Jobs

Do you want to help improve research communications in all corners of the globe? Come and join the world of nonprofit open infrastructure and be part of improving the creation and sharing of knowledge as one of our two new Member Support Specialists.

• Location: Remote and global, to partially overlap with working hours in European time zones.
• Type: Full-time, Monday-Friday
• Remuneration: 47k USD or local equivalent. We pay salaries in the currency of the country in which you’re based. We arrive at the local USD-equivalent salary by determining the average 5-year USD exchange rate, to stabilize currency fluctuations.
• Benefits: Check out our Employee Handbook for more details on paid time off, unlimited sick time, paid parental and medical leaves, and more.
• Reports to: One role reports to Maryna Kovalyova, Member Experience Manager (Operations) and the other role reports to Collin Knopp-Schwyn, Member Experience Manager (Metadata Quality)
• Timeline: Advertise + interviews in November and offers in December

About the role

Crossref runs the global open infrastructure to link research objects, entities, and actions—creating a lasting and reusable scholarly record that underpins open science. Together with our >26,500 members in 171 countries, we drive metadata exchange and support 2.1 billion monthly API queries, facilitating global research communication for the benefit of society.

One of the two roles will initially focus on ROR curation. ROR (the Research Organization Registry) is jointly managed by DataCite, Crossref, and California Digital Library. It’s a community-led initiative to develop an open, sustainable, usable, and unique identifier for every research organization in the world. You can find out more about how DataCite, Crossref and California Digital Library all work together here.

Role 1: Member Support Specialist (ROR focus)

This role combines detailed systems work with the human touch. You’ll triage and process community requests to add or update records in the Research Organization Registry (ROR), researching organisations carefully and making recommendations to the curation team.

You’ll start focused entirely on ROR curation. From 2027, as that work becomes shared across the membership team, you’ll also move into reviewing and processing Crossref membership applications and supporting Crossref members.

You’ll work with organisations across scholarly communications—journal publishers, research funders, museums, libraries, universities—so you’ll need an understanding of how research and publishing work, a systematic approach, and the confidence to ask probing questions when something doesn’t add up.

Reports to the Member Experience Manager (Metadata Quality).

Key responsibilities

ROR curation requests:

• Triage new community requests for additions and updates using GitHub-based tools.
• Manage requests for additions and updates that are escalated by the contractors.
• Check the accuracy of the metadata by researching in ROR itself, organisational websites, and sources like Google Scholar, Wikidata, ISNI, and ORCID.
• Recommend to the ROR curation team and advisory board how each request should be handled.

Crossref membership applications, from late 2027:

• Review and process applications in Zendesk, following detailed process notes.
• Handle particularly tricky applications that are escalated by contract staff.
• Work with applicants to understand their organisational structure and the membership options open to them, brokering conversations between publishers, platforms, sponsors, and service providers where needed.
• Explain what membership involves: the community, the obligations, and why complete metadata matters.
• Run the administrative process end to end, including sending for sanctions checks, system setup, and issuing the DOI prefix and credentials.
• Keep our CRM (Sugar) clean and current, and work with the billing team so members understand what they owe and why.

About you

You follow a process precisely and you’re comfortable when there isn’t one. Our membership and our environment change quickly, and we won’t always have a clear answer, so some cases need slow careful work over email or Zoom while others need a fast decision.

• Extremely organised, with close attention to detail, in a role that gets busy.
• Able to research organisations and publications intelligently across multiple sources, and to make judgement calls against ROR’s inclusion criteria.
• Comfortable with spreadsheets and data analysis.
• Strong written English, and able to use open questions to get to the bottom of things when an applicant’s account doesn’t quite hang together.
• A genuinely global outlook—26,500 members in 171 countries, across every time zone.
• A quick study with new systems; we automate what we can and keep the human touch where it counts.
• Familiarity with GitHub issues and projects, and the ROR API, is useful (we can train you).
• Experience of Zendesk or a similar support tool, and a CRM like Sugar, is ideal.
• Knowledge of publishing, XML, metadata, or information science is a bonus. Professional English is essential; second languages are a strong advantage.

Role 2: Member Support Specialist

The membership support specialist role combines member consultation and detailed systems and administrative work. You’ll need to have an understanding of the academic and scientific research process, great attention to detail, the ability to ask probing questions of applicants, and a logical, systematic approach to work.

You’ll be working with a wide range of organisations in the scholarly communications world, from journal publishers to research funders to museums to libraries, in order to determine their needs and advise them on membership. You’ll take them through our application process, setting them up carefully in our CRM and other systems, navigating through automated processes, paying extremely close attention to data quality. Once they’re members, you’ll continue to work with them closely for onboarding - answering their questions via email, and increasingly via our community forum and other public channels as we work to make membership operations fully transparent. You’ll help them take on new Crossref services, navigate platform migrations, and understand how to set up service providers to work with us on their behalf. You’ll work closely with sponsors, platform providers, service providers, and other registration agencies to support our members. It’s a very diverse role and is an excellent opportunity to get wide-ranging experience within Crossref and global open scholarly infrastructure and communications.

Reports to the Member Experience Manager (Operations).

