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 our new Member Support Specialist.
The member 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.
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.
Needed to succeed:
Nice-to-have:
We’re a nonprofit 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 23,000+ members from 160+ 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 50 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 here.
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 information 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!
Applications close on November 28th, 2025.
Anticipated salary for this role is approximately 40-45k USD-equivalent, paid in local currency. Crossref offers competitive compensation, benefits, flexible work arrangements, professional development opportunities, and a supportive work environment. Check out our Employee Handbook for more details on paid time off, unlimited sick time, paid parental and medical leaves, and more.
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.
