Membership on Crossref

Strengthening community connections in São Paulo

Susan Collins — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

As our global community continues to grow, it is important for us to build and maintain our connections within it. In March this year, we had the opportunity to visit São Paulo for a community event at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas. The content of our presentations is available online. Events such as this provide an opportunity for us to update our members on Crossref fundamentals and developments, and help us better tune in to the varied needs of our communities and learn how we can work together more effectively. This was our third visit to Brazil, with previous events held in Campinas and São Paulo in 2016, and Goiânia and Fortaleza in 2018.

Our membership in Latin America has grown steadily in the meantime. We currently work with more than 3,300 members across the region; and the largest number is based in Brazil, with over 1,900 members. The majority of these represent universities, societies, and government organisations, followed by libraries and foundations that also register their works with us. In total, our members in Brazil have contributed over 2 million open metadata records to the Research Nexus.

On March 3, we welcomed 60 attendees, which included members, sponsors, service providers, and researchers. Each of these groups contribute unique perspectives and experiences, and use our services in a variety of ways. We were also joined by four Crossref ambassadors - Pedro López Casique from Mexico, Juan Felipe Vargas, Nicolás Mejía Torres from Colombia, Edilson Damasio from Brazil, as well as colleagues from SciELO Brazil.

Photo: Crossref staff and ambassadors: Leandro Contreras, Pablo López Casique, Nicolás Mejía Torres, Luis Montilla, Susan Collins, Juan Felipe Vargas, Jason Portenoy, and Isaac Farley

We started the day with an emphasis on metadata quality, the role of Crossref DOIs, and content registration best practices. We offered an overview of our helper tools: the updated Metadata Manager for record registration and Participation Reports for reviewing metadata completeness. Pedro, who is also a Publication Support Specialist with Public Knowledge Project (PKP), gave an overview of working with the Open Journals Systems (OJS) platform, which is widely used by our members throughout Brazil.

Photo: PKP’s Pedro López Casique highlighting Brazil as the second highest user of OJS-hosted journals globally.

Later in the day we shifted to more technical topics including metadata retrieval, the use of metadata for discoverability and research integrity, and common metadata errors in the registration process. Roberta Takenaka, systems developer at SciELO, discussed an overview and challenges of the adoption of DOIs in the SciELO network.

This was a tri-lingual event with presentations delivered in English, Portuguese, and Spanish, with live interpretation available for participants and presenters.

Photo: Isaac Farley discussing metadata updates

During the session, we asked attendees to share their feedback on both the value of Crossref to their organisation and the challenges they face when working with us. Participants noted persistence, the commitment to scientific development, metadata standardisation, interoperability, and increasing content visibility as important benefits. The most common challenge reported was language - the majority of our documentation is in English, which makes it difficult for many to fully utilise the available resources. Several mentioned that costs can be a challenge for some organisations, and others noted that more training opportunities, held in Brazilian Portuguese, would be appreciated.

Photo: Participants chatting during the morning coffee break

The question and answer sessions covered a wide range of technical topics, including OJS integrations, interpreting monthly resolution reports, updating metadata in bulk, and implementing Crossmark. During the coffee breaks, discussions continued as participants shared their thoughts, additional questions, and feedback with us.

Following the presentations, we held small group sessions with participants to gather feedback on two ongoing projects. Leandro Contreras, our new UX researcher, met with a group to gather information on how users interact with our website, as part of our website architecture improvement project. Luis Montilla, Technical Community Manager, led a group discussion with editors to learn more about editorial workflows and how they interact with scholarly metadata.

Many of the participants also joined us for our Metadata Sprint, which took place in the days following, exploring the uses of open scholarly metadata in creating new tools and solutions. These events were an opportunity to reconnect with the community, gather feedback to create additional training and support materials, share developments and resources, and strengthen our connections with members and key collaborators. Ana Marlene Freitas de Morais, former vice-president of the Associacao Brasileira de Editores Cientificos do Brasil (ABEC Brasil), our largest Sponsor in Brazil, stressed the importance of face-to-face collaborations, such as this event, for engagement in Brazil. Through our Ambassadors, Sponsors, and other partners, we aim to continue building lasting relationships and supporting our growing community in Brazil.

With special thanks to our hosts at Fundação Getúlio Vargas for the generous use of their venue and support personnel.

Português version

À medida que nossa comunidade global continua a crescer, é importante para nós construir e manter nossos laços dentro dela. Em março deste ano, tivemos a oportunidade de visitar a nossa comunidade em São Paulo num evento na Fundação Getúlio Vargas. O conteúdo das apresentações está disponível online. Eventos como este nos proporcionam uma oportunidade de atualizar nossos membros sobre os fundamentos e desenvolvimentos da Crossref, além de nos ajudar a nos sintonizar melhor com as diversas necessidades de nossas comunidades, e aprender como podemos trabalhar juntos eficazmente. Esta foi a nossa terceira visita ao Brasil, com eventos anteriores realizados em Campinas e São Paulo em 2016, e em Goiânia e Fortaleza em 2018.

Nosso conjunto de membros na América Latina tem crescido de forma constante ao longo do tempo. Atualmente, trabalhamos com mais de 3.300 membros em toda a região; e o maior número está concentrado no Brasil, com mais de 1.900 membros. A maioria deles representa universidades, sociedades e organizações governamentais, seguidas por bibliotecas e fundações que também registram seus trabalhos conosco. No total, nossos membros no Brasil já contribuíram com mais de 2 milhões de registros de metadados abertos para o Research Nexus.

No dia 3 de março, recebemos 60 participantes, entre os quais membros, patrocinadores, prestadores de serviços e pesquisadores. Cada um desses grupos traz perspectivas e experiências únicas, e utilizam nossos serviços de diversas maneiras. Também contamos com a presença de quatro embaixadores da Crossref: Pedro López Casique, do México; Juan Felipe Vargas e Nicolás Mejía Torres, da Colômbia; e Edilson Damasio, do Brasil, e também colegas da SciELO Brasil.

Foto: Equipe e embaixadores da Crossref: Leandro Contreras, Pablo López Casique, Nicolás Mejía Torres, Luis Montilla, Susan Collins, Juan Felipe Vargas, Jason Portenoy e Isaac Farley

Começamos o dia com ênfase na qualidade dos metadados, no papel dos DOIs da Crossref e nas boas práticas de registro de conteúdo. Apresentamos uma visão geral das nossas ferramentas: Metadata Manager, atualizado para registro de registros e os Participation Reports para verificar a integridade dos metadados. Pedro, que também é especialista em suporte a publicações no Public Knowledge Project (PKP), apresentou uma visão geral do trabalho com a plataforma Open Journals Systems (OJS), amplamente utilizada por nossos membros em todo o Brasil.

Foto: Pedro López Casique, da PKP, destacando o Brasil como o segundo maior usuário de revistas hospedadas no OJS em todo o mundo.

No decorrer do dia, passamos a abordar temas mais técnicos, incluindo a recuperação de metadados, o uso de metadados para a visibilidade e a integridade da pesquisa, e erros comuns de metadados no processo de registro. Roberta Takenaka, desenvolvedora de sistemas da SciELO, apresentou uma visão geral e discutiu os desafios da adoção de DOIs na rede SciELO.

Este foi um evento trilíngue, com apresentações em inglês, português e espanhol, com interpretação simultânea disponível para participantes e palestrantes.

Photo: Isaac Farley discussing metadata updates.

Durante a sessão, pedimos aos participantes que compartilhassem comentários sobre o valor da Crossref para suas organizações, e sobre os desafios que enfrentam ao trabalhar conosco. Os participantes destacaram a persistência, o compromisso com o desenvolvimento científico, a padronização de metadados, a interoperabilidade e o aumento da visibilidade do conteúdo como benefícios importantes. O desafio mais comum relatado foi o idioma - a maior parte da nossa documentação está em inglês, o que dificulta para muitos a utilização plena dos recursos disponíveis. Vários mencionaram que os custos podem ser um desafio para algumas organizações, e outros observaram que mais oportunidades de treino, ministradas em português do Brasil, seriam bem-vindas.

Foto: Participantes conversando durante o intervalo da manhã.

As sessões de perguntas e respostas abordaram uma ampla variedade de tópicos técnicos, incluindo integrações com o OJS, interpretação de relatórios mensais de resolução, atualização em massa de metadados e implementação do Crossmark. Durante os intervalos para o café, as discussões continuaram enquanto os participantes compartilhavam suas ideias, perguntas adicionais e comentários conosco.

Após as apresentações, realizamos sessões em pequenos grupos com os participantes para coletar feedback sobre dois projetos em andamento. Leandro Contreras, nosso novo pesquisador de experiência do usuário (UX), reuniu-se com um grupo para coletar informações sobre como os usuários interagem com nosso site, como parte do nosso projeto de melhoria da arquitetura do site. Luis Montilla, gerente da comunidade técnica, conduziu uma discussão em grupo com editores para aprender mais sobre os fluxos de trabalho editoriais e como eles interagem com metadados acadêmicos.

Muitos dos participantes também se juntaram a nós no nosso Metadata Sprint, realizado nos dias seguintes, para explorar os usos de metadados acadêmicos abertos na criação de novas ferramentas e soluções.

Esses eventos foram uma oportunidade para nos reconectarmos com a comunidade, coletar feedback para criar materiais adicionais de treinamento e apoio, compartilhar desenvolvimentos e recursos, e fortalecer nossos laços com os membros e principais colaboradores. Ana Marlene Freitas de Morais, ex-vice-presidente da Associação Brasileira de Editores Científicos (ABEC Brasil), nosso maior patrocinador no Brasil, destacou a importância das colaborações presenciais, como este evento, para o engajamento no Brasil. Por meio de nossos Embaixadores, Patrocinadores e outros parceiros, nosso objetivo é continuar construindo relacionamentos duradouros e apoiando nossa crescente comunidade no Brasil.

Agradecemos especialmente aos nossos anfitriões da Fundação Getúlio Vargas pelo generoso uso de suas instalações e pela equipe de apoio.

Reflections from Bangkok

Amanda Bartell — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Each organization in the global community of Crossref members (that’s currently over 25k organizations in 166 different countries) plays a key role in building the Research Nexus. Any opportunity we have to meet with our members in person is a highlight and a way for us to learn more from each other. The month of January saw three of us travel to Bangkok to attend the first-ever Charleston Conference organised in Asia and to meet with our growing community in Thailand.

The Charleston Conference is a meeting for librarians and publishers that is held annually in the USA. This year, the conference was held for the first time in Asia, and attending the event allowed us to connect with the library publishing community from the region and others, who had travelled from around the world to meet in picturesque Bangkok. Half of Crossref members are now based in Asia, so visiting Thailand gave us a great opportunity to meet members and colleagues from the continent in person.

At the conference, Robbykha moderated a panel discussion on “the importance of metadata for Asian scholarship”, capturing voices from across Asia on how open metadata is being used for discoverability, integrity, and assessment by different scholarly communities in the region.

Our visit to Bangkok culminated with a one-day Crossref Bangkok event that we had organised to meet with Crossref members in Thailand. We were also able to visit The Thailand National Library, who are the Thai ISSN Centre and stewards of so much of Thailand’s cultural heritage.

We were very grateful to our colleagues in Thailand for their warm welcome, particularly during the official mourning period for Her Majesty Queen Sirikit The Queen Mother.

Left hand photo: Madhura Amdekar (Crossref), Guo Xiaofeng (Crossref Ambassador and Crossref sponsors Sin-Chn Scientific Press Pte. Ltd (Singapore)), Robbykha Rosalien (Crossref), Mochammad Tanzil Multazam (Crossref sponsors Relawan Jurnal Indonesia), Prof. Dr. Namtip Wipawin (Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University and Crossref sponsors National Research Council of Thailand), Amanda Bartell (Crossref). Right hand photo: Members discussing challenges and opportunities for Thai scholarship.

Charleston Asia conference - a reminder of the importance of infrastructure

The three-day Charleston Asia conference gave us a great opportunity to meet with members and colleagues based in Asia, and hear about areas of focus and concern. It was refreshing to hear about the global challenges of access to knowledge, AI, and preserving research integrity, within the context of Asia’s institutional, linguistic, and economic environment. And it was wonderful to hear about so many projects (many at national level) integrating Crossref data to lead their strategies and even shape policy decisions.

Three inspiring keynotes covered many of the challenges of scholarship in Asia, covering local, national, and regional approaches.

Distinguished Professor Joyashree Roy (Asian Institute of Technology) presented her work on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change at the United Nations. She highlighted how those in Asia are the most likely to be impacted by climate change, but underrepresented in the research due to structural, linguistic, and financial barriers. She explained how publishers and librarians can remove some of these barriers.

Professor Devika Madalli (Director of INFLIBNET Centre) talked about the various services that her team has created at a national level in India to reduce country and institution-wide inequalities. INFLIBNET subscribes to Crossref’s Metadata Plus service, and it’s great to see our community’s metadata being part of such useful services.

Professor Bin Zhang (Library Director, Renmin University of China) talked about the challenges of access to scholarship across different regions in China, and how investment in infrastructure is making a difference here.

There were many other fascinating sessions during the three days, including our panel discussion, moderated by Robbykha Rosalien.

The importance of metadata for Asian scholarship - our panel at Charleston Asia

Metadata isn’t just a technical detail—it’s the backbone of discoverability, credibility, trust, and impact in scholarly communication. In our panel session, we explored metadata trends across Asia and discussed how open metadata is shaping research visibility, integrity, and assessment in the region. Our panel brought together diverse voices: Mochammad Tanzil Multazam from Relawan Jurnal Indonesia, Ms. Guo Xiaofeng, Crossref Ambassador in Asia and Director at Sin-Chn Scientific Press (Singapore), and Prof. Dr. Namtip Wipawin from the Department of Information Science, School of Liberal Arts, Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University in Thailand. Each shared experiences of challenges and solutions in adopting open metadata practices and leveraging metadata effectively.

Photo: panel session - Ms. Guo Xiaofeng, Prof. Dr. Namtip Wipawin, Mochammad Tanzil Multazam

The session opened with Robbykha presenting a striking graph: Crossref now has more than 14,000 members from Asia, representing over half of its global membership. As of January 19th, 2026, there are 13.8 million registered DOI records from Asia. Indonesia leads with 3.02 million registered DOIs, followed by Japan with 2.73 million, India with 2.52 million, South Korea with 1.28 million, and Türkiye rounding out the top five with 793,198. These numbers highlight Asia’s growing role in global scholarly communication.

Photo: Robbykha presenting the Asian metadata coverage from Crossref data

Mochammad Tanzil Multazam shared how government support for persistent identifiers and metadata in Indonesia has fueled one of the largest and fastest‑growing open‑access journal ecosystems worldwide. Of 27,807 national journals, nearly half already register DOIs and metadata records (SINTA, 13 January 2026). Prof. Dr. Namtip Wipawin provided an overview of the metadata landscape in Thai academia, highlighting both progress and ongoing challenges. Meanwhile, Ms. Guo Xiaofeng presented a case study on open metadata utilization across Asia, showing practical examples of how metadata strengthens discoverability and trust.

Participants emphasized the importance of metadata for Asian scholarship: enhancing discoverability, accessibility, and providing rich, accurate data. Yet challenges remain. One of the most pressing issues is multilingual content, and the best way to reflect this in the metadata. For our current advice on multilingual metadata, take a look at our documentation and this interesting discussion on our forum. Our Metadata Advisory Group currently has a working group of members and metadata users discussing this further, to help ensure our future schema updates help to accurately reflect multilingual metadata.

Poll results from the panel audience on key challenges to the adoption of rich metadata

Crossref Bangkok - a reminder of the importance of visibility

The day after the Charleston Asia conference, around 75 attendees joined us for our Crossref Bangkok event. The event reinforced how valuable opportunities to interact directly with our members are for learning about the challenges that they face in scholarly publishing and to explore together how those can be overcome. We were supported during the event by our ambassadors Guo Xiaofeng, Amber Osman and Prof. MI Subhani, and by Prof. Dr. Namtip Wipawin and her team, who lead the sponsor organization from National Research Council of Thailand. We were also grateful to Mark Husskison from PKP for attending and helping attendees with some of their knottier OJS questions.

Most of the event attendees were from universities, which are our existing members in Thailand, and we were also joined by a team from the National Library of Thailand.

Photo: Participants from across Thailand’s research and publishing landscape

We started the day by hearing more about who was in attendance, where they had travelled from, and what they hoped to get out of the day. We moved on to an introduction to Crossref and DOI metadata records, which provided a refresher on the benefits and obligations of Crossref membership and highlighted the importance of rich metadata for discoverability and research integrity. Next up, we split up into small groups to discuss and share the challenges and opportunities in scholarly publishing in Thailand. From across the discussion groups, there was one word that kept coming up again and again: visibility. Attendees shared how visibility is both a challenge and an opportunity. They appreciate that registering rich metadata records with Crossref - which are then shared with the global scholarly ecosystem - provides them with a way to make their content more visible, but agreed that this isn’t without challenges. Attendees welcomed the in-person meeting, and asked for more training and support from Crossref, particularly in registering content. (We shared details of our regular “Getting Started at Crossref” webinars for new members, and our regular “Metadata Health Checks” for longer term members, and we’ll be thinking about how to support members in Asia with more training).

During the afternoon, we heard more from Prof. Dr. Namtip Wipawin on the importance of metadata for raising the visibility of Thai research. We then ran a practical session, explaining how to add (and update) metadata records for those using our new Metadata Manager, and those using the OJS platform. These were followed by a practical session, with participants exploring their own Participation Reports, and discussing how to fill in any gaps in their metadata. The new CSV download for metadata gaps was particularly useful. It was great to support members in adding in their missing references through the OJS platform live, by properly activating the OJS references plugin.

Attending the Crossref Bangkok Workshop made it clear that being a part of Crossref goes far beyond simply assigning DOIs, it is about contributing to a global research community. The sessions highlighted how rich metadata, such as references, abstracts, ORCID iDs, and funding information, play a vital role in making Thai research more visible and accessible worldwide. There was also a strong emphasis on the importance of English metadata and standard identifiers in overcoming language and name-related challenges. Overall, the workshop showed how high-quality metadata can help bring Thai research onto the global stage and strengthen its international recognition.

– Prof. Dr. Namtip Wipawin on behalf of the National Research Council of Thailand.

Visiting the National Library of Thailand - a reminder of the importance of stewardship

The warm welcome from National Library of Thailand team: Ms. Thanachcha Suwannavach (Librarian, Practitioner Level), Ms. Thitima Kumkhun (Librarian, Professional Level), Ms. Linda Puechsee (Librarian, Professional Level), Madhura Amdekar (Crossref), Robbykha Rosalien (Crossref), Amanda Bartell (Crossref), Ms. Bubphar Chuchat (Director of the National Library of Thailand), Dr. Prasittichai Lertratanakehakarn (Director of Information Resources Service Group), Ms. Rawiwan Putsorn (Director of Library Research and Development Group), Mrs. Atchara Jaruwan (Director of Information Resources Development Group), Mr. Jung Dippracone (Director of Manuscripts and Inscriptions Group), and Ms. Samachaya Dadrung (Librarian, Professional Level)

On our final day in Bangkok, we were lucky enough to visit with the team at the National Library of Thailand. They have a key role to play in scholarly publishing in Thailand as they run the National ISSN Centre. They are also stewards of much of Thailand’s cultural heritage, and we were honoured to view some of the artifacts that they look after.

Staff showcasing the digitization efforts at the National Library of Thailand — preserving knowledge and making it accessible for the future.

The role of DOI metadata in enhancing the visibility and accessibility of digital resources is vital. This experience has provided the National Library with a clearer strategic roadmap for establishing a DOI Center dedicated to rare materials and digital ancient manuscripts. This initiative aims to broaden the reach of these invaluable heritage resources, ensuring they are easily discoverable and accessible to a global audience.

– Ms. Bubphar Chuchat, Director of the National Library of Thailand

Wrapping up our visit, we left the National Library of Thailand feeling inspired. The team’s passion for preserving rare manuscripts while embracing digital tools shows how heritage and innovation can go hand in hand. It was a reminder that stewardship isn’t only about looking after the past; it’s about making sure knowledge and culture continue to thrive for the future.

A spotlight on our community in Indonesia

Susan Collins — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Click here for the translation in Bahasa Indonesia

As Crossref celebrated its 25th anniversary last year, we are highlighting some of the most active and engaged regions in our global community.

Over the past 25 years, the makeup of Crossref membership has evolved significantly; founded by a handful of large publishers, we now have more than 24,000 members representing 165 countries. Nearly two-thirds of them self-identify as universities, libraries, government agencies, foundations, scholar publishers, and research institutions.

The Crossref community in Indonesia is by far the most dynamically growing region. Each year since 2017, we’ve seen the highest number of new members joining from the country. There are now over 4,400 members based in Indonesia who have registered the metadata for more than 2.6 million works, connecting their research to the global community.

Indonesia also happens to be the largest user of OJS globally, with close to 20,000 journals publishing on the platform. Most journals are published by universities, research institutions, and government agencies.

