In December 2026, we plan to publish new Crossref Member Practices which will set out the standards we expect all Crossref members to meet. From August to October 2026 we are consulting with our members on a draft of these Member Practices. This blog provides the background to this, and explains how you can share your views.
In response to community concerns, in July 2025 our Board decided to update our Member Terms to require members to follow a broader set of Member Practices. As these are now drafted by a dedicated working group, we invite feedback on these draft Member Practices from all of our community by 9th of October 2026. Read on to learn more about the aims and development process of the Member Practices, and the different ways to offer your feedback.
Crossref membership is open to organisations that produce professional and scholarly materials and content. All members have agreed to our member terms, which outline both the benefits of membership and the responsibilities that come with it. We deliberately keep barriers to membership low, and we donât assess the quality of our membersâ outputs or the integrity of the research process as this isnât part of our mission.
Instead, our role is to preserve the integrity of the scholarly record in a specific way. Our members can create and share Crossref DOIs â unique and persistent identifiers and metadata records for the objects they produce. These metadata records are openly shared through our free APIs, allowing the global scholarly community to discover, connect, and evaluate research.
Each DOI and metadata record confirms that an item has been published, provides a persistent link to the content, and identifies the organisation responsible for both the publication and the metadata. Members are encouraged to include rich information about their recordsâsuch as reference links, ORCID iDs for authors, ROR IDs for affiliations, funding information, licensing details, and other metadataâthat provides evidence of their publishing practices and helps place their outputs within the scholarly record.
This information allows others to assess a publisher, its processes, and its content. A DOI itself is therefore not a mark of quality or endorsement - it simply confirms that an item has been published and provides metadata that can be considered alongside other trust signals when evaluating the content or the publisher. As we explained in our blog ISR part one: What is our role in preserving the integrity of the scholarly record?:
“Crossref is focused on enriching metadata to provide more and better trust signals while keeping barriers to membership and participation as low as possible to enable an inclusive scholarly record.”
Our member terms have always required our members to keep their DOI records active, accurate, and up-to-date. Members are responsible for:
Over the past several years, conversations with the scholarly community have shown that people are interested not only in the metadata our members provide, but also in members’ broader practices. The community has continued to ask what Crossref can do when a member is not following responsible or ethical practices.
We also recognise that part of our role is helping members understand what it means to participate in the Crossref community. As we explained in ISR part two: How our membership approach helps to preserve the integrity of the scholarly record:
âInclusivity is very important to us - after all, one of our organisational truths (the guiding principles for everything we do) is âcome one, come allâ, and this is mirrored in the POSI principles that commit us to broad stakeholder representation. We know that for new organisations, it may take them a while to be able to completely fulfil the membership obligations. We support them with information to help them understand what being a participant in the Crossref community entails. These organisations would have less of a chance of developing better practices if we were to limit membership in Crossref to âprovenâ candidates.â
With this in mind, we decided to develop a set of Crossref Member Practices to clearly describe the expectations of membership. Our aim is to help our diverse members understand what responsible participation in the Crossref community looks like, regardless of organisation type, region of the world, or discipline. Additionally, where we see an ongoing pattern of non-compliance, particularly if a member does not make reasonable efforts to improve after concerns have been raised, this set of practices offers clear grounds for suspending or ultimately revoking their Crossref membership. We wanted to be clear that deceptive or fraudulent practices are not acceptable for Crossref members.
In July 2025, we updated our Member Terms to require members to follow new Member Practices. Since January 2026, weâve been working in consultation with the Crossref Member Practices Working Group to develop the practices collaboratively. The working group brings together research integrity experts and scholarly sleuths at publishers, institutions, funders, and community organisations, including COPE and DOAJ. Together, they have shared different perspectives and challenges, helping to shape practical recommendations for the Member Practices. We would like to extend our thanks to this group for all of their suggestions and efforts over the past few months.
While these recommendations are mainly based on the most common issues that have been brought to our notice by the community and largely come from journal publishing, the Member Practices are meant to be adhered to by all Crossref members. These Member Practices will also be reviewed annually with the aim of updating them in line with trends that we notice in the community.
Throughout the groupâs discussions, the group has also been clear about what will not change with the introduction of the Member Practices.
We are still unable to get involved in individual instances of non-compliant activity, we donât intervene in legal or financial disputes between parties, and we donât assess the quality of published content or research. But where we see compelling evidence of deceptive or fraudulent activities, where there are systematic problems indicating that a member is no longer acting responsibly, or particularly if a member does not make reasonable efforts to improve after being notified of concerns, we may suspend or ultimately revoke their Crossref membership.
We invite you to read the draft Member Practices and share your feedback with us. We are keen to understand from our members whether these practices feel realistic and achievable, whether they exclude any part of the community, and if there is anything missing that needs to be included in the Member Practices. As you read the Member Practices, we encourage you to consider:
There are several ways in which you can provide your feedback on the draft:
We also plan to organise online meetings with our members representing different areas and different publishing models and output types, so look out for an invitation to those.
The final date for sharing your feedback is 9th October.
Your feedback will be used to finalise the draft of the Member Practices and we will discuss it in our Annual Meeting on 22nd of October. The finalised set of Member Practices will then be shared with the Crossref board for a final review and approval.
Share your feedback on the new Crossref Member Practices
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