As we finish celebrating our 25th anniversary, we can look back on a truly transformational year, defined by the successful delivery of several long-planned, foundational projects—as well as updates to our teams, services, and fees—that position Crossref for success over the next quarter century as essential open scholarly infrastructure. In our update at the end of 2024, we highlighted that we had restructured our leadership team and paused some projects. The changes made in 2024 positioned us for a year of getting things done in 2025. We launched cross-functional programs, modernised our systems, strengthened connections with our growing global community, and streamlined a bunch of technical and business operations while continuing to grow our staff, members, content, relationships, and community connections.
Crossref turned twenty-five this year, and our 2025 Annual Meeting became more than a celebration—it was a shared moment to reflect on how far open scholarly infrastructure has come and where we, as a community, are heading next.
Over two days in October, hundreds of participants joined online and in local satellite meetings in Madrid, Nairobi, Medan, Bogotá, Washington D.C., and London––a reminder that our community spans the globe. The meetings offered updates, community highlights, and a look at what’s ahead for our shared metadata network––including plans to connect funders, platforms, and AI tools across the global research ecosystem.
In my latest conversations with research funders, I talked with Hannah Hope, Open Research Lead at Wellcome, and Melissa Harrison, Team Leader of Literature Services at Europe PMC. Wellcome and Europe PMC are working together to realise the potential of funding metadata and the Crossref Grant Linking System for, among other things, programmatic grantee reporting. In this blog, we explore how this partnership works and how the Crossref Grant Linking System is supporting Wellcome in realising their Open Science vision.
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.
We encourage you to include references (citation lists, bibliographies, data and software citations) with all content you register. A key benefit is that they will appear in Cited-by query results. You can include references when your first register your DOI records, or you can add them to existing DOI records later. Learn more about the benefits of registering your references.
Including references (or adding them to an existing deposit) can be done by:
Crossref XML plugin for OJS: You must first enable References as a submission metadata field and then enable the Crossref reference linking plugin, to include references in your initial deposit, or add them later.
Metadata Manager: Our new Metadata Manager tool (previously known as the record registration form) has a built-in field for adding references. Learn more about how to use this tool.
Simple Text Query allows you to both find the DOIs for your references and add them to the metadata for a DOI that you have already registered with Crossref. Please note that this method will overwrite any references previously deposited for the content item - if you’ve previously added references to an item, and want to add more references using Simple Text Query, you need to include both the existing and the new references in your deposit.
If your details have been entered correctly, you will see a success message, showing that your deposit has been submitted to the system queue for processing. When the reference deposit has been submitted, you will receive an email containing the XML deposit generated by the form. After that submission has been processed (usually within minutes of your submission), you will receive a submission log by email with the results of your submission.
