Crossjournal

Crossjournal is a proposed framework and set of practices aimed at enabling interoperability among scholarly journals and repositories. It envisions a federated network in which articles published across different publishers can be discovered, cited, and annotated within a cross-journal context, while preserving publisher control and licensing terms.

The core goals of crossjournal include improving discovery across journal ecosystems, enabling cross-reference linking of related articles, standardizing bibliographic metadata, and supporting cross-publisher peer review or post-publication commentary where permissible. By coordinating metadata, identifiers, and linking rules, crossjournal aims to reduce fragmentation in scholarly communication and to facilitate cross-journal navigation and reuse of content.

Key components of a crossjournal framework would likely involve a common metadata schema aligned with existing standards (such as DOI, ISSN, schema.org, and JATS), a federation protocol for indexing and search, and authentication for researchers via identifiers like ORCID. A Crossjournal Registry or Index could serve as a lightweight directory that publishers opt into, enabling cross-journal citations, recommendations, and annotations without requiring content duplication.

Implementation would require collaboration among publishers, libraries, and standards bodies. Adoption depends on governance agreements, licensing compatibility, and technical integration with existing systems like Crossref, OpenCitations, and COAR’s initiatives. The concept sits alongside broader efforts to standardize metadata, facilitate open citations, and promote interoperable scholarly infrastructure.

See also: Crossref, DOI, ORCID, OpenCitations, COAR, JATS, schema.org.