Indexing, Production, Trends

Index becomes a Sponsor of Crossref: a new step to strengthen open access scientific publishing

May 18, 2026

At Index, we continue to advance our commitment to the professionalization, visibility, and interoperability of journal. Therefore, we are pleased to announce that Index Publishing SL has been accepted as a Crossref Sponsor for journalscientific,a status that allows us to support scientific societies, universities, and publishing entities in their integration into Crossref's global infrastructure. This step reinforces our mission: to help journalpublish according to international standards, improve the quality of their metadata, facilitate DOI assignment, and connect their content with the global ecosystem of scientific communication.

What is Crossref?

Crossref is an international non-profit organization that provides open infrastructure to connect research objects—such as scientific articles, books, chapters, proceedings, data, preprints, and other scholarly content—using persistent identifiers, metadata, and interoperable links. Its goal is to make research easier to find, cite, link to, evaluate, and reuse. (www.crossref.org) In practice, Crossref allows scholarly content to become part of a global network of references, citations, DOIs, metadata, and relationships between publications. This is especially important for journalseeking to improve their visibility, strengthen their digital presence, and meet the technical requirements of databases, repositories, and academic indexes.

What does it mean to be a Crossref Sponsor?

Being a Crossref Sponsor for journalmeans that Index can act as an intermediary and support entity for organizations that wish to join Crossref but may encounter technical, administrative, linguistic, or financial barriers to doing so directly. Crossref explains that members who join through a Sponsor have the same obligations and benefits as other members, but they also have an organization that represents them and supports them in using Crossref's services. Furthermore, in this model, the Sponsor manages aspects such as technical support, billing, and administrative assistance. (www.crossref.org) For many journal, scientific societies, or academic institutions, this route facilitates access to essential infrastructure without having to internally handle all the technical and operational complexity of the process.

What does this mean for journal that work with Index?

From now on, journal collaborating with Index will be able to integrate into Crossref more directly, systematically, and with greater support. This simplifies processes that are critical for current scientific publishing , such as:

  • registration of the journal as a sponsored member of Crossref;
  • assignment of DOI prefixes;
  • DOI registration for articles and other scientific content;
  • metadata repository;
  • updating URLs and data associated with DOIs;
  • Technical and editorial support to keep records properly structured.

This doesn't just mean "having a DOI". It means working with an internationally recognized infrastructure, where each article is connected to a persistent network of identification, citation, and scholarly discovery.

More than DOI: metadata, traceability and interoperability

In today's publishing environment, the quality of a journal depends not only on its scientific content but also on how that content is structured, identified, and connected to the rest of the academic ecosystem. A properly registered DOI must be accompanied by consistent metadata: title, authors, affiliations, ORCID, abstract, references, dates, license, destination URL, journal information, and other technical elements. This metadata allows the article to be located, cited, retrieved, and integrated into indexing and analysis systems. Therefore, at Index, we understand DOI registration as part of a broader publishing process: web publishing , comprehensive metadata, technical standards, XML/JATS, preservation, interoperability, and indexing .

An opportunity for journal from scientific societies and universities

Many journalfrom scientific societies, professional associations, and universities produce high-value knowledge, but they don't always have the necessary technical resources to fully integrate into the international publishing . The Crossref Sponsorship Program exists precisely to facilitate this participation. According to Crossref, sponsors help organizations that might otherwise have difficulty joining directly due to economic, technical, administrative, or linguistic barriers. (www.crossref.org) At Index, we work especially with journalin the health field, medical societies, universities, and academic publications in Spain and Latin America. For many of them, this new role of Index as a sponsor represents a simpler path toward international publishing.

Aligned with open access and the democratization of scientific publishing

This recognition is directly aligned with our vision: to democratize access to high-quality publishing tools. We believe that a journal should not be excluded from the international ecosystem due to a lack of technical staff, administrative barriers, or the absence of a large editorial structure. Scientific quality should be supported by a robust infrastructure, even if the journal is small, independent, or supported by a scientific society. Our goal is to help more journalachieve this.

  • publish in open access using professional standards;
  • improve the visibility of your articles;
  • meet technical indexing criteria;
  • have properly managed DOIs;
  • structure quality metadata;
  • reduce the operational burden on their editorial teams;
  • to integrate into international scientific communication networks.

One more step within the Index ecosystem

Crossref's sponsorship of journalis integrated into Index's comprehensive offering: an editorial platform that combines manuscript management, peer review, publishing web editorial production, PDF, HTML, and XML/JATS generation, DOI creation, metadata generation, and indexing. This is not about adding an isolated service, but rather about strengthening a complete infrastructure for journalthat want to grow, professionalize, and increase their impact. In the coming months, we will continue working to ensure that this integration allows our journalclients to register their content more efficiently, securely, and consistently with international best practices.

Conclusion

Becoming a Crossref Sponsor is a significant milestone for Index and for the journal that rely on us. It allows us to offer more comprehensive support in one of the most important layers of scientific publishing : persistent identification, metadata registration, and connection to the global research infrastructure. We continue to move forward with a clear vision: to help more scientific journal publish better, increase their visibility, and compete with international standards without losing their identity, editorial autonomy, or commitment to serving the scientific community.