It’s been said that Americans are unusual in tending to ask “Where do you work?” as an initial question upon introduction to a new acquaintance, indicating a perhaps unhealthy preoccupation with work as identity. But in the context of published research, “What is this author’s affiliation?” is a question of global importance that goes beyond just wanting to know the name – and perhaps prestige level – of the place a researcher works.
As Crossref membership continues to grow, finding ways to help organisations participate is an important part of our mission. Although Crossref membership is open to all organisations that produce scholarly and professional materials, cost and technical challenges can be barriers to joining for many.
We are pleased to announce that—effective 1st January 2026—we have made two changes to grant record registration fees that aim to accelerate adoption of Crossref’s Grant Linking System (GLS) and provide a two-year window of opportunity to increase the number and availability of open persistent grant identifiers and boost the matching of relationships with research objects.
We are very pleased to kick off the New Year with another important schema update and the news that a Grant DOI field is now supported for all record types. This means that Crossref members can explicitly include the Crossref Grant IDs as part of their DOI metadata records for publications and any other output type, accurately linking research outputs to the funding that made it possible, all through metadata. We hope that our members will leverage this to respond to recent calls for stronger funding transparency and best practices for reporting funding sources in research outputs.
A DOI may refer to a journal or book (a title-level DOI), or to a specific article or chapter.
Journals and DOIs
Like a set of nesting dolls, a journal may be made up of volumes, each containing a number of issues, each containing a number of articles. You can assign a DOI at each level, for example:
journal-level-DOI (sometimes called the title-level-DOI) 10.5555/QYPF2031. Like an ISSN, it refers to the whole journal
volume-level-DOI 10.5555/FFFU4804
issue-level-DOI 10.5555/QKLE5634
article-level-DOI 10.5555/CNBT7653
The role of the journal-level-DOI, volume-level-DOI, and issue-level-DOI is to link persistently to a point in the journal structure. These DOIs do not have any associated content, and it does not cost anything to register these DOIs.
However, article-level-DOIs do have associated content, and therefore a fee applies to register these DOIs.
Books and DOIs
Like a set of nesting dolls, a book may be made up of chapters. Again, you can assign a DOI at each level, for example:
book-level-DOI (sometimes called the title-level-DOI) 10.5555/ZAAR1365. Just like an ISBN, it refers to the whole book.
chapter-level-DOI 10.5555/TFWD2627
Both book-level-DOIs and chapter-level-DOIs have associated content, and therefore a fee applies to register these DOIs.