There is a strong emphasis on publishing as part of completing a university degree. The Ministry of National Education policy requires all students to publish their research before graduation. To provide opportunities and accessible platforms for publication, Indonesian universities and faculties have established journals to help their students meet these requirements for graduation.

Most journals in Indonesia are indexed in SINTA (Science and Technology Index), which is managed by the Ministry of Higher Education, Science, and Technology (MoHEST). The aim of SINTA is to improve journal quality, facilitate assessment, and increase the competitiveness of Indonesian journals. The use of DOIs is a requirement for indexing on the platform.

Members know the value of persistent identifiers for their content, but many also realise the value of Crossref’s commitment to open metadata and the open scholarly record. Being a member of Crossref means being part of a larger community. While DOIs may be required for national indexing, organisations have various reasons for becoming Crossref members. One of the most important factors is to increase the global visibility of their content and, therefore, increase the impact of their publications.

“We feel like we’re part of the Crossref community because we don’t just use your service; we contribute to it. By providing DOIs and metadata, we’re helping to build the open scholarly record that benefits everyone. Being a part of the Crossref network is more than just being a member—it’s about a shared vision. We see ourselves as active contributors. Every time we register a DOI and provide metadata, we add a new link to the global chain of knowledge. This helps ensure our research can be easily found, cited, and connected to other works, which benefits everyone.” — Nita Nurdiana, Universitas PGRI Palembang

We have very dedicated ambassadors based in Indonesia who advocate for Crossref’s mission, Fauji Nurdin ST. Mudo and Zulidyana Rusnalasari. Each has been instrumental in organising in-person events and webinars for members, as well as in representing Crossref at events throughout the region.

In October, as part of our 25th Anniversary celebration, the ambassadors, with the support of our Sponsor Relawan Jurnal Indonesia (RJI), held a satellite event in Medan, which brought together participants from universities, publishers, government agencies, research institutes, non-governmental organisations, libraries, and museums. It provided a forum for dialogue around key topics in scholarly publishing.

Crossref 25th Anniversary Satellite Event, Medan, October 2025

The majority of members in Indonesia work through one of our regional sponsors. Sponsors provide support to smaller organisations that often face financial, technical, and language barriers, making membership challenging. Their knowledge of the unique needs of their local publishing community and extensive networks help organisations learn more about Crossref in a more accessible way.

Our first sponsor in Indonesia, Relawan Jurnal Indonesia (RJI), joined in 2017; we now have eight sponsors that together support over 3,900 members in Indonesia.

Our sponsors are also key partners in helping us engage with the community, facilitating webinars and supporting our in-person meetings. In August 2024, in collaboration with RJI, we held a two-day in-person event in Jakarta, attended by over 100 members, and joined by our sponsors and ambassadors. Along with discussions on the fundamentals of Crossref and the role of quality metadata, we’ve heard from Ahmad Saefudin Surapermana, a sub-coordinator from ISSN Indonesia. Because so many members in Indonesia use the OJS publishing platform, colleagues from the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) joined us for a session on OJS plugins and an upgrade workshop for OJS system administrators. We continue to receive feedback from members that more regular in-person and online events should be held to facilitate connections and share developments.

Crossref Jakarta, August 2024

While interest in Crossref among this community is ever-growing, there are still painpoints for Indonesian members. Though many join through a Sponsor, some report challenges with metadata deposits, errors, and submission failures, and others struggle to navigate the documentation when technical issues arise. Some members have noted that our metadata requirements can be complex and that they struggle to achieve metadata completeness in their records. These concerns can be particularly challenging for institutions with limited resources.

To provide additional support, we developed a series of webinars in Bahasa Indonesia, covering topics such as using our Participation Reports to assess metadata completeness and workshops on best practices for using OJS. These webinars have been some of the most attended by our members. The strong interest reflects the value these sessions bring to our community, and we continue to receive requests for additional training opportunities. In total, we welcomed 1,044 registrants and 501 attendees across our webinars last year. This level of participation highlights the importance of ongoing training and the enthusiasm of our members to engage, learn, and grow together.

Despite some challenges, many members feel there is significant value in being a Crossref member. Including their metadata in Crossref enhances the visibility and accessibility of their journals globally. Because Crossref provides the infrastructure of persistent identifiers and open metadata, this ensures scholarly outputs are discoverable, connected, and part of a global research record.

“Crossref’s vision of creating open, connected scholarly infrastructure directly supports our university’s core mission of advancing knowledge and research impact. As an academic institution, we rely on Crossref’s DOI system to ensure our faculty publications and institutional repository content remain permanently accessible and properly cited. This infrastructure is essential for maximizing the visibility and impact of our research output, which directly contributes to our university’s reputation and ranking. Additionally, Crossref’s commitment to open scholarly communication aligns with our values of making knowledge freely accessible, supporting our open access initiatives and helping us demonstrate research impact to funding bodies and stakeholders. The persistent linking system also supports our students and researchers in conducting reliable literature reviews and building upon existing scholarship with confidence that their citations will remain valid over time.” — Anggota dari STIS Darul Falah, Indonesia

Ratna Galuh Manika Trisista, from Universitas Islam Jakarta, has also illustrated how joining Crossref and stewardship of rich metadata supports the development of Indonesian journals in her presentation, Our Metadata Story: Improving Citation Visibility through Reference Linking during the Crossref2025 Annual Meeting.

As membership growth in Indonesia continues, we look forward to building relationships within the community, supported by our ambassadors, sponsors, and members’ contributions.

Much of the information in this report comes from a survey sent to our members, sponsors, and ambassadors in Indonesia. We appreciate all the feedback, comments, and suggestions we received, and we look forward to continuing our collaborations and increasing our engagement with the community.

Translation in Bahasa Indonesia

Tahun lalu Crossref merayakan usia ke-25, dan momen ini menjadi kesempatan istimewa untuk menyoroti wilayah-wilayah yang paling aktif dan berperan penting dalam komunitas global Crossref. Salah satunya adalah Indonesia.

Dalam perjalanan 25 tahun tersebut, keanggotaan Crossref telah berkembang pesat. Yang awalnya hanya digagas oleh beberapa penerbit besar, kini Crossref menaungi lebih dari 24.000 anggota dari 165 negara. Menariknya, hampir dua pertiga anggota Crossref saat ini berasal dari perguruan tinggi, perpustakaan, lembaga pemerintah, yayasan, penerbit ilmiah, serta institusi riset, menunjukkan semakin kuatnya peran komunitas akademik dalam ekosistem publikasi global.

Indonesia menjadi wilayah dengan pertumbuhan komunitas paling dinamis di Crossref. Sejak tahun 2017, Indonesia secara konsisten mencatat jumlah anggota baru terbanyak setiap tahunnya. Saat ini, lebih dari 4.400 anggota Crossref berbasis di Indonesia telah mendaftarkan metadata untuk lebih dari 2,6 juta karya ilmiah. Kontribusi ini tidak hanya memperkuat visibilitas riset nasional, tetapi juga menghubungkan pengetahuan yang dihasilkan di Indonesia dengan komunitas ilmiah global.

Pertumbuhan ini tentu tidak terjadi begitu saja. Ia lahir dari kerja kolektif para pengelola jurnal, penerbit perguruan tinggi, editor, dan komunitas akademik di Indonesia yang terus belajar, beradaptasi, dan saling berbagi praktik baik dalam tata kelola publikasi ilmiah. Semakin banyak institusi yang menyadari pentingnya metadata yang berkualitas, transparansi dalam publikasi, serta keterhubungan riset melalui DOI sebagai fondasi visibilitas dan keberlanjutan ilmu pengetahuan.

Di berbagai forum, pelatihan, dan pendampingan komunitas, semangat kolaborasi ini terus tumbuh. Komunitas Crossref di Indonesia tidak hanya berkembang secara kuantitas, tetapi juga menunjukkan peningkatan kualitas dalam pengelolaan metadata, kepatuhan terhadap standar internasional, serta komitmen terhadap praktik publikasi ilmiah yang etis dan terbuka. Inilah yang menjadikan Indonesia bukan sekadar pengguna, melainkan kontributor aktif dalam ekosistem pengetahuan global.

Indonesia juga dikenal sebagai pengguna Open Journal Systems (OJS) terbesar di dunia, dengan hampir 20.000 jurnal yang dikelola dan diterbitkan melalui platform ini. Sebagian besar jurnal tersebut diterbitkan oleh perguruan tinggi, lembaga riset, dan instansi pemerintah, yang menunjukkan kuatnya peran institusi akademik dan publik dalam ekosistem publikasi ilmiah nasional.

Budaya publikasi ilmiah di Indonesia sangat erat kaitannya dengan dunia pendidikan tinggi. Kebijakan Kementerian Pendidikan Tinggi, Sains, dan Teknologi mewajibkan mahasiswa untuk mempublikasikan hasil penelitiannya sebagai salah satu syarat kelulusan. Untuk menjawab kebutuhan tersebut sekaligus menyediakan ruang publikasi yang inklusif dan mudah diakses, banyak universitas dan fakultas di Indonesia membentuk serta mengelola jurnal ilmiah mereka sendiri sebagai wadah bagi karya mahasiswa.

Sebagian besar jurnal di Indonesia terindeks dalam SINTA (Science and Technology Index) yang dikelola oleh Kementerian Pendidikan Tinggi, Sains, dan Teknologi (MoHEST). SINTA bertujuan untuk meningkatkan kualitas jurnal, memfasilitasi proses penilaian, serta mendorong daya saing jurnal ilmiah Indonesia. Dalam konteks ini, penggunaan DOI menjadi salah satu persyaratan penting agar jurnal dapat terindeks di platform tersebut.

Para anggota Crossref di Indonesia memahami pentingnya persistent identifiers untuk memastikan keberlanjutan dan keterlacakan karya ilmiah mereka. Namun, semakin banyak pula yang menyadari nilai lebih dari komitmen Crossref terhadap metadata terbuka dan rekam jejak ilmiah yang terbuka. Menjadi anggota Crossref bukan sekadar memenuhi kewajiban teknis, melainkan juga menjadi bagian dari komunitas global yang lebih besar. Meski DOI dibutuhkan untuk kepentingan pengindeksan nasional, banyak organisasi memilih bergabung dengan Crossref demi meningkatkan visibilitas global konten mereka—dan pada akhirnya, memperluas dampak dari publikasi yang dihasilkan.

“Kami merasa menjadi bagian dari komunitas Crossref karena kami tidak hanya menggunakan layanannya, tetapi juga berkontribusi di dalamnya. Melalui pendaftaran DOI dan penyediaan metadata, kami ikut membangun rekam jejak keilmuan terbuka yang bermanfaat bagi semua. Menjadi bagian dari jejaring Crossref bukan sekadar status keanggotaan—ini adalah tentang visi bersama. Kami melihat diri kami sebagai kontributor aktif. Setiap kali mendaftarkan DOI dan metadata, kami menambahkan satu mata rantai baru dalam jejaring pengetahuan global. Hal ini memastikan riset kami dapat ditemukan, disitasi, dan terhubung dengan karya lain, sehingga memberi manfaat bagi semua pihak.” — Nita Nurdiana, Universitas PGRI Palembang

Semangat kontribusi ini juga diperkuat oleh peran para ambassador Crossref di Indonesia yang dengan penuh dedikasi mengadvokasi misi Crossref. Fauji Nurdin ST. Mudo dan Zulidyana Rusnalasari telah menjadi penggerak penting dalam penyelenggaraan berbagai kegiatan, mulai dari acara luring hingga webinar untuk para anggota, sekaligus mewakili Crossref dalam beragam forum di berbagai wilayah Indonesia.

Pada bulan Oktober lalu, sebagai bagian dari perayaan ulang tahun ke-25 Crossref, para ambassador ini—dengan dukungan sponsor dari Relawan Jurnal Indonesia (RJI)—menyelenggarakan sebuah acara satelit di Medan. Kegiatan ini mempertemukan peserta dari perguruan tinggi, penerbit, instansi pemerintah, lembaga riset, organisasi non-pemerintah, perpustakaan, hingga museum. Acara tersebut menjadi ruang dialog yang hidup untuk membahas isu-isu kunci dalam dunia publikasi ilmiah dan memperkuat jejaring kolaborasi lintas sektor.

Crossref 25th Anniversary Satellite Event, Medan, October 2025

Sebagian besar anggota Crossref di Indonesia bergabung dan beraktivitas melalui sponsor regional. Para sponsor ini berperan penting dalam mendampingi organisasi-organisasi kecil yang kerap menghadapi berbagai tantangan—mulai dari keterbatasan finansial, kendala teknis, hingga hambatan bahasa—yang membuat proses keanggotaan menjadi tidak selalu mudah. Dengan pemahaman yang kuat terhadap kebutuhan khas komunitas penerbitan lokal serta jejaring yang luas, para sponsor membantu organisasi mengenal dan memanfaatkan Crossref dengan cara yang lebih ramah dan mudah diakses.

Sponsor pertama Crossref di Indonesia, Relawan Jurnal Indonesia (RJI), bergabung pada tahun 2017. Hingga kini, Indonesia telah memiliki delapan sponsor yang secara kolektif mendukung lebih dari 3.900 anggota di seluruh Indonesia. Peran ini menjadikan para sponsor sebagai tulang punggung pertumbuhan dan keberlanjutan komunitas Crossref di tanah air.

Lebih dari sekadar pendamping teknis, para sponsor juga menjadi mitra strategis dalam membangun keterlibatan komunitas—mulai dari memfasilitasi webinar hingga mendukung pertemuan luring. Pada Agustus 2024, misalnya, Crossref bekerja sama dengan RJI menyelenggarakan acara luring selama dua hari di Jakarta, yang dihadiri oleh lebih dari 100 anggota. Selain diskusi mengenai dasar-dasar Crossref dan pentingnya metadata berkualitas, kegiatan ini juga menghadirkan Ahmad Saefudin Surapermana dari ISSN Indonesia, serta para sponsor dan ambassador Crossref. Mengingat banyaknya anggota di Indonesia yang menggunakan platform OJS, rekan-rekan dari Public Knowledge Project (PKP) turut bergabung untuk memberikan sesi khusus tentang plugin OJS serta lokakarya peningkatan versi bagi para administrator sistem OJS. Hingga kini, Crossref terus menerima masukan dari para anggota bahwa kegiatan luring dan daring yang lebih rutin sangat dibutuhkan—tidak hanya untuk memperkuat jejaring, tetapi juga untuk berbagi perkembangan terbaru dalam dunia publikasi ilmiah.

Crossref Jakarta, August 2024

Seiring dengan meningkatnya minat komunitas ini terhadap Crossref, masih terdapat sejumlah tantangan (pain points) yang dirasakan oleh anggota di Indonesia. Meskipun banyak yang bergabung melalui sponsor, sebagian anggota melaporkan kendala dalam proses deposit metadata, munculnya error, hingga kegagalan pengiriman data. Ada pula yang merasa kesulitan menavigasi dokumentasi teknis ketika menghadapi permasalahan sistem. Beberapa anggota juga menilai bahwa persyaratan metadata Crossref cukup kompleks, sehingga mereka mengalami tantangan dalam mencapai kelengkapan metadata pada rekaman mereka. Kondisi ini tentu menjadi lebih berat bagi institusi dengan sumber daya yang terbatas.

Untuk memberikan dukungan tambahan, Crossref kemudian mengembangkan rangkaian webinar dalam Bahasa Indonesia, yang membahas topik-topik praktis seperti pemanfaatan Participation Reports untuk menilai kelengkapan metadata, serta lokakarya praktik terbaik dalam penggunaan OJS. Webinar-webinar ini menjadi salah satu kegiatan dengan tingkat kehadiran tertinggi. Minat yang kuat mencerminkan nilai yang dibawa sesi ini bagi komunitas kami, dan Crossref terus menerima permintaan untuk pelatihan tambahan. Secara keseluruhan, kami menyambut 1.044 pendaftar dan 501 peserta dalam webinar sepanjang tahun 2025. Tingkat partisipasi ini menegaskan pentingnya pelatihan berkelanjutan serta antusiasme anggota kami untuk terlibat, belajar, dan berkembang bersama.

Di balik berbagai tantangan tersebut, banyak anggota tetap merasakan nilai strategis dari keanggotaan Crossref. Penyertaan metadata jurnal ke dalam Crossref secara signifikan meningkatkan visibilitas dan aksesibilitas jurnal Indonesia di tingkat global. Melalui infrastruktur persistent identifiers dan metadata terbuka yang disediakan Crossref, keluaran ilmiah menjadi lebih mudah ditemukan, saling terhubung, dan tercatat sebagai bagian dari rekam jejak riset global.

“Visi Crossref dalam membangun infrastruktur keilmuan yang terbuka dan saling terhubung sangat mendukung misi utama universitas kami dalam memajukan pengetahuan dan dampak riset. Sebagai institusi akademik, kami mengandalkan sistem DOI Crossref untuk memastikan publikasi dosen dan konten repositori institusi kami tetap dapat diakses secara permanen dan disitasi dengan tepat. Infrastruktur ini sangat penting untuk memaksimalkan visibilitas dan dampak luaran riset kami, yang secara langsung berkontribusi pada reputasi dan peringkat universitas. Selain itu, komitmen Crossref terhadap komunikasi ilmiah terbuka sejalan dengan nilai-nilai kami dalam membuka akses pengetahuan seluas-luasnya, mendukung inisiatif open access, serta membantu kami menunjukkan dampak riset kepada lembaga pendanaan dan para pemangku kepentingan. Sistem keterhubungan yang berkelanjutan ini juga mendukung mahasiswa dan peneliti kami dalam melakukan tinjauan pustaka yang andal, dengan keyakinan bahwa sitasi yang digunakan akan tetap valid dalam jangka panjang.”
— Anggota dari STIS Darul Falah, Indonesia

Pengalaman serupa juga disampaikan oleh Ratna Galuh Manika Trisista dari Universitas Islam Jakarta, yang memaparkan bagaimana keikutsertaan di Crossref dan pengelolaan metadata yang kaya dapat mendukung pengembangan jurnal Indonesia. Hal ini ia sampaikan dalam presentasinya berjudul “Our Metadata Story: Improving Citation Visibility through Reference Linking” pada Crossref Annual Meeting 2025. Seiring pertumbuhan keanggotaan Crossref di Indonesia yang terus berlanjut, kami menantikan penguatan relasi dengan komunitas—dengan dukungan para ambassador, sponsor, serta kontribusi aktif dari para anggota itu sendiri.

Sebagian besar informasi dalam laporan ini bersumber dari survei yang dikirimkan kepada anggota, sponsor, dan ambassador Crossref di Indonesia. Kami sangat menghargai seluruh umpan balik, komentar, dan saran yang telah diberikan, dan berharap dapat terus melanjutkan kolaborasi serta meningkatkan keterlibatan bersama komunitas di masa mendatang.

The GEM program - Year Three and program expansion for 2026

Susan Collins — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

As Crossref membership continues to grow, finding ways to help organisations participate is an important part of our mission. Although Crossref membership is open to all organisations that produce scholarly and professional materials, cost and technical challenges can be barriers to joining for many.

Our Global Equitable Membership (GEM) Program aims to provide greater membership equity and accessibility to organisations in the world’s least economically advantaged countries. Eligible members pay no membership or record registration fees. Eligibility for the program is based on a member’s country. Seeing its effectiveness in increasing participation in the research nexus from previously underrepresented regions, this year we are expanding the GEM program to include 18 new countries.

Overview of the first 3 years of GEM

The program began in January 2023 with 214 existing members. By the end of 2025, we had 628 organisations under the GEM program. Of these, 535 are independent members, and 89 members work through one of our sponsors. To date, GEM program members have contributed approximately 334,000 works to the Research Nexus.

Global equitable membership	2023	2024	2025
New members joining	129	127	151
Total member count	327	458	628

Total number of Crossref GEM members by country until the end of 2025:

GEM country – alphabetically	Total no. of members	GEM country – alphabetically	Total no. of members
Afghanistan	29	Malawi	2
Bangladesh	167	Maldives	4
Benin	6	Mali	4
Bhutan	6	Marshall Islands	0
Burkina Faso	7	Mauritania	1
Burundi	3	Micronesia	0
Cambodia	14	Mozambique	2
Central African Republic	1	Myanmar	3
Chad	0	Nepal	60
Comoros	1	Nicaragua	2
Congo, Democratic Republic	24	Niger	0
Côte d’Ivoire	3	Rwanda	9
Djibouti	0	Samoa	0
Eritrea	0	São Tomé and Principe	0
Ethiopia	17	Senegal	7
Gambia	0	Sierra Leone	2
Ghana	38	Solomon Islands	0
Guinea	0	Somalia	10
Guinea-Bissau	0	South Sudan	0
Guyana	3	Sri Lanka	31
Haiti	2	Sudan	14
Honduras	3	Tajikistan	8
Kiribati	0	Tanzania, United Republic of	28
Kosovo	9	Togo	1
Kyrgyz Republic	27	Tonga	0
Lao, People’s Democratic Rep.	5	Tuvalu	0
Lesotho	0	Uganda	23
Liberia	1	Vanuatu	0
Madagascar	5	Yemen	37
		Zambia	8

Membership Density in GEM Program Countries until the end of 2025

Program expansion in 2026

Starting on 1st of January 2026, we’re excited to invite organisations from Angola, Belize, Cabo Verde, Cameroon, Republic of Congo, Dominica, Eswatini, Fiji, Grenada, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Timor Leste, and Uzbekistan to join Crossref and register their content and metadata with us without membership or record registration fees. There are 711 existing Crossref members based in these countries who are now eligible for the program, bringing the overall number of GEM members to 1339 across 77 countries (that’s close to 5% of all Crossref members).

