Microbial Cell is now a member of the Publishers International Linking Association, Inc. (PILA), a non-profit, independent organization, which operates CrossRef. The CrossRef network was founded to make reference linking throughout online scholarly literature efficient and reliable and develop other services that are best achieved through collaboration. As a DOI registration agency CrossRef, enables links to and from online scholarly content and is committed to long term sustainability.

A DOI is a unique alphanumeric string assigned to a digital object – in this case, an electronic journal article. In the CrossRef system, each DOI is associated with a set of basic metadata and a URL pointer to the full text, so that ituniquely identifies the content item and provides a persistent link to its location on the internet. Thus, each article published so far and in the future by Microbial Cell will obtain a unique DOI identification number that will be displayed as part of the paper’s reference.