Key responsibilities

• Answer questions in writing from people across the international scholarly community through our support software (Zendesk), our community forum, social media, and Q&A on webinars. This will mostly be in the English language. These questions might be from organisations that are already members, organisations seeking to join Crossref as a member, metadata users, or community members with a general enquiry. You’ll be working with publishers, funders, universities, museums, scholarly tools and platforms, authors and many more.
• Help member applicants understand the community aspect of Crossref, the benefits and obligations of being a member, and the importance of correct and complete metadata.
• Work with new member applicants to understand their organisations’ internal structures and help them understand the various membership options available to them.
• Own and drive the administrative process for new applicants, ensuring that any sanctions checks have been performed and that we have all the necessary information to help them get started, as well as setting them up correctly in our central systems.
• Broker conversations between publishers, platforms, and service providers to ensure the member is able to fulfil their aims while still meeting their membership obligations.
• Ensure that the data in our CRM system (Sugar CRM) is kept clean and up-to-date.
• Work closely with the billing team to ensure that members understand their billing responsibilities and that we have the information we need to make their payment experience smooth.
• Liaise with other registration agencies and CNRI to transfer ownership of DOI prefixes and ensure that no metadata is lost from the research nexus during the transfer.
• Manage title transfers between members in our system, ensuring that the relevant permissions have been provided.
• Work closely with the technical support team.
• Represent the membership team (and members) on Crossref-wide projects. Present on occasional community calls and represent Crossref at occasional in-person events.

About you

• We’re looking for a smart, savvy person who’s able to work with our diverse membership to really get to the bottom of their needs. You’ll need to be able to follow processes precisely and maintain accuracy, while at the same time being comfortable with ambiguity - our membership and environment is changing rapidly and we won’t always have a clear answer for everything. This means we sometimes need to work slowly and carefully with our members to get to the bottom of things - either through exploratory emails or Zoom meetings - but, at other times, adapt quickly to changing needs.
• You’ll be a quick learner of new technologies and enjoy improving systems and processes, automating those where possible, but you’ll also be able to build relationships with our members and serve their very diverse needs - from hand-holding those with basic queries to really digging into some knotty organisational relationships.
• Able to balance a very busy role while still paying close attention to detail and keeping member experience at the forefront of everything you do.
• Experience in helping customers and solving problems in creative and unique ways.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to communicate clearly in English - able to use open questions to get to the bottom of things when members don’t seem to make sense.
• A truly global perspective - we have 26.5k member organisations from 171 countries across numerous time zones.
• Comfortable taking the initiative to lead conversations with people at all levels.
• Quick learner of new technologies and able to rapidly pick up new programs and systems. We are trying to automate as much as possible while still maintaining the human touch - so experience of automation platforms such as Zapier are a plus.
• Extremely organised and attentive to detail.
• Experience with Zendesk or similar support system is ideal, as is familiarity with CRM systems such as Sugar.
• Familiar with the publishing process with knowledge of XML, metadata, scholarly research, or information science being a bonus.

About Crossref and the team

We’re a non-profit membership organisation that exists to make scholarly communications better. We rally the community; tag and share metadata; run an open infrastructure; play with technology; and make tools and services—all to help put research in context.

We envision a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organisations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society. We are working towards this vision of a ‘Research Nexus’ by demonstrating the value of richer and connected open metadata, incentivising people to meet best practices, while making it easier to do so. “We” means 26,500+ members from 170+ countries, 170+ million records, and nearly 2 billion monthly metadata queries from thousands of tools across the research ecosystem. We want to be a sustainable source of complete, open, and global scholarly metadata and relationships.

Take a look at our strategic agenda to see the planned work that aims to achieve the vision. The sustainability area aims to make transparent all the processes and procedures we follow to run the operation long-term, including our financials and our ongoing commitment to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI). The governance area describes our board and its role in community oversight.

It also takes a strong team – because reliable infrastructure needs committed people who contribute to and realise the vision, and thrive doing it. We are a distributed group of 60+ dedicated people who take our work seriously, but don’t take ourselves seriously - we like to play quizzes, measure coffee intake, and create 100s of custom slack emojis. We do this through fair policies and working practices, a balanced approach to resourcing, and accountability to each other.

We can offer the successful candidate a challenging and fun environment to work in. Together we are dedicated to our global mission and we are constantly adapting to ensure we get there. Take a look at our organisation chart, the latest Annual Meeting recordings, and our financial information.

Thinking of applying?

We especially encourage applications from people with backgrounds historically under-represented in research and scholarly communications. You can be based anywhere in the world where we can employ staff, either directly or through an employer of record.

We will invite selected candidates to an initial call to discuss the role. Following that, shortlisted candidates will be invited to an interview. You will receive all questions in advance, and the interview will include some questions and/or exercises you’ll have a chance to prepare for. All interviews will be held remotely on Zoom.

Click here to apply!

Please strive to submit your applications by November 17, 2026.

Equal opportunities commitment

Crossref is committed to a policy of non-discrimination and equal opportunity for all employees and qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, colour, religion, sex, pregnancy or a condition related to pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, ancestry, age, physical or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, uniform service member status, or any other protected class under applicable law. Crossref will make reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with known disabilities in accordance with applicable law.

Thanks for your interest in joining Crossref. We are excited to hear from you!