Ginny Hendricks

The Crossref Board recently approved three recommendations for changes to our fees: introduction of a new lowest membership fee tier, removal of volume discounts for record registration, and normalisation of registration fees for peer reviews. The changes will be applied from January 2026.

This is the first outcome of the Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability (RCFS) program, launched in 2023, as a comprehensive effort to review all aspects of Crossref revenue and how we’re adapting to growth and the diversification of our membership. The program aims to make fees more equitable, simplify our complex fee schedule, and rebalance revenue sources.

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.

Looking back over 2024, we wanted to reflect on where we are in meeting our goals, and report on the progress and plans that affect you - our community of 21,000 organisational members as well as the vast number of research initiatives and scientific bodies that rely on Crossref metadata.

In this post, we will give an update on our roadmap, including what is completed, underway, and up next, and a bit about what’s paused and why. We’ll describe how we have been making resourcing and prioritisation decisions, including a revised management structure, and introduce new cross-functional program groups to collectively take the work forward more effectively.

Metadata is one of the most important tools needed to communicate with each other about science and scholarship. It tells the story of research that travels throughout systems and subjects and even to future generations. We have metadata for organising and describing content, metadata for provenance and ownership information, and metadata is increasingly used as signals of trust.

Following our panel discussion on the same subject at the ALPSP University Press Redux conference in May 2024, in this post we explore the idea that metadata, once considered important mostly for discoverability, is now a vital element used for evidence and the integrity of the scholarly record. We share our experiences and views on the metadata significance and workflows from the perspective of academic and university presses – thus we primarily concentrate on the context of books and journal articles.

We’re in year two of the Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability (RCFS) research. This report provides an update on progress to date, specifically on research we’ve conducted to better understand the impact of our fees and possible changes.

Crossref is in a good financial position with our current fees, which haven’t increased in 20 years. This project is seeking to future-proof our fees by:

• Making fees more equitable
• Simplifying our complex fee schedule
• Rebalancing revenue sources

In order to review all aspects of our fees, we’ve planned five projects to look into specific aspects of our current fees that may need to change to achieve the goals above. This is an update on the research and discussions that have been underway with our Membership & Fees Committee and our Board, and what we’ve learned so far in each of these areas.