CrossRef
AAIDD is a member of CrossRef, an independent membership association for building shared technologies. CrossRef launched in early 2000 as a cooperative effort among publishers to enable citation linking in journals using the Digital Object Identifier, or DOI. A CrossRef DOI is an alphanumeric name (for example, “10.3366/cor.2006.1.2.109”) for digital content such as a journal article.
The CrossRef DOI is paired with the article’s electronic address, or URL, in a central DOI directory that is easily updated, allowing the content to move as needed. When a user clicks on a CrossRef DOI, it is resolved through the central DOI directory. This allows hyperlinks from references within article PDFs which take the user through to the abstract page of the referenced article (or, in some cases, to the full text where access is authenticated).