Member Briefing

We have some rather unusual news to share: Crossref fees are going down again. At its meeting in Paris earlier this month, the Crossref Board approved two further recommendations from the Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability (RCFS) project: effective 1st January 2027, we will reduce the majority of Content Registration fees for all 25,000 members, and remove fees for back-year records altogether.

Content Registration fees haven’t increased in around 20 years, and this is the first significant change to them in that time—downwards. Since these fees account for the largest share of Crossref’s revenue (around 60%), and since every member registers DOI records, these changes reach further than anything we’ve announced under the RCFS project so far.

The Crossref Nominating Committee is inviting expressions of interest to join the Board of Directors of Crossref for the term starting in January 2027. The committee will gather responses from those interested and create the slate of candidates that our membership will vote on in an election in September.

Expressions of interest will be due Monday, June 22, 2026

We’re providing a summary of the board’s March 2026 meeting. At the meeting, the board reviewed progress in our key programs and initiatives, the strategic outlook for 2026, filled a vacancy on the Board, considered an additional legal entity for Crossref, and reviewed our governance structures. The resolutions are available on the dedicated section of our website, which also lists the members of the Board and offers further information about our governance.

In an ongoing effort to make more of our operations transparent, we have decided to start sharing summaries of our board meetings on the blog. We already post our board resolutions, but the summaries will give a bit more information on what the board discusses that may or may not show up on the list of resolutions.

We are pleased to announce that—effective 1st January 2026—we have made two changes to grant record registration fees that aim to accelerate adoption of Crossref’s Grant Linking System (GLS) and provide a two-year window of opportunity to increase the number and availability of open persistent grant identifiers and boost the matching of relationships with research objects.

TL;DR. Metadata Manager will be retired at the end of 2025. Over the past four years, we have been developing a new helper tool to replace it, and that tool has now reached a stage of maturity that means we will be able to switch off Metadata Manager by the end of the year.

Wednesday 22nd October 2025—Crossref, the open scholarly infrastructure nonprofit, today releases an enhanced dashboard showing metadata coverage and individual organisations’ contributions to documenting the process and outputs of scientific research in the open. The tool helps research-performing, funding, and publishing organisations identify gaps in open research information, and provides supporting evidence for movements like the Barcelona Declaration for Open Research Information, which encourages more substantial commitment to stewarding and enriching the scholarly record through open metadata.

On behalf of the Nominating Committee, I’m pleased to share the slate of candidates for the 2025 board election.

Each year we do an open call for board interest. This year, the Nominating Committee received 51 submissions from members worldwide to fill five open board seats.

We have four large member seats and one small member seat open for election in 2025. We maintain a balanced board of 8 large member seats and 8 small member seats. Size is determined based on the organization’s membership tier (small members fall in the $0-$1,650 tiers and large members in the $3,900 - $50,000 tiers).

The Crossref Nominating Committee invites expressions of interest to join the Board of Directors of Crossref for the term starting in January 2026. The committee will gather responses from those interested and create the slate of candidates that our membership will vote on in an election in September.

Expressions of interest will be due Monday, June 9th, 2025

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.