In creating our eligibility list, we refer to existing sources. For the first three years of the program, our list was predominantly based on the World Bank’s International Development Association (IDA) classification. In 2026, we leveraged additional sources to curate our list, resulting in the inclusion of 18 new countries in the program. Following community feedback, we now refer to the IDA, the IDA Blend List, and the United Nations Least Developed Countries list. In our choices, we also keep abreast of the global situation and conversations about supporting equitability in scholarly publishing and in the future, we may consider other factors too.

We will review our lists and the eligibility criteria annually and note any changes on our website. Members whose country moves on or off the GEM Program will be notified of any upcoming fees (or the removal of fees) with adequate time to plan and budget accordingly. Although the GEM program reduces financial barriers, many small organisations may still need administrative, technical, and language support provided by our Sponsors, and we will continue working with suitable organisations to make participation in Crossref easier.

Highlights of a very busy year: our 2025 annual report

Ginny Hendricks — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Read on for the highlights of a very busy year, grouped around our four strategic themes.

Strategic theme 1: Contribute to an environment where the community identifies and co-creates solutions for broad benefit

Enhanced tools and services

In October, we released an enhanced Participation Reports dashboard that shows metadata coverage across all 180 million records and provides individual member organisations with actionable gap reports to guide them to improve metadata completeness. The new tool provides more complete coverage of all members and resource types, now including funders and grants, with up to 11 best-practice metadata elements publicly tracked.

We launched support for journal articles in the New Metadata Manager record registration form (initially only for grants), which includes built-in reference and relationships deposit capabilities. In the New Metadata Manager, it’s now also possible to search for previously registered DOIs to edit your metadata records. In the coming years, we are planning to expand the new Metadata Manager to support all the many different content types that you can register with Crossref DOIs.

After a long break between regular updates, we have fixed our process for and just released v.1.63 of the Open Funder registry. With the updated process, we’re now able to resume more frequent updates to the registry (while of course still working towards the transition to ROR for funders).

Throughout 2025, we conducted a website information architecture review to improve the information we provide to our members and the wider community. Based on the recommendations from this review, we will be renewing our website and documentation in 2026.

Deprecations and modernisation

‘Old’ Metadata Manager is to be retired at the end of 2025, with users transitioning to the ‘New’ version or to our other helper tools for registering and updating DOIs. All users have been contacted during 2025 and received training on how to use the New Metadata Manager.

We also announced the deprecation of Co-access, which will end in 2026, bringing an end to the service that allowed duplicate DOIs for book content. Users of co-access have been informed and are in the process of transitioning to multiple resolution.

Together with Turnitin and our members, we are working to transition all subscribers to our Similarity Check service to a new version of iThenticate 2.0. We are happy to report that all platforms with integrations with us transitioned to 2.0 during 2025, and we will continue working with our members to get everyone transitioned during 2026.

Eating our own DOI dogfood

In June this year, we were particularly pleased to finally support the registration of DOIs for our own content, this very blog, through partnering with Rogue Scholar. Blogs are a growing format for scholarly discourse and our own blog is no different as it’s the main way that we share guidelines and best practices, as well as news and stories from the scholarly community. With a Crossref DOI for all blogs going back to 2006, we’re setting ourselves up to ensure better future preservation of the discussion and information about Crossref.

Community connections

We delivered 29 metadata health-check webinars over the course of the year, in French, Indonesian, Spanish, and English, reaching 2,166 participants with practical advice on identifying gaps in journal metadata using Participation Reports.

Crossref Accra took place in March as our first in-person event in a GEM country. We also held similar events in Ecuador and Türkiye with Crossref Quito in September and Crossref Ankara in November. At these three events, we welcomed key figures from each country’s library, government, publishing, and academic communities and we learned so much about the thriving communities there, and also that even more dedicated workshops on the specifics of metadata quality improvements would be appreciated.

Our metadata sprint in Madrid in April brought together community members to tackle specific problems collaboratively, with teams exploring coding, documentation, translation, and research using our open metadata. We’re already planning our next sprint in São Paulo for March 2026, and it will be held in three languages: Portuguese, Spanish, and English.

A strategic goal for Crossref is to grow research funders’ adoption of the Grant Linking System, and we produced the first in a series of interviews with funder members this year to highlight how and why Crossref DOIs are fulfilling goals to assess the reach and return of their research support for FWF (Austria), NWO (Netherlands), FCCN|FCT (Portugal), and Wellcome. This year, we welcomed more funders including Fonds de recherche du Québec (Canada) and Independent Research Fund Denmark as part of their national research platform NORA; we look forward to reporting on their experiences and outcomes next year and others as they work towards Crossref Grant DOI adoption.

We continued working closely with PKP and renewed our partnership to help drive better experience for OJS users registering metadata with Crossref. We also delivered a proportion of the metadata health-checks together to maximise the learning opportunities for our members using OJS; and we joined PKP’s Sprint in Oslo to help make improvements to OJS and OMP.

Crossref staff members serve on almost 50 committees, boards, and other community bodies alongside our own direct work. These include in the areas of research integrity, metascience, metadata and PID standards, open science policy or monitoring, development of new models (such as Diamond OA), editorial production, library and institutional publishing, and citation and other metadata analyses. We also work with other DOI Registration Agencies and support the sustainability of the DOI Foundation with an additional annual subsidy. Many DOI RAs are also Crossref Sponsors so that their members can access our unique reference matching service. While we often might advise, we also learn a huge amount from collaborating with the numerous systems and initiatives that make up the wider research community.

Our involvement with developing the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information led us to become the fiscal host and to participate in most of the working groups on open metadata. Of particular note this year was the Funding Metadata Working Group round table about moving forward the state of funding metadata, which we co-hosted with Barcelona Declaration colleagues, and three funding bodies, NWO (Netherlands), FWF (Austria), and ANR (France) as we heard from publishers and their vendors about challenges and how to overcome them to increase the quantity and quality of available open funding metadata.

All our community engagement activities have been enthusiastically supported and enriched by our indispensable Ambassadors and our group of now 130 Sponsors, organisations that help thousands of Crossref members with local language and technical support and lower cost access to our membership.

Strategic theme 2: A sustainable source of complete, open, and global scholarly metadata and relationships

Schema developments

The grant schema version 0.2.0 was released in January, adding support for ROR identifiers to identify funders and new funding types for in our taxonomy, including APC, BPC, and infrastructure. All of these funding types can be specified in the metadata of our grant-giving members alongside the existing types such as use of facilities or salary/training awards, etc.

Version 5.4 of our publications schema was released in March, marking our first update in many years and a great opportunity to learn how to do this and make the process more efficient. This release introduced typed references to denote the type of object referenced (dataset, blog, software, etc.), preprint status indicators, and version numbering.

Just last week, we also added a dedicated field for grant DOIs to our publications schema. This means it’s now possible to indicate in an article’s metadata which grant(s) funded the research using the persistent identifier. This is an essential step toward better alignment between grant funding and research, enriching the Research Nexus.

We also launched our new Metadata Advisory Group and they have already devised sub-working groups in three focus topic areas:

Multilingual metadata
Subjects and keywords
Relationships

Public data file

We released the 2025 public data file in March, containing metadata for (at the time) over 165 million research outputs from more than 22,000 organisations.

Inaugural Metadata Awards

In May, we launched the first-ever Metadata Awards to recognise members demonstrating excellence in metadata completeness and enrichment. Winners included Noyam Publishers (Ghana), GigaScience Press (Hong Kong), eLife (UK), American Society for Microbiology (USA), Universidad La Salle Arequipa (Peru), and Instituto Geologico y Minero de España (Spain). The awards will be held biennially going forward.

Metadata Matching project

In April, we launched the metadata matching project with the aim of building a more complete picture of the research nexus over time by automatically identifying missing relationships between entities across the scholarly record. The project’s goal is to modernise Crossref’s enrichment workflows by rebuilding them using modern software development and data science practices.

We are in the throws of developing a consolidated matching workflow that will eventually replace all existing production matching processes, with results exposed through the REST API. All new matching strategies will be rigorously evaluated, and the resulting data will be accompanied by clear provenance information. This project covers six matching tasks:

bibliographic reference matching
funder name matching
preprint matching
affiliation matching
grant matching
title matching

In the meantime, while work continues on integrating matching results into the REST API, we’ve been releasing standalone matching datasets for separate download and analysis. These include relationships between preprints and journal articles, relationships involving research organisations, and relationships between grants and research outputs.

Data infrastructure and Research Nexus participation dashboard

Staying on the data science front, we’ve established an internal data environment that combines all relevant data sources (scholarly metadata, logs and usage data, and external datasets) in their raw forms into a single place. This environment is supported by a suite of modern tools and data processing techniques, enabling data science experiments and analytics pipelines to run effectively at scale.

Building on this foundation, we plan to develop a series of dashboards to monitor the state of the scholarly record over time. These dashboards will feature both work-level and member-level statistics (for example, how many works of a given type have been registered, or how many members are registering grant IDs) as well as more detailed insights at the relationship level (for example, how many bibliographic references have been automatically matched, or how many times ROR IDs are included in funder assertions). Some of these statistics are already available in a public spreadsheet for now, pending the dashboard.

Retraction Watch integration

In 2023, Crossref acquired the Retraction Watch database to make it open data. Initially, this was done through sharing simple CSV files, but this year we have set up a pipeline to feed this information into our REST API, which means that Retraction Watch data is now fully available through the REST API, integrated with Crossref member-supplied retraction and correction metadata. This is the first example of Crossref integrating third-party metadata, and we’re learning a lot about how to best incorporate other datasets in future.

Metadata API and services improvements

From 1 December 2025, we revised rate limits for the REST API to ensure system stability whilst maintaining free access to metadata for everyone. Changes were made to the rate limits for our ‘public’ and ‘polite’ APIs, while the limits for our Metadata Plus users stayed the same. We continue to make all metadata openly available to the whole community.

We also improved how information from our content system feeds into the REST API. A tool we call ‘pusher’—because it pushes information from the content system to the REST API—was rebuilt so that we now have a more reliable transfer of information between our two systems.

While adding to technical improvements, we’ve also worked to better understand the use of and streamline the service offering for paid options. We’ll share more about this year’s Metadata Plus consultation soon. And based on feedback, we have already retired the ‘Query Affiliate’ service, where a handful of organisations still paid us a fee to access our XML API, whereas no credentials have been required for some time.

Strategic theme 3: Manage Crossref openly and sustainably, modernising and making transparent all operations so that we are accountable to the communities that govern us

Infrastructure modernisation

One of our biggest projects of 2025—if not the biggest—was the move from our data centre into the cloud (AWS). For 25 years, Crossref had been running a physical data centre in Massachusetts, USA, but as part of modernising our systems, it was high time to move everything into the cloud. The move to AWS took several months, but we successfully completed this move to the cloud in July this year. We’re spending these last weeks of 2025 fully decommissioning our data centre, which means that we are removing all the equipment we had there and locking the door for the last time.

A part of the move to AWS included moving onto an open-source database solution, PostgreSQL. This reduced our reliance on closed, costly licensed solutions, while also aligning with our POSI commitment to open-source. Running our entire system in AWS provides a more stable, modern approach to our infrastructure, but it also is expensive. We expect to spend about 2 million USD on AWS fees next year, with the majority of this cost coming from REST API usage. Some of the improvements described above will help us manage those costs and better observe traffic patterns.

Our new cloud infrastructure is a bittersweet milestone: while we are happy to not have to rely on a physical presence to support a 24/7 global infrastructure, we also say a sad farewell to our much-loved and long-suffering Sys Admin, Tim Pickard, who has been with Crossref since 2002, and has contributed significantly and unwaveringly to keeping our system up and running in the data centre. Tim will be leaving Crossref at the end of the year; we’re grateful to Tim for all his years of dedication, and we will greatly miss his impressive Hawaiian shirt game on our all-staff calls.

After 25 years, it was also time to get serious about modernising our core content system, because even though it serves our community well, an older system with legacy code is a constant risk and frustration. We’ve therefore embarked on a multi-year modernisation project where we are replacing our old code piece by piece. We no longer want to have one big content system (a monolith), but are planning to identify different pieces of functionality and rebuild these as separate services (a modular, flexible, and robust approach). This year, we already managed to reconstruct some smaller pieces (for example, the ‘pusher’ mentioned above), and next year we will tackle larger projects, such as Metadata Matching and Authentication.

We continue to prioritise open, timely communication for planned or unplanned service interruptions and encourage everyone to monitor our status page at status.crossref.org. We’ll further hone our incident response processes in 2026, including openly posting incident reviews, and we’ll also centre system maintenance and documentation clarity in everything we do.

RCFS Projects

The Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability projects (RCFS) and the work of our Membership & Fees Committee resulted in deciding not to change some things (such as the basis for annual membership fees), but to change three things about our fees, as reported in July:

A new lower membership fee tier of 200 USD for members with annual revenues/expenses of under 1000 USD - so far, this includes around 3000 members. See below for more info.
A removal of volume discounts to reduce complexity in our billing code; they were little used, and those who did use these were fine with the loss of the discount.
A removal of the rule that only publishers of a title could register peer review reports (including comments and annotations) at the lower 0.25 USD fee for the first review; this lower fee is now available to any member to register any reviews of any other members’ works.

A new late-breaking addition to these fee decisions is the reduction of fees for members registering grants. As of January 1st 2026, there will be no fee for back-year (BY) grant registration, to encourage the faster adoption of older grants, which are more likely to have research outputs to be matched. This will be a two-year pilot to trial how a reduced fee incentivises adoption and boosts metadata connections, and could be extended to other record types as we monitor its success and sustainability. In addition, the 2 USD fee per current-year (CY) grant record is being reduced to 1 USD in line with the next-nearest fee, this is a permanent change for the foreseeable future.

Membership growth, efficiencies, and accessibility

In March, the board voted to update membership terms and bylaws to clarify processes for suspending and revoking membership, and to be more explicit about member practices that preserve the integrity of the scholarly record. A short-term Member Practices Working Group will be meeting in the first half of 2026 to draft these.

Crossref now serves 23,600 members across 164 countries, with continued growth particularly in Asia and Latin America. We’ve continued our ongoing member onboarding activities to support new members joining the community. We see around 230 new members join each month, and have welcomed 2,700 this year so far. We recently reported on how the shape of membership has evolved over our 25 years of operation.

From January 2026, we’re introducing a new lower membership fee tier of 200 USD for organisations with annual revenue or expenses of 1,000 USD or less, making membership more accessible to low-resourced organisations. Already, over 3000 members have been eligible to move into or join under that fee, and the idea is to monitor how this affects Crossref’s financial sustainability and potentially adjust the 200 USD annual fee down again in future years.

From 1 January 2026, the GEM program, which offers fee-free membership and content registration for all members from certain countries, will expand to include 18 additional countries, further reducing financial barriers to participation in the scholarly record, so we expect several hundred further members to join the existing 600 organisations in this category. More information about the GEM program expansion here.

As our membership base continues to grow, the Membership and Finance teams are constantly exploring ways to make shared processes more efficient. A key component in this work has been the efforts to automate several tasks within both teams to help us manage the additional work caused by our growth and allow our teams to focus more on providing the best quality service we can.

Our membership team continues to support our members, sponsors, service providers, metadata users and the wider community by email and through our community forum. The membership team includes staff members who focus on member support, and staff members who focus on technical support. During 2025 so far, we’ve received 36.8k member enquiries through our support system, a 17% increase from last year. This includes 22.6k inquiries related to general membership and 13k technical support enquiries. We’ve received 3.8k membership applications, and welcomed 2.7k new members.

Growth by the numbers

Crossref continues its steady revenue growth in 2025 due to the expansion of our membership base. With the addition of new members and the general growth of Crossref, comes an increase in the transaction-based tasks our Finance team handles.

So far in 2025 we have issued 14,833 invoices, which is a 9% increase since last year. We’ve seen an 11% increase in the number of payments received and applied, and a 12% increase in the amount of credit and debit memos applied over the same time last year. We have also seen a 42% increase in the number of billing-related tickets, totalling 20,723. A large segment of these tickets are related to fee updates associated with the new $200 membership tier.

Not all transactional work in Finance has increased as steadily, with increased revenue of 8% we have also seen a 14% increase in operating expenses. Through the strategic consolidation of vendors and use of financial tools, we have only seen a 1% increase in Accounts Payable invoices processed.

Organisational sustainability

Finance-wise, we’re doing well. We’re projecting to finish this year with revenue of 14,200,000 USD and expect revenue next year of 14,500,000 USD. We’re budgeting 2% growth in overall revenue, accounting for some of the changes to fees that will reduce our earnings on membership dues, but anticipating continued growth of content registration revenue.

Revenue and expenses trends

About 67% of our expenses come from personnel costs, and the other 33% include non-personnel costs like AWS, travel, legal fees, etc. As we continue to build out the team, we have ten new positions planned for the next year (recruitment for many of these is already underway or done). With additional staff roles and AWS expenses, we’re expecting expense growth of 16%. We post our financial statements and Form 990 filings on the financials page on our website.

Revenue per member size (by tier)

As the chart above shows, we still see ’the long tail’ of smaller members in the lowest fee category (275 USD) contributing more revenue than those in the largest category (50,000 USD) at 5.8 million USD versus 5 million USD.

Another aspect of sustainability is our impact on the world around us. And this year we were able to publish a second report on Crossref’s carbon footprint, having monitored and controlled for several carbon-heavy activities, primarily staff travel. Our reported emissions went up 40% from 2023 to 2024, due to more travel given our growth in staff and members, better recording our emissions (for example, with hotel stays), and including travel that we support for our partners, ambassadors and board members. In terms of travel spending, we are still well below 2019 when we were smaller, demonstrating that we are following through on not going back to the pre-pandemic norm.

We were one of the first open infrastructure organisations to adopt the POSI Principles and now have a few years’ experience in trying to meet them. Together with other adopters, we proposed updates and additions to the principles, based on real-world practice, and gathered a lot of community comment, resulting in the group publishing POSI v2 in October. We conduct a self-assessment every other year and we’ll be involving all our staff in the next self-assessment, due later in 2026.

Open governance through board election and annual meeting

We continued our commitment to being member-led and community-driven. This year’s anniversary Annual Meeting in October brought together members to discuss strategy, metadata developments, and hear the results of their voting in our board election. It comprised two half-days of online conferencing and several in-person satellite meetings spread across five continents, gathering close to 500 members of our community. It was a platform to reflect together on the past quarter of the century of building community infrastructure and connections underpinning the progress of scholarship, and to share plans for the future.

Each member has one vote, and together they elected the following organisations to serve a three-year term alongside the rest of the board:

Tier 1 candidates (electing one seat):

Rebecca Wambua, Distance, Open and e-Learning Practitioners’ Association of Kenya

Tier 2 candidates (electing four seats):

Damian Bird, CABI
Rose L’Huillier, Elsevier*
Anjalie Nawaratne, Springer Nature*
Nick Lindsay, The MIT Press*

*returning board member

Congratulations to the remaining and incoming board members as we start their new term in January 2026. Have a look at all the outputs from our Annual Meeting.

Strategic theme 4: Foster a strong team—because reliable infrastructure needs committed people who contribute to and realise the vision, and thrive doing it

Team structure

We reorganised the team heading into 2025 because we had ambitious goals that required a more structured, collaborative approach. We reorganised the work around three strategic, mission-driven areas of focus described above. This was our first full year with the cross-functional program groups in place, and the activities reported here make it evident that our team members, both existing and new, are firing on all cylinders.

New staff and new roles

We welcomed eight new team members in 2025. In February, we welcomed our new Director of Programs & Services, Helena Cousijn, and a new member of the Technical Support team, Arley Soto. In March, we welcomed our new Community Manager for funders, Rocío Gaudioso Pedraza. In April, we launched our new Data Science team by welcoming Jason Portenoy and Alex Bédard-Vallée. In November, we welcomed our new DevOps Engineer, Thelma Laryea, and our new Program Technical Lead for the OSO program, Bharath Govindarajan. In December, we welcomed another member of the Technical Support team, Natali Giorgobiani.

We also had team members step up into new roles. Dominika Tkaczyk completed the new leadership team by taking on the Director of Technology role, Paul Davis has started his new role as Product Manager, and Michelle Cancel has taken on the Head of Human Resources role. And there’s more to come! As next year begins, two team members will step into Program Technical Lead roles: Carlos del Ojo Elias for the CRN program and Patrick Vale for the CCT program. Together with the Program Technical Lead for the OSO program and the Head of Infrastructure Services, these roles will complete the new structure of the technology team. This structure is more closely aligned with how our work is organised and will enable stronger coordination both within and across cross-functional programs.

