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.
Pending publication is a way of creating a DOI and depositing metadata for a content item any time after a manuscript has been accepted but before it is published online. This is possible for all standard record types (such as articles, books, conference proceedings).
Because a pending publication has not yet been published, its DOI will resolve to a publicly-available Crossref-hosted landing page. Once the work is published online, this same DOI will resolve to the URL for that content.
The pending publication record type serves as a temporary placeholder for your content - like a “coming soon” or preview of the great work to come. For a pending publication, you register basic metadata for your content item before registering all the formal metadata that comes with a version of record. Take care not to share a DOI before it has been deposited with us, or it will not resolve for your readers, and will lead to a failed resolution in your resolution report. Learn more about the pending publication consultation.
Use cases for pending publication
Before the pending publication record type existed, we recommended you to register DOIs at the time content was published online, or shortly after. As the communication needs of our members (researchers, funders, institutions, and publishers) evolve, we have created this new solution to aid you and your work, and allow you to register DOIs before content is published online. With pending publication:
Members can:
address timing issues related to press embargos
publicly establish scholarly precedence for their articles
meet the conditions in full for new funder policies and mandates, which focus on acceptance as a key event to report on
ensure that institutional repositories use the DOI to link to the member-stewarded copy
Researchers can provide formal evidence of all publications in employment and grant applications
Funders can fully track all publications funded by their research grants
Institutions can fully track the scholarly output of their faculty members
Technology vendors that support scholarly research management can account for all outputs
How does pending publication work?
When registering your publication as pending there are two things you need to do:
Register a subset of the metadata (as a minimum: member name, journal title, and accepted date) under the Pending Publication record type.
After you do this, the DOI will resolve to a Crossref-hosted landing page displaying your logo, a banner showing the manuscript has been accepted for publication, and the metadata you’ve provided. As with all registered content, pending publication metadata will be publicly available in our XML API (and updated as you update your metadata records). Unfortunately, we do not yet support pending publications in our REST API.
Once your work is published, you need to register the full metadata for the work - this is not an automatic process. You must update the metadata for each pending publication DOI, so that each DOI will resolve directly to the content (and not the pending publication landing page).
Pending publication workflow diagram
Crossmark participants please note that you can deposit Crossmark metadata at any point, but during the Beta version of the pending publication rollout, the Crossmark badge will not be displayed to readers.
Fees for pending publications
Content Registration (metadata deposit) fees still apply, but there are no additional fees for using pending publication. So, you’ll be charged once when you register the pending publication, but any subsequent updates, including the update on publication, are not charged.
History
Pending publication has been supported since 2019 and was designed in response to community feedback:
