7 minute read.Fee update: lowering and removing DOI registration fees in January 2027
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.
What’s changing
1. Most Content Registration fees are reduced from January 2027. We’re simplifying record fees to just a few price points: most records currently priced at USD 1.00—journal articles, conference papers, book titles, dissertations, working papers, grants—will move to USD 0.95, and records at USD 0.25—book chapters, posted content (including preprints), and first peer reviews—will move to USD 0.20. Components and datasets stay at USD 0.06. One fee goes up slightly in the name of simplification: standards move from USD 0.15 to USD 0.20.
Simplification isn’t an end in itself, either: fewer price points take us towards one of our stated goals: making fees more predictable. Simplifying our fees from 16 different prices down to three means organisations can more easily estimate their costs and will allow us to offer a fee calculator in the future.
| Record type (current-year) | Current fee | From January 2027 |
|---|
| Journal article | USD 1.00 | USD 0.95 |
| Conference paper | USD 1.00 | USD 0.95 |
| Book title | USD 1.00 | USD 0.95 |
| Dissertation | USD 1.00 | USD 0.95 |
| Working paper / technical report | USD 1.00 | USD 0.95 |
| Grant / award / use of facilities | USD 1.00 | USD 0.95 |
| Book chapter | USD 0.25 | USD 0.20 |
| Posted content (incl. preprints) | USD 0.25 | USD 0.20 |
| Peer review (first only) | USD 0.25 | USD 0.20 |
| Standard | USD 0.15 | USD 0.20 |
| Component | USD 0.06 | USD 0.06 (no change) |
| Dataset | USD 0.06 | USD 0.06 (no change) |
2. All fees for back-year records are removed. Back-year records are works produced more than two full years ago (so in 2027, anything published in 2024 or earlier). Starting in January 2027, registering them will be free for all record types. We started piloting this approach with the back-year fee waiver for grant records introduced this January, and we’re now extending it to all members and all record types.
This is arguably the bigger of the two changes. For repositories, archives, national libraries, and other high-volume, low-budget collections—some of whom have told us plainly that Crossref was beyond their budgets—the cost of bringing decades of holdings into the scholarly record drops to zero. It also matters for existing members who haven’t had the chance to register historical records over the years, for archival digitisation projects, and for members absorbing another organisation’s unregistered backlist.
Why lower fees instead of continuing to invest?
Four reasons:
1. It’s not an either/or; we can reduce fees and invest.
We should be direct about scale and related plans: in consultation, members large and small told us frankly that a change from USD 1.00 to USD 0.95 wasn’t going to make a difference to them. We agree that five cents will not transform anyone’s budget. But it is a big change for Crossref, given our aim of deliberately reducing future surpluses in the years ahead and it signals our direction of travel.
2. It’s the responsible thing to do.
Crossref is in a healthy financial position. Revenue has grown steadily, through the growing volume of records registered with us and the long tail of thousands of new members rather than price rises. We met our target of holding twelve months’ operating expenses in reserve in 2023, and have run surpluses each year since. This puts us in the fortunate position of being able to lower our fees and still support our expenses. We act on our members’ behalf, so when revenue runs too far ahead of what’s needed to healthily run the organisation, the savings should find their way back to members. We’re also investing surplus funds into our systems and into community initiatives, through the framework our board agreed in November 2025; adjusting fees now is the other half of the same approach.
The combined changes are projected to reduce our Content Registration revenue by roughly USD 760K in 2027, around 5% of our total forecasted revenue. This is an intentional and manageable contraction, with growth in membership and record volumes expected to carry revenue forward from there, based on our 10-year revenue growth trend.
Taken as a package—alongside yesterday’s announcement of a major investment in redesigning our system—we think it’s a strong message from an open infrastructure: financial sustainability is a target to hit and maintain, and managing our finances responsibly and transparently is our obligation to the community.
3. It helps all members—and welcomes those we’ve been missing.
Nearly every member will pay less per record from 2027. And for the archives and repositories that register a great deal but operate on very little, free back-year registration removes what they’ve told us was the barrier to participating in Crossref at all.
4. It builds the Research Nexus.
More back-year records mean more raw material for our matching techniques, filling in more of the gaps and relationships in the scholarly record—citations, funding, affiliations, versions—which is a key goal. The record didn’t start two years ago, and neither should the metadata.
It was never just about the DOIs
It’s worth restating while we’re talking about per-record fees: registering a DOI has never really been the point. What members are paying for—and what the community gets—is the connective tissue of the scholarly record: 185 million records, more than two billion citation links, and metadata relationships spanning funding, affiliations, versions, and corrections—all matched and openly available to everyone through our APIs. It’s the metadata and the relationships, at that reach and scale, that turn a set of PIDs into a connected scholarly record. In fact, “PIDs are a means to an end” is the first of the six key positions in our new position paper on PIDs in research infrastructure policy, published this week.
The RCFS story so far
These decisions don’t stand alone; they’re the latest step in a program of work grounded in the fee principles our Board adopted in 2019 and formalised as RCFS following the July 2023 board meeting. The aims have stayed constant throughout: making fees more equitable, simplifying our complex fee schedule, and rebalancing revenue sources.
What’s next
The RCFS project continues. Work remains on rebalancing revenue from the use of our metadata (including Metadata Plus fees), on normalising the annual membership fee structure for our funder members, on the fee calculator mentioned above, and on monitoring the effects of all of these changes, including whether free back-year registration does what we hope it will for the completeness of the scholarly record.
As ever, Board motions are publicly available and summarised on our blog.
We’ll be discussing these changes and other directions of travel for Crossref and the Research Nexus at our annual meeting and board election, Crossref2026, on October 22nd. Save the date and join us there.
Our thanks go to our internal team and the Membership & Fees Committee for the hours spent scrutinising data and asking questions on the community’s behalf. Questions and comments are welcome in the comments below or in the dedicated RCFS category on the community forum, or email us via feedback@crossref.org anytime.