Supporting a thriving global culture

As our team grows in different aspects within our new org structure to meet the needs of the community, we remain committed to supporting a thriving culture through training, conducting regular temperature checks, and organising our annual staff retreat. This year, we continued our work on psychological safety and introduced workshops on giving and receiving feedback and on consensus building. We were able to put some of this training into practice at our in-person all-staff event in Split, Croatia, where we all came together to build our roadmap.

We are ending the year with 51 staff in 14 countries and look forward to diversifying and evolving even further as a team in 2026—we’re currently hiring in UX, Communications, and Membership—and keep an eye on our jobs page for forthcoming opportunities in Software, DevOps, Metadata, and Operations!

Thank you to our community of members, partners, board, ambassadors, sponsors, metadata users, service providers, integrators—and of course our team—for making 2025 such a productive year. Together, we’re building a richer, more connected research ecosystem for the benefit of society. We can’t wait to continue the work together in 2026.

Some things are big because they are small – the new fee tier for Crossref members takes effect

Kornelia Korzec — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Haz clic aquí para ver la versión en español

In January 2026, our new annual membership fee tier takes effect. The new tier is US$200 for member organisations that operate on publishing revenue or expenses (whichever is higher) of up to US$1,000 annually. We announced the Board’s decision, making it possible in July, and––as you can infer from Amanda’s latest blog––this is the first such change to the annual membership fee tiers in close to 20 years!

The new fee tier resulted from the consultation process and fees review undertaken as part of the Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability program, carried out with the help of our Membership and Fees Committee (made up of representatives from member organisations and community partners). The program is ongoing, and the new fee tier, intended to make Crossref membership more accessible, is one of the first changes it helped us determine.

When our membership renewal invoices are sent out in January 2026, the new fee tier will apply to 3,194 of our existing members, who will receive annual membership invoices 27% lower than previously. Surveys preceding the introduction of the new fee tier have shown that it might be applicable to between 30-60% of the organisations in what used to be our lowest fee tier (US$275 fee for organisations with publishing revenue or expenses of up to US$1 million).

We received positive feedback from members affected by the change.

We are very grateful for the new lowest membership fee tier. The Crossref fee is indeed a significant expense for our organisation, but we accept it given its importance. This new fee structure will make it easier for us to cover the cost.” – said Marina Pérez, Análisis Filosófico.

This initiative by Crossref to reduce membership fees is a welcome step toward achieving a truly global and connected research ecosystem. This will undoubtedly help our journal’s mission in fostering inclusive, open, and accessible publishing.” – said Dev Roychowdhury, Journal of Psychological Experience.

Following the feedback provided in the consultations and a number of prompts over the months after the original announcement, our Membership Team gathered information necessary to transition 3,194 members into the new fee tier. That’s 14.5% of all Crossref members (please note that in the graph below the number of members in $200 tier is higher due to recent influx of new members who didn’t need to transition, further – “$0” denotes all our sponsored members, who don’t pay membership fees to us, and those included in the GEM program).

Any members out there who think their organisation should be moved to the new lowest membership fee tier and haven’t already informed us – please contact us as soon as possible, before the end of the year, so we can make the change before invoices are raised in January.

We know – from speaking with our community (and thank you SO MUCH, for everyone’s feedback in surveys and discussions!) that this change makes participation in Crossref more accessible to smaller organisations communicating research. This will result in a continued flow of new records and associated metadata into the research nexus, helping us to make it easier to find and assess research, achieve greater transparency in the scientific process, and continue building trust in its outputs.

We’re not done reviewing our fees, and we don’t think the new fee tier addresses all the needs of the growing and evolving scholarly community. We continue working with Sponsors and Ambassadors, and we have upcoming changes to the Global Equitable Membership program to facilitate participation by all types and sizes of organisations sharing research.

Version in Español

Algunas cosas son grandes porque son pequeñas: la nueva tarifa para los miembros de Crossref entra en vigencia

En enero de 2026 entrará en vigencia nuestra nueva tarifa anual. Será de 200 dólares americanos (US$) para las organizaciones miembro que operen con ingresos o gastos editoriales de hasta 1000 US$ al año. Tras anunciar esta decisión de la Junta Directiva, se hizo realidad en julio y, como se puede inferir del último blog de Amanda, este es el primer cambio en las tarifas anuales de membresía en casi 20 años.

Esta nueva tarifa fue resultado de consultas y revisiones de tarifas que hicimos y que hacen parte del programa de financiación para la sostenibilidad a futuro de Crossref y que fue elaborada con la ayuda del comité de membresía y tarifas (compuesto por miembros representantes y aliados de la comunidad). El programa sigue en curso y la nueva tarifa, pensada para hacer más accesible la membresía de Crossref, es uno de los primeros cambios que nos ayudó a definir.

Cuando se envíen las facturas de renovación de membresía en enero de 2026, la nueva tarifa se aplicará a 3.194 de nuestros miembros actuales, quienes notarán que esta será un 27 % más económica que en otros años. Por otro lado, queremos que tengan en cuenta que las encuestas realizadas antes de la introducción de la nueva tarifa demostraron que esta podría ser aplicable a entre el 30 y el 60 % de las organizaciones que anteriormente se encontraban en nuestro nivel de tarifa más bajo (275 US$ para organizaciones con ingresos o gastos de publicación de hasta 1 millón de US$). Ya hemos recibido retroalimentación positiva de miembros que han sido beneficiados con el cambio:

Estamos agradecidos por la nueva tarifa más baja. El costo de Crossref es, sin duda, un gasto significativo para nuestra organización, pero lo aceptamos dada su importancia. Esta nueva estructura de tarifa hará que cubrir el costo sea más fácil.”, dijo Mariana Pérez, de Análisis Filosófico.

La iniciativa de Crossref de reducir las tarifas de membresía es la bienvenida a lograr un verdadero ecosistema de investigación global y conectado. Sin duda, esto va a ayudar en la misión de nuestra revista de fomentar una publicación inclusiva, abierta y accesible.”, dijo Dev Roychowdhury, del Journal of Psychological Experience.

Siguiendo los comentarios proporcionados en las consultas y una serie de indicaciones a lo largo de los meses posteriores al anuncio original, nuestro equipo de membresías recopiló la información necesaria para trasladar a 3.194 miembros al nuevo nivel de tarifas, lo que representa el 14,5 % de todos los miembros de Crossref (el gráfico a continuación muestra que el número de miembros en el nivel de $200 es mayor debido a la reciente afluencia de nuevos miembros que no necesitaron hacer la transición; además, “$0” denota a todos nuestros miembros patrocinados, que no pagan cuotas de membresía, y a aquellos incluidos en el programa Global Equitable Membership (GEM)).

Nota: los miembros que consideren que su organización debería pasar a esta nueva tarifa de cuota de membresía y que aún no nos lo hayan comunicado, por favor, contáctenos antes de que termine el año para que podamos hacer el cambio antes de que se emitan las facturas en enero.

Dicho lo anterior, por medio de las conversaciones que tenemos con nuestra comunidad (y GRACIAS por todos sus comentarios en encuestas y debates), sabemos que este cambio hace que la participación en Crossref sea más accesible para organizaciones pequeñas que comunican investigación. Estamos seguros de que esto promoverá un flujo continuo de nuevos registros y metadatos asociados que sumarán al nexo de la investigación, lo que nos ayudará a facilitar la búsqueda y evaluación de la investigación, lograr una mayor transparencia en el proceso científico y seguir construyendo confianza en sus resultados.

Aún no terminamos de revisar nuestras tarifas y no creemos que este nuevo nivel de tarifas considere todas las necesidades de la comunidad académica, que está en crecimiento y evolución. Seguimos trabajando con nuestros patrocinadores y embajadores y tenemos próximos cambios en el programa GEM para facilitar la participación de organizaciones, de todo tipo y tamaño, que comparten investigación.

Traducido por: Nicolás Mejía Torres

Crossref members over the years: a journey through space and time

Amanda Bartell — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Crossref was created back in 2000 by 12 forward-thinking scholarly publishers from North America and Europe, and by 2002, these members had registered 4 million DOI records. At the time of writing, we have over 23,600 members in 164 different countries. Half of our members are based in Asia, and 35% are universities or scholar-led. These members have registered over 176 million open metadata records with DOIs (as of today). What a difference 25 years makes!

In our 25th anniversary year, I thought it would be time to take a look at how we got here. And so—hold tight—we’re going to go on an adventure through space and time¹, stopping every 5 years through Crossref history to check in on our members. And we’re going to see some really interesting changes over the years.

2005

Let’s go back twenty years to 2005. Crossref has been running for five years, and at this point, we have just 318 members from 31 countries, with 18 million DOI records already registered. These members and the Crossref infrastructure are supported by five Crossref employees based in just two countries—the US and the UK.

In 2005, the majority of our members are based in North America, Northern Europe and Western Europe, and they are mostly publishers or societies. Our sponsor program doesn’t yet exist, so all members pay a membership fee directly to Crossref. Our membership fee structure is the same as it is today—we have tiered membership fees so our members can contribute to our infrastructure based on their capacity to pay. At this point, half of our members are eligible for our lowest fee tier.

2005 at a glance

318 members from 31 countries.
18 million DOI records registered.
Supported by five Crossref employees based in two countries - the US and the UK.
The majority (89%) are based in North America or Northern & Western Europe.
Half are eligible for our lowest fee tier.
Mostly societies (40%) and publishers (33%).

2010

Let’s move on by five years to 2010. By this stage, Crossref membership had grown to 1101 members from 69 countries, and these members have now registered 44 million DOI records. They are now supported by 14 Crossref employees, still all located in either the US or the UK.

We’re starting to see some changes in where our members are based. You’ll remember that back in 2005, 89% of Crossref members were based in North America, Northern Europe or Western Europe. By 2010, that percentage has dropped to 63%, and we’re seeing the number of members based in Asia starting to grow. In 2005, only 4% of our members were based in Asia, but by 2010, 18% of our members are based there, with 93 members in the Republic of Korea alone.

By 2010, the percentage of members who are eligible for our lowest fee tier has grown to 78%, so we are seeing smaller and less well-funded organisations starting to join. The types of organisations joining hasn’t changed significantly—members are still mostly societies and publishers. However, we are starting to see universities and scholar-led organisations beginning to join.

2010 at a glance

1,101 members from 69 countries.
44 million DOI records registered.
Supported by 14 Crossref employees based in two countries - the US and the UK.
Growth of members based in Asia (18%).
Smaller, less well-funded organisations starting to join - 78% eligible for our lowest fee tier.
Still mostly societies (37%) and publishers (28%), but universities and scholar-led members starting to emerge (23%).

2015

Jumping ahead another five years to 2015, we see Crossref membership has grown to over 3,000 members from 93 countries, with registered DOI records exceeding 77 million. These members and the Crossref infrastructure are supported by 28 employees, still all based in the US and UK.

Membership in Asia has now really taken off, and Asian organisations now account for 38% of all Crossref members. We also see membership in Latin America emerging, representing 12% of our membership. We have members from 12 different countries in Latin America in 2015, but the most significant number are from Brazil, with 274 members.

Our formal Sponsor program started to emerge from 2012 onwards. Our Sponsor program supports members who are otherwise eligible for our lowest fee tier and provides financial, technical and language support to organisations that would otherwise face barriers to membership. By 2015, we have 26 sponsors in 14 countries, and 20% of all members are working with us through a Sponsor. This is one of the drivers behind smaller, less well-funded members joining Crossref. We really see a leap here in 2015 with over 90% of members now eligible for our lowest fee tier.

Around 2015, we also begin to see an interesting shift in the types of organisations that are becoming members. Increasingly, our new members are university-based, and that type of member organisation has overtaken the publisher group in number for the first time. However, societies still make up the largest number of members.

2015 at a glance

3,134 members from 93 countries.
77 million DOI records.
Supported by 28 Crossref employees based in two countries - US and UK.
Growth in Asia (38%) and members in Latin America (12%) starting to emerge.
Leap in smaller, less well-funded members - 92% eligible for the lowest fee tier.
Sponsor program emerges - 26 sponsors in 14 countries.
Rise of university and scholar-led members (29%) - overtaking publishers (21%). Societies (31%) are still the largest group.

2020

Can you believe we’re already in 2020? Crossref now has almost 12,000 members in 133 countries, with registered DOI records totalling over 120 million! These members and the Crossref infrastructure are now supported by 43 employees across five countries, with Ireland, Germany, and France added to our staff locations.

Almost half of our members are based in Asia at this time, driven by growth from Indonesia, where we have 1681 members in 2020. Our sponsor program now contains 77 sponsors across 32 countries, including our first sponsor in North Africa.

We can now really see how membership is weighted towards smaller, less well-funded organisations: 97% of members are eligible for the lowest fee tier, and 57% choose to work with a sponsor.

By 2020, we also see a fundamental change in the types of organisations that are Crossref members. Societies no longer account for the largest share of our members, with both universities and publishers overtaking them. In 2016, we updated our schema to enable members to register records for preprints (and connect them to an article where relevant). By 2020, 65 members are registering preprints, and many preprint repositories have already become members.

2020 at a glance

11,976 members from 133 countries.
120 million DOI records.
Supported by 43 Crossref employees in five countries - France, Germany, Ireland, the UK, and the US.
46% of members based in Asia.
77 sponsors in 32 countries, first sponsor in N Africa.
Membership heavily weighted to smaller, less well-funded organisations - 97% eligible for the lowest fee tier and 57% working through a sponsor.
Universities and scholar-led are now the largest group (37%), followed by publishers (29%) and societies (24%).

2025

And so we find ourselves back in the present day.

With such steady growth, it’s pretty easy to predict almost exactly how many members we will have by 31st December 2025. By year-end, we would expect to have 23,800 members in 164 countries, with registered DOI records totalling around 177 million. With recent hiring, these members and our infrastructure will be supported by 52 Crossref employees in 14 different countries.

Member organisations are now a real mix, with museums, hospitals, botanic gardens, banks, and many more joining. The largest proportion remains those at a university or scholar-led (35%), but interestingly, we see the percentage who consider themselves to be societies starting to fall (19%) and publishers starting to grow again (29%).

And we see the arrival of a new type of member - since the launch of the Grant Linking System in 2019, we now see Research Funders joining Crossref in order to register identifiers for individual grants. These grant identifiers can then be included in the metadata for published content to uniquely identify the funding source, providing context and trust signals for the content, and fleshing out the Research Nexus. We currently have 45 funders who have registered over 175,000 grant records.

By 2025 we have 129 sponsors in 51 countries - including our first sponsors in East and West Africa who joined in 2024 and 2025 respectively. Half of all members are now based in Asia. 98% of members are now eligible for our lowest fee tier and 57% are working with us through a sponsor.

In 2023, we launched our Global Equitable Membership (GEM) program, which offers relief from any membership and content registration fees for organisations in the least economically advantaged countries in the world. We use the World Bank’s International Development Association (IDA) list as our data source for countries to include in the program. When we launched the program, 187 existing members moved under the program. Since the program’s focus is to enable participation for those who would otherwise find Crossref unaffordable, we are happy that we now have 583 organisational members in the GEM Program, showing the growth in participation from lower-income nations. Most members in the GEM Program are based in Southern Asia (48%) and Sub-Saharan Africa (33%).

November 2025 at a glance

23,622 members in 164 countries.
175 million DOI records.
Supported by 52 Crossref employees from 14 countries - Armenia, Austria, Canada, Ecuador, Germany, Ghana, Hong Kong, Ireland, Kenya, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Spain, the UK, and the US.
51% of members are based in Asia.
129 sponsors in 51 countries - first sponsors in East and West Africa.
98% of members are eligible for the lowest fee tier, and 57% working through a sponsor.
Real mix of organisation types - universities and scholar-led (35%), publishers (29%), societies (19%), but also research funders, museums, pharmaceutical companies, news agencies, and more!

Changes over the years

Here are some of that data over time, depicted in charts.

2026 and beyond

As you can see from our adventure through space and time, the types of organisations that work with Crossref have changed significantly over the years as the scholarly communications world has evolved. Our members now tend to be university-based research-performing organisations or scholar-led journals, based in Asia, and with low or zero publishing revenues (and volumes).

To meet our mission of a truly global and connected research ecosystem, it is essential to ensure that participation in Crossref and all our services and metadata is accessible to everyone involved in documenting scholarly progress.

We want to ensure that access to the Crossref infrastructure is equitable, so we are making two key changes in 2026: we’re extending eligibility for the GEM Program (more to follow), and we are introducing a new, lower-fee tier as an outcome of the RCFS projects more here.

We’re excited to see how our members will change as we head into our next 25 years—we hope you’ll continue with us on our journey and welcome all kinds of new members to the expansive and vibrant Crossref community.

Technically, this is only an adventure through time. At the time of writing, we have no members based in space. Unless you count the European Space Agency, NASA, et al. ↩︎

Destacando nuestra comunidad en Colombia

Susan Collins — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

English version

Dado que Crossref celebra su 25º aniversario este año, nos gustaría destacar algunas de las regiones activas y comprometidas en nuestra comunidad global.

Durante los primeros 25 años, la composición de los miembros de Crossref ha evolucionado significativamente. De un puñado de grandes editoriales fundadoras, ahora tenemos más de 22.000 miembros de 160 países. Casi dos tercios de ellos se identifican como universidades, bibliotecas, entidades gubernamentales, fundaciones, editoriales académicas, e institutos de investigación.

Una de las regiones de mayor crecimiento es Latinoamérica, con más de 3.200 miembros, la mitad de los cuales se unió en los pasados cinco años. Colombia fue uno de los primeros miembros de Crossref en Latinoamérica y continua siendo uno de los países más activos con 242 organizaciones.

“Creo que las organizaciones en Colombia siempre están abiertas a nuevos cambios, y a implementar nuevas estrategias que permitan mejorar o generar vínculos entre diversos actores, el programa Nexo podría verse de gran utilidad puesto que Colombia está uno de los grandes generadores de investigación en la región, y el poder conectar de una manera ágil y rápida toda una red de investigación va a representar grandes ventajas en los procesos”, – dice nuestro Embajador Juan Felipe Vargas Martínez, Cofundador y Director de Journals & Authors, en Medellín.

Una de las razones del aumento en la participación en Colombia es nuestro programa de patrocinadores. Los patrocinadores proveen apoyo a organizaciones más pequeñas que a menudo enfrentan barreras financieras, técnicas, y linguísticas que les dificultan convertirse en miembros de Crossref. Uno de los primeros patrocinadores en Colombia, Journals & Authors, se unió en 2016, siendo de los primeros en Latinoamérica. Ahora tenemos cinco patrocinadores ubicados en Colombia, apoyando 114 miembros.

Nuestros patrocinadores también han sido aliados clave en ayudarnos a interactuar con la comunidad, facilitando numerosos webinars y apoyando nuestras reuniones presenciales en Colombia en 2019 y 2024. Su conocimiento de la comunidad editorial a lo largo del país y sus extensas redes ayudan a las organizaciones nuevas a aprender más sobre Crossref de manera accesible, y a crecer continuamente la participación con nosotros.

También tenemos embajadores altamente dedicados ubicados en Colombia que son fuertes promotores de la misión de Crossref: Nicolás Mejía Torres y Juan Felipe Vargas Martínez. A lo largo de los años, ellos han sido instrumentales en ayudar a organizar eventos presenciales y webinarios para miembros, así como también en representar a Crossref en eventos a en Latinoamérica. Puedes aprender sobre nuestras discusiones en el resumen de los eventos más recientes en nuestro Foro Comunitario. Recientemente Juan Felipe y Nicolás participaron en la Feria Internacional del Libro en Bogotá donde presentaron una charla sobre los beneficios de los metadatos académicos abiertos.

Nuestra membresía en Colombia está conformada fundamentalmente por universidades, sociedades, e instituciones públicas. Casi todas las revistas dejan su contenido disponible abiertamente. La mayoría del contenido de revistas se publica usando la plataforma de publicación OJS de PKP - Colombia es el 8vo mayor usuario de OJS globalmente, y el segundo mayor en Latinoamérica.

“Entendemos que hay todavía mucho margen de uso de editoriales colombianas de Crossref.” Jaime Iván Hurtado, CEO & Fundador de Hipertexto-Netizen, un patrocinador de Crossref, reporta que “algunas hacen uso del DOI pero centradas en revistas tímidamente en los libros y poco en los capítulos de libros,” Hipertexto ha estado contribuyendo al incremento en el uso de identificadores persistentes para libros y capítulos de libros a través de sus herramientas y manejo estadarizado de metadatos.

Los miembros de Crossref a menudo conocen la importancia de los identificadores persistentes para su contenido, pero hay una necesidad de incrementar la conciencia sobre los beneficios y la importancia de incluír metadatos adicionales. Estamos concientes que muchos editores ofrecen su tiempo de manera voluntaria lo cual puede limitar su disponibilidad para entrenamiento adicional y participación en eventos relacionados con la edición y las buenas practicas para el manejo de metadatos. Queremos aumentar las oportunidades para el entrenamiento tanto presencial como remotamente, y nuestros patrocinadores y embajadores han sido aliados clave en la facilitación de estos eventos. En febrero de 2024 nos aliamos con nuestro patrocinador Biteca en un evento de dos días en Bogotá, en el que participaron más de 100 miembro. Hubo diuscusiones activas sobre los fundamentos de Crossref y el rol de los metadatos de calidad en la visibilidad de contenido, así como también presentaciones sobre la integridad y ética en la investigación y la publicación, con compañeros clave como COPE, PKP, Scielo, y DOAJ.

En Colombia no hay un requerimiento de usar identificadores persistentes (o no específicamente el DOI). Cada institución decide si usarlos de manera independiente, así que vemos con agrado tantos miembros de Crossref activos, registrando su contenido, y cada mes se unen más. Ellos reconocen el beneficio de los metadatos, así como también el ser parte de la comunidad de Crossref en general: “En Colombia, Crossref es un referente gracias al uso del DOI. Si bien en sus inicios este identificador se veía como otro requisito más que complicaba el trabajo de las editoriales, hoy es reconocido como una herramienta clave para mejorar la visibilidad y el impacto de las publicaciones. Asimismo, Crossref, a través de sus encuentros y recursos, brinda apoyo a los equipos editoriales al ofrecer pautas, herramientas e información valiosa que facilita la adopción de buenas prácticas y el cumplimiento de estándares de calidad” reporta Luz Ayda Becerra, Consultora de Innovación con nuestro patrocinador Biteca.

Las organizaciones tienen varias razones para convertirse en miembros de Crossref - la principal motivación es incrementar la visbilidad global de su contenido y, por lo tanto, incrementar el impacto de sus publicaciones. Los metadatos de Crossref son accesibles de manera abierta para todos en la comunidad. Cada mes tenemos millones de búsquedas en nuestra base de datos por parte de investigadores, bibñiotecas, herramientas que perfilan autores, servicios de búsqueda, y muchos más. Otras partes usan estos metadatos para crear herramientas y servicios que incrementan la visibilidad y la recuperabilidad del contenido de los miembros.

Sin embargo, existen desafíos que los miembros aún enfrentan cuando trabajan con nosotros. El obstáculo más frecuentemente mencionado al trabajar con Crossref es el lenguaje. La mayoría de nuestros correos electrónicos, documentación y herramientas están en inglés, y a los miembros les gustaría tener la oportunidad de recibir soporte, recursos y correspondencia en español. Aquellos que trabajan con patrocinadores se benefician de soporte de esta manera. Estamos aumentando el número de oportunidades de entrenamiento remoto y webinarios en español, y nuestros embajadores han estado interactuando con la comunidad local para proveer recursos adicionales. A principios de este año, el primer miembro de nuestro equipo ubicado en un país de Latinoamérica se unió a nuestro equipo de soporte técnico, y ahora podemos proveer soporte en español (recursos como este aparecerán más frecuentemente ahora). Reconocemos que aun tenemos trabajo por hacer para que Crossref sea más accesible a las comunidades globalmente.

Nuestros miembros han sugerido que más eventos locales y presenciales serian beneficiosos. Y estamos de acuerdo que las interacciones cara a cara son una manera clave para nosotros construir relaciones e incrementar la representación y visibilidad en las comunidades, y aspiramos a crear oportunidades de interacturas con nuestros miembros en todos los rincones del mundo.

Mostrar como se utilizan los metadatos puede resaltar los beneficios y la importancia de incluir metadatos adicionales. Varios de nuestros miembros y Patrocinadores han solicitado entrenamiento adicional en español sobre el uso de nuestras APIs, lo cual les permitiría obtener y analizar elementos clave de los metadatos.

“Al especializarse en este tipo de tecnologías, puedo analizar y estructurar la información de manera efectiva, generando informes útiles para los editores. Esto facilita la toma de decisiones informadas sobre sus publicaciones, optimizando la gestión editorial y asegurando una mejor visibilidad e impacto de los contenidos académicos.” (Luz Ayda Becerra)

En años anteriores Crossref ha sido invitado a participar en webinars y eventos presenciales en Colombia, dado el interés en crecimiento y la conciencia de la importancia de los metadatos para la comunidad de investigadores y la visibilidad de las publicaciones.

Gran parte de la información en este reporte proviene de encuestas enviadas a nuestros miembros, patrocinadores, y embajadores en Colombia. Apreciamos toda la retroalimentación, comentarios y sugerencias que hemos recibido, y queremos continuar la colaboración e incrementar la interacción con la comunidad.

English version

A spotlight on our community in Colombia

As Crossref celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, we would like to highlight some of the active and engaged regions in our global community.

Over the past 25 years, the makeup of Crossref membership has evolved significantly; from a handful of founding large publishers, we now have more than 22,000 members from 160 countries. Nearly two-thirds of them self-identify as universities, libraries, government agencies, foundations, scholar publishers, and research institutions.

One of our fastest-growing regions is Latin America, with over 3,200 members, half of whom joined us in the past five years. Colombia was one of the early adopters of Crossref from Latin America and remains one of our most active countries with 242 organisations.

“I believe that organisations in Colombia are always open to new changes and to implementing new strategies that allow for improvement or the creation of connections between diverse actors. The Research Nexus program could be very useful since Colombia is one of the largest producers of research in the region, and being able to connect an entire research network quickly and efficiently will represent significant advantages in the processes”, – says our Ambassador Juan Felipe Vargas Martínez, Co-founder and Director, Journals & Authors, in Medellín.

One of the reasons for increased participation in Colombia is our sponsor program. Sponsors provide support for smaller organisations that often face financial, technical, and language barriers that make becoming a member difficult. Our first sponsor in Colombia, Journals & Authors, joined in 2016, one of our first in Latin America. We now have five sponsors based in Colombia, supporting 114 members.

Our sponsors have also been key partners in helping us engage with the community, facilitating numerous webinars and supporting our in-person meetings in Colombia in 2019 and 2024. Their knowledge of the publishing community across the country and extensive networks help new organisations learn more about Crossref in an accessible way, and continuously grow participation with us.

We also have very dedicated ambassadors based in Colombia who are strong advocates for Crossref’s mission: Nicolás Mejía Torres and Juan Felipe Vargas Martínez. Over the years, they have been instrumental in helping to organise in-person events and webinars for members, as well as representing Crossref at events throughout Latin America. You can learn more about our discussions from the summary of the latest event on our Community Forum. Most recently, Juan Felipe and Nicolás attended the Bogotá International Book Fair, where they gave a presentation on the benefits of open academic metadata.

Our membership in Colombia is made up primarily of universities, societies, and public institutions. Almost all journals make their content openly available. Most of the journal content is published using the OJS publishing platform from PKP. Colombia is the eighth-largest user of OJS globally and the second-largest in Latin America.

“There is still considerable scope for Colombian publishers to utilise Crossref” Jaime Iván Hurtado, CEO & Founder of Hipertexto-Netizen, a Crossref sponsor, reports that “while organisations use DOIs most commonly for journals, there’s potential for greater use for books and chapters.” Hipertexto has been contributing to the increased use of persistent identifiers for books and book chapters through their tools and standardised metadata management.

Members often know the importance of persistent identifiers for their content, but there is a need to increase awareness of the benefits and importance of including additional metadata. We’re aware that many editors volunteer their time, which can limit their availability for additional training and participation in events related to publishing and metadata best practices. We aim to increase opportunities for training, both in-person and online, and our sponsors and ambassadors have been key partners in facilitating these events. In February 2024, we partnered with our Sponsor, Biteca, on a two-day event in Bogotá, attended by over 100 members. There were lively discussions on the fundamentals of Crossref and the role of quality metadata for content discovery, as well as additional presentations on research integrity and publication ethics, with key partners including COPE, PKP, Scielo, and DOAJ.

There is no requirement to use persistent identifiers (or specifically DOIs) in Colombia. Each institution decides whether to use them independently, so we’re delighted to see so many are active Crossref members, registering their content, and more are joining every month. They recognise the benefit of metadata, as well as being part of the Crossref community at large: “In Colombia, Crossref is a benchmark thanks to its use of the DOI. While initially viewed as yet another requirement that complicated the work of publishers, this identifier (and related metadata) is now recognised as a key tool for improving the visibility and impact of publications. Furthermore, through its meetings and resources, Crossref supports editorial teams by offering guidelines, tools, and valuable information that facilitate the adoption of best practices and compliance with quality standards,” reports Luz Ayda Becerra, Innovation Advisor with our sponsor, Biteca.

Organisations have various reasons for becoming members with Crossref – the main motivation is to increase the global visibility of their content and, therefore, to increase the impact of their publications. Crossref’s metadata is openly accessible and free for everyone in the community. Each month, we have millions of queries to our database from researchers, libraries, author profiling tools, discovery services and many more. Third parties use this metadata to create tools and services that increase visibility and discoverability of members’ content.

There are, however, challenges that members still face when working with us. The most frequently listed obstacle in working with Crossref is language. Most of our emails, documentation and tools are in English, and members would like the opportunity for support, resources, and correspondence in Spanish. Those working with sponsors benefit from their support in this way. For all, we are increasing the number of Spanish language online training opportunities and webinars, and our ambassadors have been engaging with the local community to provide additional resources. Earlier this year, the first staff member based in Latin America joined our technical support team, and we can now provide Spanish language support (resources like this will appear more frequently now). We recognise that we still have work to do to make Crossref more accessible to global communities.

Members have suggested that more local in-person events would be beneficial. And we agree - face-to-face interactions are a key way for us to build relationships and increase representation and visibility in communities, and we aspire to create opportunities to engage with members in all corners of the world.

Showing how metadata is utilised can show the benefits and importance of including additional metadata. Several of our members and sponsors have requested additional Spanish language training on using our APIs, which would enable them to obtain and analyse key metadata elements.

“By specialising in these technologies, I can effectively analyse and structure information, generating useful reports for editors. This facilitates informed decision-making regarding their publications, optimising editorial management, and ensuring greater visibility and impact of scholarly content.” (Luz Ayda Becerra)

Over the past several years, Crossref has been invited to participate in webinars and in-person events in Colombia, as there is an increased interest and awareness of the importance of metadata for the research community and the visibility of publications.

Much of the information in this report is taken from a survey sent to our members, sponsors, and ambassadors in Colombia. We appreciate all the feedback, comments, and suggestions we received, and we look forward to continuing our collaborations and increasing our engagement with the community.

Notice of amendments to Crossref membership terms and bylaws

Amanda Bartell — Sun, 11 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In its March 2025 meeting, the Crossref board unanimously voted to update both the Crossref bylaws and the Crossref membership terms to:

Provide more clarity and alignment between our bylaws and membership terms, where they had become out of sync over the years.
Reflect previous board motions and bring both documents up-to-date with current processes for suspending and revoking membership, and reviewing those decisions.
Work towards being more explicit about what “Member Practices” should look like in terms of preserving the integrity of the scholarly record.

Link to updated membership terms and link to updated bylaws

The bylaw changes are effective immediately, and the updated version of the membership terms will come into effect on 11th July 2025.

In accordance with the 60-day notice period, we have emailed the Primary contact on all our active member accounts today. Note: Members do not need to do anything in response to these changes - by continuing to use our services after 11th July, they are accepting the latest version of the terms.

Changes to the membership terms

The membership terms will be updated on 11th July to be clearer on, among other things, the importance of accurate metadata, using DOI links everywhere, the all-important reference linking obligation, and the process for suspending and revoking/terminating membership. It also introduces the new concept of “Member Practices”, which a dedicated community committee will propose for board approval. More information about this will follow soon.

You can find the specific changes below, or take a look at this marked-up PDF showing the changes between the current (from June 2022) terms and the revised (July 2025) terms.

Topic	Section	Summary of Change(s)
Terminology	Various sections (e.g., 1, 2(i), 2(k), 5)	Streamlines some legal language to enhance clarity and readability.
Member Practices	2(a)	Establishes an obligation of Members to comply with Member Practices, to be established soon through a dedicated committee.
Unauthorised use of metadata	2(d)	Highlights the harmful impact of unauthorised use or deposit of metadata on Crossref, its Members, and the integrity of the scholarly record.
Reference linking	2(f), (g)	Updates the language referring to reference linking, and makes explicit Members’ obligation to maintain reference linking throughout membership, not only upon first joining Crossref. It also makes it clear that members should use DOI links wherever they communicate about any item with a DOI.
Displaying identifiers	2(h)	Strengthens Members’ obligation to display DOIs in accordance with Crossref’s Display Guidelines (by eliminating the “commercially reasonable efforts” qualifier).
Fees	3	Expands the definition of “Fees” to include all usage fees and fees for optional services, in addition to annual fees and Content Registration fees. Crossref’s right to suspend or terminate a Member’s account for non-payment extends to any of these fees.
Termination of Membership	9	Significantly revises the provision regarding termination of a Member’s membership by Crossref:
		Updates the bases for ‘for-cause’ termination, to include ongoing misrepresentations in a Member’s practices; misleading use or creation of DOIs; and failure to pay fees due (without the former 120-day minimum duration of nonpayment);
		Clarifies the distinction between suspension and termination (also referred to as revocation or expulsion) of a Member’s Crossref membership;
		Eliminates the existing procedures for automatic Board review of a termination or extended suspension. (Crossref’s bylaws have been amended to prescribe a new suspension/termination process and right to request Board review);
		Adds a termination trigger for cases where a Sponsor cancels its agreement with a Sponsored Member. (The member, of course, has the option to move to a new Sponsor, or re-join Crossref as an independent member).
Notice contacts	8(d)	Updates Crossref’s Notice contact; updates the list of required Member contacts.

Changes to the bylaws

Our bylaws have needed updating for a while, but since these seldom change, we’ve saved up a few changes, also to bring them in line with the revised membership terms.

We’ve now modernised the language, ensured that the bylaws match what’s in the membership terms, and we’ve added in motions that have been agreed by the board but not updated in the bylaws over the last few years. We’ve also updated the bylaws in line with the new membership revocation process in the new July 2025 membership terms. The new bylaws also allow for a new group of members to be created to help Crossref define Member Practices.

You can find a summary of the changes below, or take a look at this marked-up PDF showing all the changes to the bylaws.

Topic	Section	Summary of Changes
Terminology	Various sections	Eliminates gender-specific terminology, e.g. replaces “Chairman” with “Chair”.
		Makes minor clean-up edits (e.g. deletion of unused “Reserved” section and renumbering).
Membership Qualification	Art. I Sec. 1	Replaces “publishes” professional and scholarly materials with “produces” professional and scholarly materials to match the language in the already-current membership terms.
Non-Voting Membership	Art. I Sec. 2; Art. IV Secs. 7, 8; Art. VII Sec. 4	Reflects the establishment of a non-voting Member category as previously approved by the Board.
Membership Procedures	Art. I Sec. 3; Art. I Sec. 5	Clarifies that acceptance of new Members is delegable to Crossref personnel generally, replacing a narrow reference to the Executive Director.
		Eliminates superfluous procedural steps regarding Member resignation.
Suspension and Termination of Membership	Art. I Sec. 6	Significantly revises the provision regarding termination of a Member’s membership by Crossref:
		Updates the bases for ‘for-cause’ termination, to include various specific prongs (matching those already in the Member Terms), while maintaining the catch-all for conduct prejudicial to Crossref’s best interests.
		Authorises the Board to define standards and procedures for ‘for-cause’ terminations, or establish a committee (which can be comprised of both Board members and non-Board members) for that purpose.
		Specifies that Crossref staff is responsible for implementing the ‘for-cause’ termination standards.
		Eliminates the existing procedures for automatic Board review of a termination or extended suspension; specifies the Board’s authority to delegate discretionary appeals/review to the ExCo or other committee of Board members.
		Restates that temporary suspension may be used in lieu of, or in advance of, termination.
Annual Meeting	Art. IV Sec. 1	Updates language around the timing of the annual Member meeting:
		Replaces reference to the “second week of November” with “during the month of October or November”.
		Eliminates language regarding avoiding legal or religious holidays; given Crossref’s global footprint, this is not feasible.

Thanks for reading this far!

Don’t forget, members do not need to do anything in response to these changes - by continuing to register metadata after 11th July, they are accepting the latest version of the terms. But do let us know if you have any questions by emailing member@crossref.org.

Reflections from Crossref Accra 2025 - Strengthening open science and partnerships in Ghana

Johanssen Obanda — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Crossref is a membership organisation, and it’s the global community of members that creates the Research Nexus together. Meeting our community locally is a highlight and an important learning experience. This year, we started by connecting with a growing community in Accra, Ghana - our first in-person event in the country included in our GEM program. From 14 members in 2023 to 31 in 2025, our community in Ghana is blooming.

At its core, Crossref Accra 2025 was about showing up for the community in Ghana - listening, learning, and building together. On the 20th of March, we welcomed 66 participants: journal editors, university staff, librarians, and researchers. People who are doing the real work of making scholarly publishing happen in the region.

Photo: Participants from across Ghana’s research and publishing landscape.

We started the day with a walkthrough of Crossref’s services, then shifted into more tailored conversations - talking metadata quality, improving discoverability, and making Crossref tools work for the local context. The panel featuring AJOL, WACREN, and CARLIGH was a key moment. We heard honest reflections about journal sustainability, the barriers to indexing, and how Open Access can grow if local infrastructure is supported. Each organisation shared how they’re working to strengthen research communities and where they see Crossref fitting into that bigger picture.

Photo: Crossref Ambassador Richard Lamptey moderates a panel with WACREN’s Effah Amponsah, CARLIGH’s Mac Anthony Cobblah, and AJOL’s Kylie van Zyl on sustaining journals and advancing Open Access in the region.

During the dedicated listening session, participants spoke candidly about the cost burden of APCs, the over-reliance on foreign journals for recognition, and the uphill battle local journals face, from limited resources to slow workflows. There was a clear push for stronger local publishing platforms and more training around tools like OJS. People want technical clarity: How does Crossref fit into their workflows? What’s involved in registering metadata and DOIs? What’s the actual value? Many also voiced interest in strengthening relationships with indexing services, and connecting university presses more directly with Crossref. The afternoon breakout sessions were hands-on. One group explored how to use the Participation Reports to check metadata completeness, while the other dove into using the Crossref API. People started swapping tips, asking questions, and brainstorming ways to improve how their institutions handle metadata. Several wanted to know how to automate more of their workflows through OJS, boost reference linking, and pull better reports from the Crossref system.

Photo: A collage of snapshots capturing activities at the Crossref Accra event.

Outside the main event, we also visited some of our members and stopped by the Association of African Universities. These visits gave us more time for deeper conversations about publishing workflows, ORCID uptake, metadata visibility, and the bigger picture of Open Access in Ghana. We heard a lot about the potential for more equitable partnerships and stronger local ownership of publishing infrastructure.

Post-event feedback made one thing clear: people want more opportunities to learn - more practical workshops, more guidance on using Crossref tools, and more support navigating the technical side of things. There’s growing interest in forming a local user group, a space to keep sharing, troubleshooting, and moving forward together. And the desire to improve indexing and visibility was a recurring theme. People see registering identifiers for content as an essential step on that journey. There’s also a broader concern about long-term sustainability and ethical publishing practices. Many journals are doing their best in tough conditions, and there’s a real appetite for honest conversations about quality, trust, and resilience.

Photo: Crossref staff and ambassadors with member Amy Asimah from Regional Maritime University. Pictured: Johanssen Obanda, Oumy Ndiaye, Evans Atoni, Patience Mbum, Audrey Kenni Nganmeni, Ginny Hendricks, and Richard Lamptey.

Crossref Accra 2025 reminded us how valuable these local gatherings are - not just for sharing tools and workflows, but for building lasting connections. We’re grateful to our Ambassadors and team who helped make it happen, and we’re committed to deepening our support across the region. There’s so much potential in Ghana’s scholarly community, and in West Africa more broadly, as we’ve seen again at WACREN in Senegal a couple of weeks later. We’re committed to working with local partners to help it grow.

Supporting Membership through the Sponsor Program

Susan Collins — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Sponsors make Crossref membership accessible to organisations that would otherwise face barriers to joining us. They also provide support to facilitate participation, which increases the amount and diversity of metadata in the global Research Nexus. This in turn improves discoverability and transparency of scholarship behind the works.

Growing number of sponsors

Our first sponsors joined in 2008, but the program started to grow rapidly between 2012-2014, with the addition of sponsors in South Korea, Türkiye, Russia, India, and Ukraine. In 2015, we welcomed our first South American sponsor from Brazil, followed by more sponsors in Latin America starting in 2016, and our first sponsor in Indonesia in 2017.

As of December 2024, Crossref works with 124 sponsoring organisations that support 12,195 sponsored members.

In 2021, we updated the criteria for organisations to be accepted as sponsors, raising the bar to ensure that potential sponsors accurately and successfully represent Crossref in the community. We also paused the acceptance of new Sponsors from regions where such organisations are already prolific. By doing so, we can focus on growing the program in areas with the greatest need.

In 2024, we added eight new sponsors to the program; these included our first sponsor in Bangladesh (our first GEM sponsor), as well as sponsors in China, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Türkiye, Tunisia, Iraq, and Kenya.

Our five largest sponsors, based on the number of members they support (as of the end of 2024) are:

Relawan Jurnal Indonesia, Indonesia - 3076 members
Associacao Brasileira de Editores Cientificos do Brasil (ABEC Brasil) - 1312
Tubitak Ulakbim DergiPark, Türkiye - 1248
NEICON ISP, Russia- 713
Kyobobook Center, South Korea - 419

The majority of sponsors are much smaller than this, looking after 25 or fewer Sponsored Members.

Each sponsor has specific criteria for what kind of organisations they work with. Some are dedicated to supporting organisations in a specific country or region, while others may be based on geography, language, subject area, or usage of a specific platform, e.g. OJS.

Our sponsors are distributed across all regions of the world, and we’re continuously working to forge networks with organisations in regions with the least coverage, to ensure scholarly communicators anywhere can join Crossref and contribute to the Research Nexus.

Asia Pacific: 22
Central and Eastern Europe: 29
Central and South Asia: 25
Latin America and the Caribbean: 24
North Africa and the Middle East: 3
Sub-Saharan Africa: 2
US and Canada: 5
Western Europe: 14

Currently, sponsored members represent 115 different countries, with the largest proportions from Latin America, South-eastern Asia, and Eastern Europe. Nearly two-thirds of sponsored members self-identify as universities, libraries, government agencies, foundations, scholar publishers, and research institutions.

To date, sponsored members have contributed 6.5 million works to the Research Nexus.

Importantly, the sponsored members have the ability to fully participate in Crossref – they are stewards of their records (even if some choose to delegate this activity to their sponsor), they can vote, stand in for elections to our Board of Directors, and collaborate with others in the Crossref community, just as any other member.

Sponsors are key partners for us in making participation easier for organisations in their communities. They work with us to provide administrative, billing, technical, and local language support to the members they work with. Depending on the financial model, they may charge members for their services.

Technical support they provide for members makes it more tailored and often quicker than the Crossref team could offer. For example, sponsors can provide service in their local language using their preferred method (helpdesk, WhatsApp, phone, email), which varies widely by region; or, where they charge any fees – they tend to collect those in the local currency. Some sponsors even take care of all the records registration for the members they support.

It’s important to note that sponsors can only support the participation of organisations that would otherwise be in the current $275 fee tier (or up to $500 for funders) if these organisations were to join independently. Regardless of the number of sponsored members, the sponsor pays one membership fee on behalf of them all, and then they also pay all the registration fees that are due on behalf of their sponsored members, which alleviates challenges related to paying in foreign currency. Overall, sponsors make Crossref membership more economical for the organisations that participate this way, and Crossref benefits from billing efficiencies.

In a recent survey of sponsored members (carried out in July 2023, with 204 responses from members working with 53 sponsors), the majority of sponsored members (88%) said that sponsors met their expectations and 85% are likely or very likely to recommend their sponsors to another organisation.

Respondents indicated that the aspects of working with a sponsor that were most valued are technical support (72%), financial assistance/no annual fee (37.3%), ability to pay in local currency (43%), and local language support (44%).

It’s important to note that sponsors often offer many non-Crossref services to members too, including anything from website design, copy editing, typesetting, set up of publishing platform, XML-JATS markup, to assistance with submitting content to third-party databases.

Sponsors represent Crossref in the community. They also assist us in connecting with their communities locally. In 2024, we collaborated with Biteca for an event in Bogotá, and Relawan Jurnal Indonesia for a two-day event in Jakarta. Both sponsors advised on venues, promoted the event to the members they support, coordinated local guest speakers, and provided translation services as needed. We also collaborated with Hipertexto-Netizen on engaging our community at the Guadalajara Book Fair. The success of these events was in part due to our collaboration with each sponsor.

Ensuring quality experience for our members

We try to make sure that every sponsor we work with will be able to commit to helping our members long-term. We offer training too, with an expectation that they can disseminate the learning to their members. The majority of sponsored members report receiving some training from their Sponsors (with 70% in our survey saying they’ve received adequate training on all services, while only 3% haven’t received any so far). Most recently we engaged sponsors with the Participation Reports to help them improve metadata completeness for their members.

In 2024, we’ve been meeting sponsors individually to review how things are going for them and their members – assessing member metadata quality, and additional services, as well as inviting their feedback about the program and suggestions for improvements that Crossref could make.

We’ve learnt a lot about practices related to record registration and training, business models and especially – a whole range of attitudes and approaches related to metadata completeness. Some sponsors register content for all or some of their members, while others provide technical support but do not register the content directly for members.

Members who used OJS often had higher scores because of the ease of use and availability of the plugins. Some sponsors noted that many journal editors are volunteers and don’t have the time or financial resources to collect extra metadata or update existing metadata records; they collect only what is required to register an item. Several sponsors also reported a barrier with authors’ mindset – they don’t tend to see the value of including ORCiDs or ROR IDs in their submissions. Somewhat surprisingly, we learned that not all members see the value in including references in their deposits or don’t wish to take the time to add them – this is a concern, as relationships created by references are a cornerstone of the Research Nexus, and markedly support discoverability of the content.

Sometimes, sponsors are unable to continue to provide services, or they are unable to meet the obligations of being a sponsor and their accounts are closed. In the cases where a sponsor account is closed, we will work with their members to find an alternative sponsor when possible.

Similarity Check is an external service provided in partnership with iThenticate, that’s available to Crossref members at a more competitive price, and it is in demand among the sponsored members too. Currently, 78 Sponsors offer Similarity Check to their members (however, not all sponsored members working with these sponsors have elected to use the service).

Sponsor LIBCOM Piotr Karwasinski was pleased that “All the rules of Crossref are unified. Everything is the same for everyone - the same for big publishers as well as small. Equal for everyone.”

Costs can sometimes be a concern; sponsors in India and Algeria both noted that $1USD is a lot of money for some. We mentioned the fee review being conducted with the RCFS project.

In summary

As we move toward realizing our vision of a connected Research Nexus, building a network for the global community must include input from all of the global community. When Crossref began 25 years ago our first members were mainly from the United States and Western Europe, but today our membership is much more global and diverse. Though our membership has grown to more than 22,000 organisations around the world, we are not seeing significant membership growth from all regions.

In the last few years, almost half of our members came from Southeastern Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America combined. However, there is much slower growth in other regions, mostly notably Northern and Sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of Central Asia, with only 5% of new member applications coming from these regions collectively. We know there are organisations in those areas contributing to the scholarly record, however, many continue to face financial, technical, and administrative barriers to become members.

The Sponsor Program is one of the avenues established to address and reduce barriers and to help facilitate membership and participation to all knowledge-sharing organisations worldwide. Ensuring it remains strong and successful requires collaboration, communication, and comprehensive training.

The GEM program - Year Two 2024

Susan Collins — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We began our Global Equitable Membership (GEM) Program to provide greater membership equitability and accessibility to organisations in the world’s least economically advantaged countries. Eligibility for the program is based on a member’s country; our list of countries is predominantly based on the International Development Association (IDA). Eligible members pay no membership or content registration fees. The list undergoes periodic reviews, as countries may be added or removed over time as economic situations change.

The program began in January 2023 with 214 existing members; and 131 more joined throughout the year. In 2024, we saw 127 organisations joining via the GEM program, bringing the total number of participants to 458. We welcomed our first-ever members from Sierra Leone and Honduras, as well as our first Sponsor in Bangladesh (Sponsors are organisations that work with us to provide administrative, billing, technical, and local language support to the members they work with).

Of 458 organisations participating in the GEM program, 380 are independent members, 77 are sponsored, and there is one sponsoring organisation. To date, these members have contributed over 279,000 works to the Research Nexus, our concept of a fully connected global scholarly ecosystem.

Though we have Sponsors based elsewhere, working with members who are in GEM countries (e.g. PKP), we will continue to consult with our ambassadors and other partners to identify potential new sponsors that are based in GEM countries.

Number of Crossref GEM members by country:

GEM Country (Alphabetically)	Total No. of Members
Afghanistan	17
Bangladesh	120
Benin	5
Bhutan	6
Burkina Faso	4
Burundi	2
Cambodia	8
Central African Republic	1
Congo, Democratic Republic	15
Ethiopia	13
Ghana	27
Guyana	2
Haiti	1
Honduras	1
Kosovo	8
Kyrgyz Republic	23
Lao, People’s Democratic Republic	2
Madagascar	4
Malawi	2

GEM Country (Alphabetically)	Total No. of Members
Maldives	3
Mali	3
Mauritania	1
Mozambique	2
Myanmar	1
Nepal	50
Nicaragua	2
Rwanda	7
Senegal	7
Sierra Leone	1
Somalia	9
Sri Lanka	14
Sudan	19
Tajikistan	4
Tanzania, United Republic of	21
Togo	1
Uganda	17
Yemen	30
Zambia	5

Number of Crossref members in GEM Program Countries

We are excited about our in-person event taking place in a few weeks in Accra, Ghana, as a direct result of the increasing participation and interest in Crossref from the region.

We can see a clear connection between outreach activities conducted by us and our Ambassadors and the increase in awareness and the number of members joining from related countries. These were Bangladesh, Nepal, Uganda, and Tanzania in 2023, and Ghana, Zambia, Sri Lanka, and Tanzania in 2024.

From our Ambassadors’ activities in the GEM countries, some recurring questions emerged highlighting barriers to joining Crossref. It’s important to recognise that many institutions struggle with funding and technical expertise. It’s no surprise that they are often concerned with the maintenance of their membership over the long term. We emphasize that GEM is a sustained measure to accommodate knowledge-sharing organisations from the regions of financial strain. Whilst the program addresses the costs of membership and content registration, our Ambassadors can assist further, offering technical support with record registration, metadata best practices, and integrating Crossref services with existing systems, including Open Journal Systems (OJS); and discuss how registering metadata improves research visibility.

We are grateful to our Ambassadors for directly supporting the GEM program within their countries through webinars and presenting in person at conferences: Shaharima Parvin and MD Jahangir in Bangladesh, Richard Bruce Lamptey in Ghana, Niranjan Koirala in Nepal, Oumy Ndiaye in Senegal, Lasith Gunawardena in Sri Lanka, and Baraka Manjale Ngussa in Tanzania.

The GEM program - year one

Susan Collins — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In January 2023, we began our Global Equitable Membership (GEM) Program to provide greater membership equitability and accessibility to organisations located in the least economically advantaged countries in the world. Eligibility for the program is based on a member’s country; our list of countries is predominantly based on the International Development Association (IDA). Eligible members pay no membership or content registration fees.

The list undergoes periodic reviews, as countries may be added or removed over time as economic situations change. Sri Lanka was added to the GEM program in March 2023 as they were recategorised to the IDA classification by the World Bank.

When the program launched, we had 214 existing members eligible for the program who then were no longer charged for membership or content registration. Since the program began, we have welcomed an additional 131 new members into the program, including our first members from Cambodia and Togo.

Country	As of 1/1/2023 (start of GEM)	Additions in 2023 (end of first year of GEM)	Total
Afghanistan	6	4	10
Bangladesh	56	33	89
Benin	1	1	2
Bhutan	4	2	6
Burkina Faso	2	0	2
Burundi	1	0	1
Cambodia	0	2	2
Central African Republic	1	0	1
Congo, Democratic Republic	1	11	12
Ethiopia	4	6	10
Ghana	14	7	21
Guyana	1	1	2
Haiti	1	0	1
Kosovo	2	2	4
Kyrgyz Republic	22	3	25
Laos	1	0	1
Madagascar	1	1	2
Malawi	1	0	1
Maldives	1	0	1
Mali	2	0	2
Mauritania	1	0	1
Myanmar	1	0	1
Nepal	20	18	38
Nicaragua	1	0	1
Rwanda	4	1	5
Senegal	3	3	6
Somalia	2	2	4
Sri Lanka	13	5	18
Sudan	9	2	11
Tajikistan	5	1	6
Tanzania	9	7	16
Togo	0	1	1
Uganda	3	6	9
Yemen	16	12	28
Zambia	5	0	5

With help from our ambassadors based in GEM countries, we organised and co-hosted several webinars to introduce the program, along with an introduction to Crossref, and the benefits of including all kinds of research objects in the Research Nexus.

In April, our team, together with ambassador Binayak Raj Pandey, provided an overview of Crossref for members and organisations in Nepal.
Our team and ambassadors, Dr Md Jahangir Alam and Shaharima Parvin hosted two webinars in May for members and organisations in Bangladesh. The first webinar provided an introduction to Crossref, our services, and the GEM Program. The second webinar focused on the methods to register content and how to add and update metadata.
In September, ambassador Baraka Manjale Ngussa joined us for an introductory webinar aimed at organisations in Tanzania
In November, CARLIGH (the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Ghana), Crossref, and EIFL co-hosted a webinar for librarians and journal editors in Ghana with a discussion on the GEM program and Crossref services.

In 2024, we will continue to collaborate with our ambassadors and other members of the community to offer more opportunities for organisations in GEM-eligible countries to learn about the program and the benefits of membership for content discovery.

The program was initially met with scepticism by some organisations in GEM-eligible countries, who wanted to be certain that it wasn’t a free trial, that there are no hidden fees, or that they would be required to pay later for other services. Others expressed concern that Crossref would introduce fees after a year or two. Though we were able to clarify these aspects of the program, we understand the concerns and are working to ensure we provide clarity and transparency about the program. Additionally, we will be conducting a complete review of our fees in 2024, and we will ensure that GEM-eligible members will have input.

Although the program offers relief from fees, many organisations require technical assistance and language support. The GEM program would benefit from an increase in local Sponsors to facilitate membership and provide support, particularly In countries with the highest growth, such as Bangladesh, Nepal, Yemen, Kyrgyz Republic, and Ghana. Though we have Sponsors working with members who are in GEM countries (e.g. PKP), we do not yet have any Sponsors who are based in a GEM country.

We will be working with relevant like-minded organisations, such as PKP, DOAJ, INASP, OASPA, EIFL, and others, to help identify suitable candidates for new Sponsors in underserved regions and engage them proactively. Additionally, we will consult with our ambassadors in GEM countries to help identify potential Sponsors. We are beginning the year by making the most of the momentum created in African countries (Uganda, Ghana, Tanzania) and looking to develop new networks in other parts of the world in Q2-Q4 of this year.

We’re hiring! New technical, community, and membership roles at Crossref

Michelle Cancel — Fri, 21 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Do you want to help make research communications better 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.

We are recruiting for three new staff positions, all new roles and all fully remote and flexible. See below for more about our ethos and what it’s like working at Crossref.

🚀 Technical Community Manager, working with our ‘integrators’ so all repository/publishing platforms and plugins, all API users incl. managing contracts with subscribers, and generally helping a very nice bunch of RESTful API dabblers, both novice and intermediate. The goal is to offer more interactive engagement such as sprints, and more technical consultation to help the community with things like query efficiency, public data dump ingestion, etc. Thousands of users exist, from individual researchers and small academic tools to giant technology companies. Researching and analysing usage and building tools to meet their needs is key, so this role works closely with Product and R&D colleagues and likely needs a developer or developer-advocacy background.

🎯 Member Experience Manager, ramping up to handle the mammoth operation that is… membership, currently 18,000 members from 150 countries, and onboarding the ~180 new joiners we welcome monthly, mostly from Africa and Asia. This role involves lots of education and relationship management, but because of the scale, we also need someone with a real business process/analysis approach, improving how our systems function so that the operation flows seamlessly and isn’t a pain for people (both members and staff). This role manages two full-time Member Support Specialists (UK and Indonesia) and three part-time contractors (USA, France, and one other as yet unknown).

🎈 Community Engagement Manager, working with the global community of scholarly editors at a time when research integrity is top of mind for our entire ecosystem. This is a classic community role for someone keen to cross over from managing or editing journals or books and perhaps make your volunteer work official. Activities will include program and project management, event and working group facilitation, communications and content creation. You’d be interacting with groups like the Asian Council of Science Editors, the European Association of Science Editors, and the Council of Science Editors, plus many more that you’d identify. It’s all about helping editors, who work hand-in-hand with authors, to think about metadata as signals of trust and better use available services, such as those for retraction management or plagiarism checking, and helping to define needs for emerging activity too, such as machine-generated content.

Working at Crossref

We’re a not-for-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.

Crossref sits at the heart of the global exchange of research information, and our job is to make it possible—and easier—to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse research, from journals and books, to preprints, data, and grants. Through partnerships and collaborations we engage with members in 150 countries (and counting) and it’s very important to us to nurture that community.

We’re about 45 staff and remote-first. This means that we support our teams working asynchronously and with flexible hours. We are dedicated to an open and fair research ecosystem and that’s reflected in our ethos and staff culture. We like to work hard but we have fun too! We take a creative, iterative approach to our projects, and believe that all team members can enrich the culture and performance of our whole organisation. Check out the organisation chart.

We are active supporters of ongoing professional development opportunities and promote self-learning at every opportunity. Crossref has a healthy financial situation and we only continue to grow. While we won’t have a clear hierarchical path for staff to follow, there are always evolving opportunities to progress and be challenged.

We especially encourage applications from people with backgrounds historically under-represented in research and scholarly communications.

Bookmark our jobs page to watch for future opportunities!

Refocusing our Sponsors Program; a call for new Sponsors in specific countries

Susan Collins — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Some small organisations who want to register metadata for their research and participate in Crossref are not able to do so due to financial, technical, or language barriers. To attempt to reduce these barriers we have developed several programs to help facilitate membership. One of the most significant—and successful—has been our Sponsor program.

Sponsors are organisations that are generally not producing scholarly content themselves but work with or publish on behalf of groups of smaller organisations that wish to join Crossref but face barriers to do so independently. Sponsors work directly with Crossref in order to provide billing, technical, and, if applicable, language support to Members.

Because Sponsors are important partners in facilitating membership there is a high bar to meet to be accepted as a Sponsor. To ensure that an organisation can accurately represent Crossref and has the resources to be successful we created a set of criteria that must be met to be considered.

Our Sponsors program has grown considerably over the last decade and has now become the primary route to membership for emerging markets and small or academic-adjacent publishing operations.

The program began in 2012 with four Sponsors, based primarily in South Korea and Turkey, representing fewer than 100 members. In the next stage of development, the program covered Brazil, India, and Ukraine, and nearly 1300 members. At the end of 2022, the program had grown to over 100 sponsors from 45 countries representing over 11,000 of our members.

Though the program continues to expand, there are still regions where we lack Sponsors, while having an abundance in others. We are working with members, ambassadors, and the community to help identify organisations that may be a fit with the Sponsor program and based in those regions where coverage is lacking.

This January we announced our Global Equitable Membership (GEM) Program which offers relief from membership and content registration fees for members in the least economically-advantaged countries in the world. Eligibility for the program is based on a member’s country on our curated list.

Though the GEM program reduces financial barriers to becoming a member, many organisations still require technical assistance and local language support. Working with a Sponsor would help organisations overcome these burdens. However, there is little or no Sponsor coverage for organisations located in most GEM-eligible countries. That means that in places like Bangladesh, Nepal, and Senegal, where we’ve seen a lot of growth, more organisations could join us if a suitable local Sponsor could support them.

We have made the decision to pause accepting new Sponsors from regions where Sponsor numbers are already very high or not based in a GEM region. By doing so we can focus on growing the program in areas where there is the greatest need.

We are also going to focus on how best to support our current 100+ Sponsors and work with them to evaluate ways to improve the program. We will bolster the training and resources, outreach activities, and solicit feedback on additional ways we can help.

We would love to hear from organisations based in GEM countries who might consider becoming a Sponsor. But our invitation for Sponsors is not limited to the support for the GEM program. There are countries where the GEM program won’t apply, but where growth is high and no Sponsor is present. In particular, we seek support in the following countries where member numbers are growing but could be better supported.

Country/state	Region	No. Crossref members
Nigeria	Sub-Saharan Africa (Western)	99
Philippines	South-eastern Asia	81
Kenya	Sub-Saharan Africa (Eastern)	40
Egypt	Northern Africa	26
Sri Lanka	Southern Asia	13

If your organisation is based in one of these regions and supports or provides services to scholarly publishers in one of the above countries —please take a look at the criteria set out on our website and do get in touch to start the conversation if you think you can meet them. We’re excited to hear from you!

Introducing our new Global Equitable Membership (GEM) program

Susan Collins — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

When Crossref began over 20 years ago, our members were primarily from the United States and Western Europe, but for several years our membership has been more global and diverse, growing to almost 18,000 organisations around the world, representing 148 countries.

As we continue to grow, finding ways to help organisations participate in Crossref is an important part of our mission and approach. Our goal of creating the Research Nexus—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—can only be achieved by ensuring that participation in Crossref is accessible to all. Building a network for the global community must include input from all of the global community.

Although Crossref membership is open to all organisations that produce scholarly and professional materials, cost and technical challenges can be barriers to joining for many organisations. To address some of these challenges, we created our Sponsors Program, which provides technical, financial and local language support. We also collaborate with the Public Knowledge Project on the Open Journals Platform to develop plugins for OJS users.

Additionally, we had a limited ‘fee assistance’ program to waive the content registration fees for members working under specific Sponsor arrangements, including INASP, and African Journals Online (AJOL). Learning from the experiences of such successful partnerships, starting in January 2023, we are expanding this program to provide greater membership equitability and accessibility to organisations located in the least economically-advantaged countries in the world through our Global Equitable Membership (GEM) Program. This new scheme now encompasses the annual fee as well as the content registration fees.

Eligibility for the program is based on a member’s country. We have curated the list, predominantly based on the International Development Association (IDA) list and excluding anywhere we are bound by international sanctions. From January 2023, organisations based in countries listed in our GEM program will be eligible to join Crossref and contribute with their metadata to a robust scholarly record at no cost. This also applies to 187 existing members in eligible countries who will no longer be charged for Crossref membership or content registration.

Existing Crossref members in GEM-eligible countries

Bangladesh (54)	Burundi (1)	Kiribati (0)
Kyrgyz Republic (20)	Central African Republic (1)	Lesotho (0)
Nepal (19)	Democratic Republic of the Congo (1)	Liberia (0)
Ghana (15)	Guyana (1)	Marshall Islands (0)
Yemen (10)	Haiti (1)	Mauritania (0)
Sudan (7)	Honduras (1)	Micronesia (0)
Tanzania (7)	Laos (1)	Mozambique (0)
Afghanistan (6)	Madagascar (1)	Nicaragua (0)
Ethiopia (5)	Malawi (1)	Niger (0)
Zambia (5)	Maldives (1)	Samoa (0)
Bhutan (4)	Myanmar (1)	Sao Tome and Principe (0)
Rwanda (4)	Cambodia (1)	Sierra Leone (0)
Tajikistan (4)	Chad (1)	Solomon Islands (0)
Kosovo (3)	Comoros (1)	South Sudan (0)
Senegal (3)	Cote d’Ivoire (1)	Togo (0)
Uganda (3)	Djibouti (1)	Tonga (0)
Burkina Faso (2)	Eritrea (1)	Tuvalu (0)
Mali (2)	Gambia (1)	Vanuatu (0)
Somalia (2)	Guinea (1)
Benin (1)	Guinea-Bissau (1)

The list of countries will undergo an annual review, to follow the latest guidance from IDA, which uses the somewhat simplistic World Bank income classifications but applies a more granular blend of criteria for economic health, thereby allowing for greater nuance, such as indicating countries where the gap between rich and poor is very wide.

The program results from our experience working with and knowing the communities through Sponsors and working with past members who have struggled to pay. It aims to bring us closer to our vision of building an inclusive, rich and open network of relationships underpinning the scholarly record. With the support of the Membership and Fees Committee, the launch of the program was confirmed with the recent unanimous vote of our Board to evolve our fee assistance program into a more expansive scheme. GEM presents a more comprehensive and equitable solution than our former arrangements. It involves an opportunity to join Crossref and contribute scholarly metadata to our global community on a zero-fee basis for membership and content registration. This offering will be applied by default to organisations based in all eligible countries, irrespective of joining through any specific Sponsor, or independently.

While the GEM Program will alleviate financial barriers, and we hope to see the numbers above grow significantly, the GEM program will not necessarily help ease technical or administrative burdens. We still need our valued Sponsors for that and we seek new Sponsors in the above locations. We would love to hear from organisations based in GEM countries who might consider becoming a Sponsor or otherwise support local colleagues in building experience of metadata and working with global open scholarly infrastructure systems like Crossref. Please reach out to me to discuss ideas or with any other questions or comments.

ISR part two: How our membership approach helps to preserve the integrity of the scholarly record

Amanda Bartell — Mon, 10 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In part one of our series on the Integrity of the Scholarly Record (ISR), we talked about how the metadata that our members register with us helps to preserve the integrity of the record, and in particular how ’trust signals’ in the metadata, combined with relationships and context, can help the community assess the work.

In this second blog, we describe membership eligibility and what you can and cannot tell simply from the fact that an organisation is a Crossref member; why increasing participation and reducing barriers actually helps to enhance the integrity of the scholarly record; and how we handle the very small number of cases where there may be a question mark.

Who can become a Crossref member and do we check new applicants?

Membership is open to organisations that “produce professional and scholarly materials and content”, and this is deliberately defined broadly. We’re a global community of members with content in all disciplines, in many formats, with all kinds of business models - research institutions, publishers, government agencies, research funders, banks, museums and many more.

Essentially, if your content is likely to be cited in the research ecosystem and you consider it part of the evidence trail, then you’re eligible to join.

We ask organisations to complete an online application form and accept our member terms. On receipt of the application, we run a few very basic checks to ensure that:

The applicant can meet the membership criteria and seems to have the capacity to fulfill the obligations (and follow our code of conduct).
We are legally permitted to accept them as a member (for example, we can’t accept applications from some countries due to sanctions.
They haven’t previously been a member of Crossref whose membership was revoked.
They haven’t misrepresented themselves in the application (such as their location).
The applicant or an affiliate is not already a member of Crossref (so that we can advise they join under a single membership fee).

As long as the applicant can meet these requirements, and as long as they are able to pay any membership fees upfront for their first year of membership, they are able to become a Crossref member, get a DOI prefix, and start registering their metadata to share it with the global scholarly community.

We are aware that some organisations in some regions may not be able to join Crossref independently. There may be barriers for them - the cost of membership fees, the fact that we only accept payment in US dollars, language barriers or technical barriers.

To help increase participation globally, we work with sponsors in some regions. All sponsors facilitate membership for organisations who wish to participate in Crossref. They pay one central membership fee on behalf of all the members they work with, and they also pay content registration fees on behalf of their members. Many sponsors register content on behalf of their members, and even if they don’t, most provide local language and technical support. Sponsors are able to charge for their services, but it can be a very economical route for a member to join. In the last year, out of the 2,322 new members that we’ve welcomed, almost 58% joined via a sponsor.

We also waive registration fees for members in certain lower income countries who join via three of our sponsors, and we are planning to expand this program soon (pending board approval in November). [EDIT 2022-November-23: The new Global Equitable Membership (GEM) Program was approved and takes effect 1st January 2023]

The importance of keeping barriers to entry low

As you can see, the checks that we run on new applicants are fairly limited in scope. In the last year, we’ve welcomed 2,322 new members and we only declined 39 applications. And 34 of these declined applications were effectively from one organisation whose membership was revoked in 2019.

Even this minimal set of checks takes a lot of research and keeps our member support specialists very busy - thank you Sally Jennings and Robbykha Rosalien (as well as contractors Kim and Collin).

So why shouldn’t we run more extensive checks on new member applicants? Why don’t we check the quality of their content, or that they are following best practices? Why don’t we decline membership for organisations that can’t demonstrate editorial integrity or that aren’t meeting 100% of the membership obligations from the start?

Nevermind the additional capacity that more extensive checks on the over 200 applicants we receive per month would entail, it’s more fitting with our mission to:

enable equitable participation; and
focus on evidence:

Equitable participation

Inclusivity is very important to us - after all, one of our organisational truths (the guiding principles for everything we do) is “come one, come all”, and this is mirrored in the POSI principles that commit us to broad stakeholder representation. We know that for new organisations, it may take them a while to be able to completely fulfil the membership obligations. We support them with information to help them understand what being a participant in the Crossref community entails. These organisations would have less of a chance of developing better practices if we were to limit membership in Crossref to ‘proven’ candidates. Besides, it would introduce a race condition; if joining and sharing metadata through Crossref is widely considered best practice, new entrants need to join Crossref in order to show that they are adopting best practices.

Trust signals and the Research Nexus

Secondly, it’s not our role to make such a call; we don’t have the expertise to decide if an organisation would be considered “good” at what they are producing; there are other organisations guiding in this area, such as with the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing. Instead, we focus on the decision-making tools, metadata, and relationships that can help provide trust signals for the community.

Once members start registering their content, their activity and metadata speak about their practices – others in the community can process that metadata, combined with its wider context, and identify trust signals to make their own decisions. That metadata can only be shared in an open and machine-readable way if an organisation joins Crossref and starts registering their records and underpinning data with us.

To paint a more detailed picture of the scholarly record, our priority is to get more and varied organisations contributing to the research nexus, rather than putting up barriers and blockers until they are performing perfectly. If they aren’t acting in the best interests of the scholarly community, then having the metadata available to assess will quickly make that obvious and hopefully encourage changes - sunlight being the best disinfectant, as the saying goes.

As we said in the first ISR blog:

“Crossref itself doesn’t assess the quality of content or the integrity of the research process but rather enables those who produce scholarly outputs to provide metadata (effectively evidence) about how they ensure the quality of content and how the outputs fit into the scholarly record.”

In our next post in the series, we’ll talk more about the workflow and decision-making tools we have in place and are planning to develop. We’ll pose questions about what kinds of metadata give what kind of levels of trustworthiness.

Helping new members become “good Crossref citizens”

Once an applicant becomes a member, we help them to completely fulfil the membership terms - ensuring that, for example, they register and display DOIs, keep their metadata up to date, and implement reference linking properly.

We have a lot of documentation on our website, we run regular events and webinars, and we have a series of automated onboarding emails for new members to help them move through the key stages of the member journey from set up and onboarding to levelling up and using additional services like Crossmark and Similarity Check. Our staff are also on hand alongside Ambassadors and other members in our Community Forum. Speaking of POSI (and transparent operations) we receive around 3,000 emails per month with support requests so we are gradually moving support from closed 1:1 email to the more public and efficient community support forum.

We work with members who aren’t fulfilling the obligations to understand challenges and help explain what they need to do. This is currently reactive, but we have plans to automate checks on whether members are meeting the membership terms in future.

Outside of confirming that our members are behaving as “good Crossref citizens”, there aren’t many other areas where the membership team typically gets involved. Our mission is to help preserve the integrity of the scholarly record by making the metadata provided by our members openly available in a machine-readable format. We don’t investigate our members’ business practices or take a deep dive into their editorial processes (such as peer review), and there are many areas where we aren’t able to get involved. For example, we cannot arbitrate title ownership disputes.

It’s all about preserving the integrity of the scholarly record

We do sometimes revoke membership, but this is for limited reasons:

unpaid invoices;
legal sanctions or judgments against the member or its home country; or
contravention of the membership terms.

Membership revocation due to unpaid invoices

We spend a lot of time communicating with members who haven’t paid their invoices and ensuring they have the information they need to solve the problem. Revoking membership due to unpaid fees is an absolute last step for us, but financial sustainability means we can keep the organisation afloat and keep our infrastructure running.

Where members have unpaid fees, we eventually suspend their access to register new records and then ultimately revoke their membership if the fees remain unpaid. Once an organisation’s membership has been revoked, they would need to re-apply if they wanted to become a member again in the future. If accepted, the applicant would need to pay all outstanding invoices before re-joining.

In March 2022, we revoked membership for around 140 members due to unpaid invoices (out of a total of over 17,000 active members).

Membership revocation due to sanctions

Occasionally, we are informed of sanctions that we need to comply with, such as the recent case of Russia invading Ukraine where each Russian member needed to be checked for individual sanctions and some were revoked. Such revocations have to be voted on by the Executive Committee and then ratified by the board. Read more information on our sanctions process.

Membership revocation for cause

Very occasionally there may be evidence that a member is in contravention of the membership terms. This may include:

Misrepresentation in the original membership application
Fraudulent use of identifiers or metadata
Contravening the code of conduct
Any other basis set forth in our governing documents.

We always try to work together with the member to solve problems, and again, revoking membership is an absolute last step. The revocation has to be voted on by the Executive Committee and then ratified by the board.

Our first ever revocation for cause was in July 2019 for OMICS, after the board voted that the US Federal Trade Commission’s ruling against them amounted to a cause for revocation. There have been a handful of cases since. For example, most recently in September this year we revoked membership for a member who was registering DOIs for journals with the ISSNs of similarly-named publications.

There’s more information about our processes to revoke membership on our website.

More participation for the win

In conclusion, we believe that the more parties able to participate in Crossref and provide metadata and context for the research nexus, the more robust this makes the scholarly record.

But do you agree? Are these measures enough? What other information about our membership operations would help us be more transparent? As we said in our first blog, we need your help to establish whether our approach is still the right one, if we are missing anything and what else we might be able to do.

Here’s how you can help:

Join the discussion about the integrity of the scholarly record on our community forum.
Keep an eye out for future blog posts and meetings. We are having a small, in-person discussion prior to the Frankfurt Book Fair and will report on this in a future blog post.
Sign up to attend Crossref LIVE22 for updates on these topics and all things Crossref.
Join and support initiatives and organisations that we partner with or who use our metadata to look at ethical practices, for example, COPE, DOAJ, and OASPA, and review the Principles of Transparency in Scholarly Publishing, which these organisations worked on with WAME.

A simpler text query form

Isaac Farley — Tue, 30 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The Simple Text Query form (STQ) allows users to retrieve existing DOIs for journal articles, books, and chapters by cutting and pasting a reference or reference list into a simple query box. For years the service has been heavily used by students, editors, researchers, and publishers eager to match and link references.

We had changes to the service planned for the first half of this year - an upgraded reference matching algorithm, a more modern interface, etc. In the spirit of openness and transparency, part of our project plan was to communicate these pending changes to STQ users well in advance of our 30 April completion date. What would users think? Could they help us improve upon our plans?

About a month ago, I reached out to the 21,000 plus users we had on record of using STQ since January 2018. We received nearly 85 responses from the messages we sent. Questions ranged from: if we were making changes, would PubMed ID matching be supported? To: What about the reliability of the returned reference links? And: Could we better accommodate larger reference lists?

Many of the users we heard from told us how STQ was critical to their work. I read all these messages. The concerns raised by users were legitimate and much appreciated. We reassessed our project timeline and plans, and decided to shift course. So, what are we doing?

What’s changing?

The previous hurdle of having to register your email address simply to return reference links was confusing and unnecessary. We removed it.
We previously limited the number of monthly reference links to 5,000 per email address. Most didn’t reach the limit, but those who did were frustrated by it and/or found ways around it. We want you to match and register as many references as possible, so we removed the monthly limit too.
Many of you with long reference lists found that you were occasionally reaching our limit of 30,000 characters per submission. Once again, we want you to match and register as many references as possible so we removed the character limit altogether and instead are just looking at the number of references per submission. We now provide space for 1,000 references per submission (We checked. The most references we have ever received via the STQ form in one submission was around 750. Thus, we rounded up.).
We did make a change to the backend of the service. We updated the algorithm we use to return reference links. We think it’s an improvement. Let us know how you find it.

What’s remaining the same?

Core functionality. It’s all in the name. Retrieve DOIs for journal articles, books, and chapters by cutting and pasting a reference or reference list into a simple query box.
PubMed ID matching. You use it. You need it. We’re keeping it.
Deposits. You’ll still need an email address for this, but we won’t ask for it until you’re at the deposit screen.
The interface. We’re still eager to give the user interface a much-needed refresh, but, as many users pointed out to us, there’s still some core functionality that’s important that we need to retain with any interface update. For instance, you need to be able to easily copy and paste reference links into your reference list. That functionality isn’t going anywhere.
Resetting reference links. Submit references, match, reset, and repeat. Many users like the reset button. It’s not going anywhere either.

XML queries

The change to the backend of the service that I mentioned above is not confined to reference matching and depositing for STQ users. XML queries for reference matching are also now powered by that new backend. We think it’s a seamless transition, but if you find it is not, please let us know.

I’m excited for these changes and hope you are too. I invite you to try the simpler and improved STQ form, and let us know what you think.

Quarterly deposit invoices: avoiding surprises

Isaac Farley — Wed, 10 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Whenever we send out our quarterly deposit invoices, we receive queries from members who have registered a lot of backlist content, but have been charged at the current year’s rate. As the invoices for the first quarter of 2019 have recently hit your inboxes, I thought I’d provide a timely reminder about this in case you spot this problem on your invoice.

This problem is usually the result of metadata being registered that makes it look as though the content was current, despite the fact that it was backlist. This post will show you what to do if you spot this problem in your latest invoice - and more importantly, how you can avoid this situation in the future.

About current and backlist Content Registration fees

There are different fees for registering content depending on whether it’s current (this year and the previous two years - 2017, ‘18, and ‘19) or backlist (older than that). As an example, it’s $1 each for a current journal article, and $0.15 for each backlist article. So, if you’ve incorrectly registered your content as published in 2019 when actually it was published in 2012, your quarterly invoice will overcharge you based on the metadata discrepancy.

We send you the quarterly deposit invoice at the end of each quarter. This example is an invoice for all deposits of the first quarter of 2018 for username ‘test’ - months January, February, and March.
The BY code represents backlist (or, back year) content (journal article, in this example). Backlist content is charged at $0.15 per content item.
The CY code represents current year content (journal article, in this example, although you can see that this invoice has charges for other content items as well). Current year content is charged at $1 per content item.

Determining whether content is current or backlist

A record is determined to be either a backlist or current year deposit based on the metadata that you deposit with us. If you use our helper tools - Metadata Manager or the web deposit form - the system looks at the information you’ve entered into the “publication date” field. If you deposit XML with us, it looks at the date in the <publication_date> element. And we look at each individual item separately—so even if you’ve put a publication date at journal level, you still need to put it at the journal article level too.

Additionally, sometimes we find that deposits mistakenly include the deposit date in place of the publication date. These two dates - the deposit date and the publication date - are not necessarily one and the same, especially if you are depositing backlist content. Please take care to double check this before you submit your deposit(s).

What to do if you think you’ve registered the wrong publication date

As you can only update a publication date by running a full redeposit, it’s important to get it right the first time. If you’ve registered the wrong publication date and have received an invoice for the wrong amount, please redeposit your content and then get in contact with us. If you do this as soon as you spot the error, we’ll be able to send a new invoice for the correct amount.

Before, during, and after - a journey through title transfers

Isaac Farley — Mon, 25 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In January, I wrote about how we’ve simplified the journal title transfer process using our new Metadata Manager tool. For those disposing publishers looking for an easy, do-it-yourself option for transferring ownership of your journal, I suggest you review that blog post. But, whether you choose to process the transfer yourself via Metadata Manager or need some help from Paul, Shayn, or myself, there’s more to a transfer than just the click of a transfer button or the submission of an email to support@crossref.org, as I’m sure those of you who have been through a title transfer can attest.

Prepping your title transfer

Sometimes members get on the other side of a title transfer and find you’re encountering problems even if you followed the process for transferring titles. You might find you can register new content for the new title against your own prefix without any issues. But you are not able to update the metadata for back-year records after we’ve made the transfer.

When we investigate, the problem is usually that the DOIs you’re trying to update don’t exist in our system yet. This means the deposit isn’t considered an update to the content, it’s considered a new deposit. And you don’t have permission to do that, since you’re effectively attempting to register new content to a prefix that is not your own.

This problem is because the former publisher didn’t ever register the DOIs with us - even though they’ve been displaying them on their website. This is bad practice and isn’t in keeping with our membership terms, but it does sometimes happen.

Before you request a title transfer, do check with the former publisher that they’ve definitely registered all the DOIs that they’ve been displaying and distributing to their readership. You can spot check this yourself by following a few of the DOI links and checking that they resolve to the right place. If you want a full list of DOIs registered to a journal title, our depositor reports are the place to start. Depositor Reports list all DOIs deposited for a title on a publisher-by-publisher basis. Or, alternatively, if you know the journal cite ID, the unique internal, Crossref identifier for the journal, you can bypass the publisher-by-publisher title list (in my example you’d need to replace my fictional 123456 journal ID with your journal’s cite ID):

`http://data.crossref.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/depositorreport?pubid=J123456`

Top tips for a pain-free title transfer

If your organisation has gained new titles, you’ve checked the depositor report for your new journal and are happy that all the existing DOIs have been registered, then you’re ready to process the transfer. Here are three key steps to ensure a pain-free transfer.

If you are not acquiring all existing journal articles as part of this transfer, you’ll need to contact us at support@crossref.org to confirm the details. Once we have those details sorted, we’ll transfer ownership for the select, specified articles.
Carefully check the existing metadata associated with your new titles - some metadata provided for text and data mining or Similarity Check are publisher-specific and must be updated or removed when content is acquired by another member.
If the metadata supplied is fine, you just need to update the URLs to direct DOIs to your content. You can do this by sending us a URL update file or by redepositing the metadata with the correct URLs.

If you need to update more than the URLs, you should redeposit the metadata with the correct information plus the correct URLs.

Note: If you, as the disposing publisher, are prepared to transfer your journal to an acquiring publisher, and would like to transfer ownership of the journal and all existing journal articles, please try your new title transfer via Metadata Manager.

