tag Manager · not on crossref.org 6/20
- Amazon SES 5/20
- Mailchimp · not on crossref.org 5/20
- Amazon CloudFront 4/20
- jQuery 4/20
- jsDelivr 4/20
- Amazon Route 53 4/20
- Apple Business · not on crossref.org 4/20
- Zendesk 4/20
- Atlassian · not on crossref.org 4/20
- OpenAI · not on crossref.org 4/20