The Formation of CrossRef: A Short History

"At the Board meeting of the STM association, held the afternoon of Monday, October 11, before the fair’s Wednesday opening, discussion focused on an emerging U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) initiative called E-Biomed (later PubMed Central) that had been proposed by Harold Varmus of the National Institutes of Health in the spring of 1999. Varmus envisioned a digital archive of journals, accessible free of charge and with the added value of reference linking. “Our consensus was that publishers should be the ones doing the linking,” said Bob Campbell, who chaired the meeting. “Since we were ‘higher up the stream,’ so to speak, we should be able to link our articles ahead of the NLM as part of the process of producing them. Stefan von Holtzbrinck then set the ball rolling by offering to link Nature publications with anyone else’s. We decided to issue an announcement of a broad STM reference linking initiative. It was, of course, a strategic move only, since we had neither plan nor prototype.” ..."