On the other side

If you follow the steps I’ve outlined above, you should get to the other side of your title transfer with few problems and are likely to encounter smooth metadata seas ahead. That said, some of our members follow these steps to a tee and still are faced with occasional transfer-related problems.

Perhaps the previous journal owner used a different scheme to assign timestamps and now you’re receiving mysterious timestamp errors when you deposit. Or, that same previous owner made a mistake with a previous deposit and accidentally submitted more than one journal title record. Or, you encounter a strange, new error in Metadata Manager when working with your new titles (yes, we’re still in beta!). If so, please reach out to us at support@crossref.org and we’ll help solve what are surely confounding problems, since you’ve undoubtedly read this post in its entirety and taken heed of the above advice.

As always, if you have questions, need guidance as you’re working through this process, or have recommendations on how we can improve title transfers, please contact us at support@crossref.org.

What can often change, but always stays the same?

Isaac Farley — Thu, 24 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Hello. Isaac here again to talk about what you can tell just by looking at the prefix of a DOI. Also, as we get a lot of title transfers at this time of year, I thought I’d clarify the difference between a title transfer and a prefix transfer, and the impact of each.

When you join Crossref, you are provided with a unique prefix, you then add suffixes of your choice to your prefix and this creates the DOIs for your content.

It’s a logical step then to assume you can tell just by looking at a DOI prefix who the current publisher is—but that’s not always the case. Things can (and often do) change. Individual journals get purchased by other publishers, and whole organisations get bought and sold.

What you can tell from looking at a DOI prefix is who originally registered it, but not necessarily who it currently belongs to. That’s because if a journal (or whole organisation) is acquired, DOIs don’t get deleted and re-registered to the new owner. The update will of course be reflected in the relevant metadata, but the prefix itself will stay the same. It never changes—and that’s the whole point, that’s what makes the DOI persistent.

Here’s a breakdown of how this works internally at Crossref:

Title transfers

Member A acquires a single title from member B. We transfer the title (and all relevant reports) over to member A. Member A must then register new content for that journal on their own prefix. The existing (newly acquired) DOIs maintain the ‘old’ prefix but member A can update metadata against these existing DOIs for that journal. Back-year and current DOIs for that journal may, therefore, have different prefixes—and that’s OK!

Organisation transfers

Member C acquires member D. We move the entire prefix (and all relevant reports) over to Member C, and close down Member D’s account with Crossref. Member C can continue to register DOIs on member D’s prefix (the original prefix) if they want to, or they can use their own existing prefix. So again, back-year and current records for that journal may have different prefixes.

And, if Member C uses a service provider to register metadata on their behalf, we will simply enable their username to work with the prefix.

It’s now easier to transfer titles

We’ve recently made the process of transferring journal titles a lot easier with our new Content Registration tool, Metadata Manager.

Resolutions 2019: Journal Title Transfers = Metadata Manager

Isaac Farley — Thu, 03 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

UPDATE, 12 December 2022
Due to the scheduled sunsetting of Metadata Manager, this title transfer process has been deprecated. Please find detailed guidance for transferring titles on our documentation site here.

When you thought about your resolutions for 2019, Crossref probably didn’t cross your mind—but, maybe it should have…

Because we know—with a high level of certainty—that Shayn, Paul and I will be spending the first few weeks of the year transferring the ownership of many journal titles. Last year we processed almost 60 journal transfer requests during this time, and we’re heading toward a similar number for 2019. There’s no objection; it’s a just a fact. We’re happy to do it, but there is another way.

Unlike previous years, we now have a tool that gives you the control to transfer titles without any intervention from the Crossref support team—Metadata Manager. With just a few clicks, you, as the disposing publisher, can transfer your journal to the acquiring publisher yourself. Here’s how:

Transferring your journal in five easy steps using Metadata Manager:

Log into Metadata Manager using your username and password (the same one you use for the Crossref Web Deposit form).

Find the journal you’re transferring on your Metadata Manager workspace using the “search publications” box and click to load the journal’s container (or, dashboard).

Within the journal container, select Transfer Title from the Action drop-down.

On the transfer title screen select the acquiring (destination) publisher’s name and DOI prefix of where ownership will be transferred to. Click Transfer.

(In addition to transferring ownership of the title itself, all existing journal article DOIs previously registered will also be transferred to the new owner using this mechanism. They will persist on their original prefix, but the acquiring publisher will be able to update the metadata associated with these DOIs).

Confirm the title transfer. It may take up to 24 hours for the transfer to be reflected within Metadata Manager, and we’ll send a courtesy email to the acquiring (destination) publisher’s technical contact when the transfer has been completed.

As always, if you have questions, need guidance as you’re working through this process, or have recommendations on how we can improve title transfers—or anything else within Metadata Manager (the tool is in beta)–please let us know at support@crossref.org. There’s also comprehensive support documentation available for Metadata Manager to help and guide you.

Newly approved membership terms will replace existing agreement

Ginny Hendricks — Wed, 05 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In its July 2018 meeting, the Crossref Board voted unanimously to approve and introduce a new set of membership terms. At the same meeting, the board also voted to change the description of membership eligibility in our Bylaws, officially broadening our remit beyond publishers, in line with current practice and positioning us for future growth.

Tl;dr

It’s a very good thing to have clearer terms; we want everyone to understand what Crossref is about and what you’re getting into. It’s a material change so we will be notifying members by direct email in December. Nobody needs to sign anything as the new terms are not signed, but are click-through acceptances on application, and that process is already in effect for new applicants. The new terms come into effect on 1st March 2019 for existing members and no action is needed.

If you’re a sponsored member you’ll have a slightly adapted message soon as we work with your sponsor.
If you’re an NGO or US State Actor you will receive a slightly adapted message.

This post is for background explanation and information. We will email existing members directly, but no acceptance or signature—nor any action—will be needed.

Why are we updating the terms?

Being almost 20 years old the old agreement is out-of-date with current practice and technology, and has become quite long and confusing, especially for applicants for whom English is not their first language. Specific reasons include:

1. To improve efficiency

Over the years we’ve had feedback that our application process is too long and involved. The membership agreement used to be signed manually by each new Crossref member, often days after they applied. We also now process around 180 new members each month which is too many for a wholly manual process managed by just one person.

2. To clarify the wording

People would tell us that the agreement is too long and confusing, especially when English is not their first language. There are often questions about the “legalese” style of language that takes up too much time in back-and-forth discussions to ensure everyone has understood. Also, the main structure of the agreement has been in place for over a decade and needs updating to avoid confusion and to align with up-to-date language, services, technologies, and current practices.

3. To emphasize the community aspect and our members’ obligations

It is quite a commitment to participate fully in Crossref, and we want people to understand up-front what their obligations are as part of the collective membership. And also to realize what value they are receiving as well as contributing to other members. We needed clearer terms so that every organisation can understand what they are getting into.

Additionally, moving from signing contracts to click-through acceptance of standard terms emphasizes that Crossref is not a service provider or vendor. We are a not-for-profit community organisation. We don’t have the resources to negotiate and keep track of individual custom agreements.

What’s changing, step-by-step

We consulted with former and current legal counsel, the Membership & Fees Committee, and also with the M&F organisations individually. We have also absorbed a lot of feedback from many other members of all kinds and sizes.

For new members

The manually-signed membership agreement has already—for new members— been turned into a set of click-through terms that organisations agree to as part of the initial application process. It is no longer a separate document that needs to be signed or countersigned. This will simplify the application process for both new applicants and our staff.

For existing members

The new membership terms will come into effect for existing members on March 1st, 2019. Because this is a material change to the terms, we will be emailing members with more information but it’s important to note that no action is necessary from existing members. The new terms will replace the old terms automatically.

The table below sets out clause-by-clause the precise changes. Here is the 2018 membership agreement and the new terms in full.

The nitty-gritty details

Topic	New section	Old section	Summary of change(s)
Overall			Eliminates legalese in favor of plain English. Updates defined terms to current usage. Shifts from execution by signature to acceptance by affirmative action.
Introduction	Background	1	Updates description of Crossref’s activities to be current. Provides for a new applicant’s acceptance of Terms upon acceptance of application by Crossref and payment of first annual fee.
Members’ rights	1	2(a)	Streamlines wording; eliminates reference to right to recommend working committee members.
Members’ obligations	2	2(b)	Significant revision. Old 2(b) mentioned only payment of fees and appointment of a contact person. New Sec. 2 aims to capture all of a Member’s operational obligations in one place.
Metadata deposits	2(a), (b)	3(a)(i)	Updates language regarding metadata deposits to current terminology and practice.
Rights to content	2(c)	15	Streamlines wording.
Registering identifiers	2(d)	3(a)ii)	Streamlines the language around registering identifiers.
Linking	2(e)	3(a)(iii)	States, in clearer language, the obligation to embed identifiers.
Reference linking	2(f)	3(a)(iv)	Eliminates outdated provision on Cross-Linking; replaces with a best efforts covenant to engage in Reference Linking.
Display identifiers	2(g)	N/A	Adds an obligation to comply with Crossref’s display guidelines and ensure each identifier is hyperlinked to be citable.
Maintaining and updating metadata	2(h)	3(b)	Streamlines language. Adds obligation to maintain the URL and the accuracy of identifier data. Adds common examples of failure to maintain and update metadata.
Archiving	2(i)	3(d)	Adds link to examples of third-party archive providers. Adds option for Crossref to point to a “defunct DOI” page. Inserts best efforts obligation to contract with a third-party archive.
Content-specific obligations	2(j)	N/A	Adds reference to Crossref’s record type rules and obligation to comply.
Fees	3	2(b)	Old agreement referred generally to “all membership dues and any charges or fees as established by the Board from time to time and set forth on the PILA Site.” New Section 3 aims to summarize the categories of fees associated with membership, including a reference to service fees for optional services if and when elected by the Member. Adds Member obligation to cover wire transfer fees/other payment costs.
General license	4(a)	4	Clarifies that the license grant covers only metadata and identifiers “corresponding to such Member’s Content.”
Metadata rights & limitations	4(b)	5	Significantly streamlines wording.
Crossref’s IP	4(c)	6	Significantly streamlines wording.
Distribution of metadata	5	9(b)	Updates language regarding Crossref’s rights to distribute Metadata. Adds an explicit carveout for a Member’s reference distribution preference.
	N/A	7, 8, 9(a)	Deletes extensive provision relating to obsolete “Clean-Up” and “Reverse Look-Up” services. Deletes provisions relating to obsolete “caching and transfer” activities, and local hosting.
Use of marks	6	10	Substantially rewritten, including to reflect Crossref’s more permissive approach to use of its logo.
Maintenance of the Crossref Infrastructure	7	[No analog.]	Adds covenant of Crossref to maintain the Crossref Infrastructure.
Term	8	11	Eliminates the concept of automatically renewing 12-month terms. Replaces with a perpetual term that continues until superseded by an amended version.
Termination of membership	9(a)	11	Provides for termination by the member upon written notice, rather than 90 days’ written notice, to align with the Bylaws. Adds a for-cause termination right by the Member, and corresponding right to receive a refund of fees. Sets out certain bases for termination of membership by Crossref, consistent with the Bylaws.
Appeal rights	9(b)	13	No material change.
Effect of termination of membership	9(c)	12	Adds refund right for for-cause terminations.
Enforcement	10	13	Replaces “Crossref has the right but not the obligation to enforce the terms of this Agreement …” with “Crossref shall take reasonable steps to enforce these Terms … .”
Governing law; venue	11	14(a)	Keeps New York as choice of law, but moves forum to Boston, nearer to Crossref’s US location.
Disputes	12	14(b)	No material change (but note venue provision moved to 11(a)).
	N/A	15	Eliminates mutual “warranty” provision; addresses rights to content and anti-infringement under other provisions.
Indemnification	13	16	Removes concept that Member is indemnifying other Crossref Members. Streamlines and cleans up the indemnity language.
Limitation of Liability	14	17	Adds explicit reference to the Crossref Infrastructure.
Assignment	16(c)	22	Removed language providing that Crossref’s consent to assignment of the Terms shall not be unreasonably delayed or conditioned.
Amendment	18	2(c)	Old: “The Board shall have the power to modify the terms of this Agreement by publishing amended versions that will automatically supersede prior versions … . PILA will use its reasonable discretion in deciding if a modification is material, and if so will provide written notice” to the Member of the material changes. New: “These Terms may be amended by Crossref, via updated Terms posted on the Website and emailed to each Member not less than sixty (60) days prior to effectiveness. By using the Crossref Infrastructure after the effective date of any such amendment hereto, the Member accepts the amended Terms.”
Data privacy	19	N/A	Adds a GDPR-compliant privacy provision; adds a linked reference to Crossref’s new Privacy Policy.
Compliance	20	N/A	Adds a mutual compliance covenant and an OFAC/sanctions representation.
Various legal “boilerplate” terms (taxes, waiver, independent contractor	15-17	18-28	Streamlined; replaced with more contemporary formulations; eliminated some excess verbiage.

Thanks for reading this far!

Please contact our member experience team with any questions.

It’s not about the money, money, money.

Amy Bosworth — Thu, 18 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

But actually, sometimes it is about the money. As a not-for-profit membership organisation that is obsessed with persistence, we have a duty to remain sustainable and manage our finances in a responsible way. Our annual audit is incredibly thorough, and our outside auditors and Board-based Audit committee consistently report that we’re in good shape.

Our Membership & Fees committee regularly reviews both membership fees and Content Registration fees for a growing range of research outputs. Together with our staff, the Board regularly reviews financial projections that inform our budgeting process and approve our budget each year.

Financial sustainability means the persistence of our infrastructure and services

We run a tight ship here at Crossref. We have to. So it’s not ideal when we have to chase members and users for late payments, but it’s an important part of keeping the organisation afloat, and keeping our dedicated service to scholarly communications running. And that’s my job at Crossref.

Working here for over six years now, I’ve seen a lot of development in our finance department. We strive as a team to always improve our communication with members and users to deliver the best ‘customer’ experience. To do this, we are always tweaking our processes to improve efficiency and accuracy, and welcome all feedback.

How the invoice schedule works

Our annual membership invoices are sent out each January, and our Content Registration invoices are generated four times a year, each quarter. All invoices are emailed to the billing contact for your organisation (please be sure to update us with any contact changes!) and have a due date of net 45 days. Our invoices now have a “pay now” link in the body of the email. This offers a faster and more convenient way for you to pay, simply by clicking on the link to our payment portal. You can also view invoices as PDFs in the payment portal. An important part of our accounting process is the automated invoice reminder schedule. There are three billing reminders we send by email:

The day immediately after the invoice due date;
21 days past the invoice due date; and
45 days past the invoice due date.

We don’t want to see you go!

We understand there are many factors that can make prompt payment a challenge for some people: international transfer delays or fees; funding for your publishing operations may end; change of contacts; problems receiving our emails.

When an account is 90 days past due, a further email notifies you that your service is at risk of suspension. If an account is then suspended for non-payment it becomes at risk of being ‘terminated’. Once an account has been terminated, you will need to contact our membership specialist to rejoin Crossref. Please note that we send numerous notifications/reminders before suspension or termination takes place (we don’t want to see you go!). We can always be reached at billing@crossref.org for any invoice inquiries you may have.

Tips that work for other users

There are some things you can do to speed-up or simplify payments:

Pay with a credit card, using our online payment portal. This is fast, convenient, and lower in fees
Always reference an invoice number on the payment to ensure that it’s applied to your account efficiently
Be sure to make billing@crossref.org a ‘safe’ email address, so that you receive our invoices and reminders
Always keep us up-to-date with any contact changes at your organisation, to ensure that we have accurate information for invoicing and other communication
We recommend giving us a generic email address for your accounts payable team, such as accounts@publisher.com so that if somebody leaves that job, invoices can still get through.

Thanks for working with us! Please let me know in the comments below if you have any feedback or additional tips for your fellow Crossref community members.

A wrap up of the Crossref blog series for SciELO

Christine Cormack Wood — Fri, 05 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Crossref member SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online), based in Brazil, celebrated two decades of operation last week with a three-day event The SciELO 20 Years Conference.

The celebration constituted an important landmark in SciELO’s evolution, and an exceptional moment for them to promote the advancement of an inclusive, global approach to scholarly communication and to the open access movement.

As part of the anniversary activities SciELO asked us to write a series of five blogs that would help the organisations of Brazil to better understand the following:

Why all articles should have a DOI
The critical role of the DOI
The basics of record types, translations, preprints, Crossmark, and more
The basics of Crossref sponsorship, and
How to make the most of your Crossref membership

Below you’ll find an abstract of each of these blog posts as well as a link to the published posts in Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish and English.

Why all articles should have a DOI
In today’s world, an author’s work needs a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for it to become discoverable, citable, and linkable. This unique alphanumeric string identifies the content of a research work, and remains associated with it irrespective of changes to its web location. Discover the origins of the DOI, how Crossref was founded, and why they continue to exist and persist.

Read the full blog in Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, or English

The critical role of the DOI
Find out why URL links to research articles are fragile, and how DOIs are essential in building stable, persistent links between research objects. This is achieved through the metadata that members deposit with Crossref, as part of their obligations. Learn how we can all contribute to creating a global, robust research record.

Read the full blog in Spanish or English

The basics of record types: Preprints, Crossmark, translations, and more
What’s the difference between preprints and ahead of print? When should you use each; and, what are the DOI requirements? This article answers those questions and provides a basic overview of how to connect the metadata records of related record types, like translations.

Read the full blog in Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, or English

The basics of Crossref sponsorship
There are many organisations that want to register content and benefit from the services Crossref provides, but may not be able to do so alone. These organisations use sponsors. Sponsors are organisations who publish on behalf of groups of smaller organisations. Nearly 650 of our 800 Brazilian members are represented by such a sponsor.

Read the full blog in Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, or English

How to make the most of your Crossref membership
Since Crossref was founded in 2000, its member organisations have registered metadata and persistent identifiers (DOIs) for over 100 million content items. This information is used extensively by the research community—individuals and organisations—who need to find, cite, link and assess research outputs. As a SciELO member, the metadata you provide to Crossref when you register content is key to the discoverability of your journal content.

Read the full blog in Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, or English

Membership on Crossref

Strengthening community connections in São Paulo

Português version

Reflections from Bangkok

Charleston Asia conference - a reminder of the importance of infrastructure

The importance of metadata for Asian scholarship - our panel at Charleston Asia

Crossref Bangkok - a reminder of the importance of visibility

Visiting the National Library of Thailand - a reminder of the importance of stewardship

A spotlight on our community in Indonesia

Translation in Bahasa Indonesia

The GEM program - Year Three and program expansion for 2026

Overview of the first 3 years of GEM

Program expansion in 2026

Highlights of a very busy year: our 2025 annual report

Strategic theme 1: Contribute to an environment where the community identifies and co-creates solutions for broad benefit

Enhanced tools and services

Deprecations and modernisation

Eating our own DOI dogfood

Community connections

Strategic theme 2: A sustainable source of complete, open, and global scholarly metadata and relationships

Schema developments

Public data file

Inaugural Metadata Awards

Metadata Matching project

Data infrastructure and Research Nexus participation dashboard

Retraction Watch integration

Metadata API and services improvements

Strategic theme 3: Manage Crossref openly and sustainably, modernising and making transparent all operations so that we are accountable to the communities that govern us

Infrastructure modernisation

RCFS Projects

Membership growth, efficiencies, and accessibility

Growth by the numbers

Organisational sustainability

Open governance through board election and annual meeting

Strategic theme 4: Foster a strong team—because reliable infrastructure needs committed people who contribute to and realise the vision, and thrive doing it

Team structure

New staff and new roles

Supporting a thriving global culture

Some things are big because they are small – the new fee tier for Crossref members takes effect

Version in Español

Algunas cosas son grandes porque son pequeñas: la nueva tarifa para los miembros de Crossref entra en vigencia

Crossref members over the years: a journey through space and time

2005

2005 at a glance

2010

2010 at a glance

2015

2015 at a glance

2020

2020 at a glance

2025

November 2025 at a glance

Changes over the years

2026 and beyond

Destacando nuestra comunidad en Colombia

English version

A spotlight on our community in Colombia

Notice of amendments to Crossref membership terms and bylaws

Link to updated membership terms and link to updated bylaws

Changes to the membership terms

Changes to the bylaws

Reflections from Crossref Accra 2025 - Strengthening open science and partnerships in Ghana

Supporting Membership through the Sponsor Program

Growing number of sponsors

Sponsor growth by country by year

Benefits of the Sponsor Program

Ensuring quality experience for our members

In summary

The GEM program - Year Two 2024

Number of Crossref GEM members by country:

Number of Crossref members in GEM Program Countries

The GEM program - year one

We’re hiring! New technical, community, and membership roles at Crossref

Working at Crossref

Refocusing our Sponsors Program; a call for new Sponsors in specific countries

Introducing our new Global Equitable Membership (GEM) program

Existing Crossref members in GEM-eligible countries

ISR part two: How our membership approach helps to preserve the integrity of the scholarly record

Who can become a Crossref member and do we check new applicants?

The importance of keeping barriers to entry low