Helena Cousijn

Helena Cousijn

Director of Programs and Services

Biography

Helena joined Crossref in February 2025 as Director of Programs and Services. She is passionate about open research and open infrastructure and joined us from DataCite, where she served as the Community Engagement Director for over 6 years. Before then, she worked at Elsevier, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), and the Dutch Brain Bank. Helena holds a DPhil in Neuroscience from the University of Oxford. Outside of work, she enjoys spending time with her family (including dogs and horses), camping, rowing, and other outdoor activities.

ORCID iD

0000-0001-6660-6214

Helena Cousijn's Latest Blog Posts

Strengthening support for data citations and saying goodbye to Event Data

Martyn Rittman, Tuesday, Mar 24, 2026

In APIsCitationDataDataCiteEvent Data

Leave a comment

We’re excited to announce a new data citation API endpoint and are seeking your feedback. The new service makes existing data citation relationships in our metadata available, thereby surfacing this part of the research nexus. At the same time, we’ve decided that it’s time to move on from Event Data.

Highlights of a very busy year: our 2025 annual report

As we finish celebrating our 25th anniversary, we can look back on a truly transformational year, defined by the successful delivery of several long-planned, foundational projects—as well as updates to our teams, services, and fees—that position Crossref for success over the next quarter century as essential open scholarly infrastructure. In our update at the end of 2024, we highlighted that we had restructured our leadership team and paused some projects. The changes made in 2024 positioned us for a year of getting things done in 2025. We launched cross-functional programs, modernised our systems, strengthened connections with our growing global community, and streamlined a bunch of technical and business operations while continuing to grow our staff, members, content, relationships, and community connections.

Crossref at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2025

Helena Cousijn, Wednesday, Nov 19, 2025

In Community

Leave a comment

The Frankfurt Book Fair is the largest book fair in the world, and therefore a key event on our calendar. Held annually in Frankfurt, Germany, the 77th Frankfurt Book Fair (October 15–19, 2025) saw 118,000 trade visitors and 120,000 private visitors from 131 countries. The Crossref booth was located, as usual, in Hall 4.0 where all the stands with information about academic publishing can be found. Four Crossref colleagues attended the Book Fair this year, and in this blog post, you can read more about their meetings, experiences, and plans. 

The programs approach: our experiences during the first quarter of 2025

Helena Cousijn, Tuesday, Apr 8, 2025

In ProgramsRoadmapStrategy

Leave a comment

At the end of last year, we were excited to announce our renewed commitment to community and the launch of three cross-functional programs to guide and accelerate our work. We introduced this new approach to work towards better cross-team alignment, shared responsibility, improved communication and learning, and make more progress on the things members need.

Joint statement on research data

Hylke Koers, Tuesday, Nov 28, 2023

In DataCiteLinked DataData Citation

Leave a comment

STM, DataCite, and Crossref are pleased to announce an updated joint statement on research data.

In 2012, DataCite and STM drafted an initial joint statement on the linkability and citability of research data. With nearly 10 million data citations tracked, thousands of repositories adopting data citation best practices, thousands of journals adopting data policies, data availability statements and establishing persistent links between articles and datasets, and the introduction of data policies by an increasing number of funders, there has been significant progress since. It now seems appropriate to focus on providing updated recommendations for the various stakeholders involved in research data sharing.

Read all of Helena Cousijn's posts »