Through user experience research (UXR) initiatives that take into account our diverse membership and community, we can have a continuous, deeper understanding of the role of metadata in our members’ workflows, and ensure that our work continues to meet our community’s needs. Your support is the key to this process, and will positively impact the wider community - and if you’d like to start today, you can take part in our latest initiative: help us improve our Events page by sharing your thoughts on the page’s feedback form.
Our 2026 Community Update took place on 13 May. Two calls, one for the eastern and one for the western time zone, highlighted how our global community is growing, how we’re refining the metadata that supports trust in the scholarly record, and connecting records more effectively through our latest tools.
Funding is one of the key enablers of the research lifecycle, but has been one of the hardest parts of the scholarly record to identify, describe and connect. This is slowly changing as we have recently reached a very exciting milestone for Crossref’s Grant Linking System (GLS). What makes it remarkable is not only the numbers reached, but where the data comes from. Research funders, who joined Crossref as members, have actively contributed more than 200,000 grants to the Research Nexus (Figure 1).
We are pleased to announce the re-launch of the Crossref Service Providers Program. From today, we are accepting applications from organisations providing tools for metadata registration to Crossref members. Participation in this program is free and the application involves an accreditation process to determine eligibility and the appropriate participation tier.
As a membership organisation, Crossref supports its members to provide rich and complete metadata which facilitates integrity judgements, increases discoverability, linking among scholarly objects and activities, and improves transparency. Service providers are key collaborators in this work because they enable our members to adopt better metadata practices.
Content Registration allows members to register and update metadata via machine or human interfaces.
When you join Crossref as a member you are issued a DOI prefix. You combine this with a suffix of your choice to create a DOI, which becomes active once registered with Crossref. Content Registration allows members to register a DOI and deposit or update its associated metadata, via machine or human interfaces.
Benefits of content registration
Academic and professional research travels further if it’s linked to the millions of other published papers. Crossref members register content with us to let the world know it exists, instead of creating thousands of bilateral agreements.
Members send information called metadata to us. Metadata includes fields like dates, titles, authors, affiliations, funders, and online location. Each metadata record includes a persistent identifier called a digital object identifier (DOI) that stays with the work even if it moves websites. Though the DOI doesn’t change, its associated metadata is kept up-to-date by the owner of the record.
Richer metadata makes content useful and easier to find. Through Crossref, members are distributing their metadata downstream, making it available to numerous systems and organisations that together help credit and cite the work, report impact of funding, track outcomes and activity, and more.
Members maintain and update metadata long-term, telling us if content moves to a new website, and they include more information as time goes on. This means that there is a growing chance that content is found, cited, linked to, included in assessment, and used by other researchers.
Participation Reports give a clear picture for anyone to see the metadata Crossref has. See for yourself where the gaps are, and what our members could improve upon. Understand best practice through seeing what others are doing, and learn how to level-up.
This is Crossref infrastructure. You can’t see infrastructure, yet research—and researchers all over the world—rely on it.
To register content with Crossref, you need to be a member. You’ll use one of our content registration methods to give us metadata about your content. Note that you don’t send us the content itself - you create a metadata record that links persistently (via a persistent identifier) to the content on your site or hosting platform. Learn more about metadata, constructing your DOIs, and ways to register your content.
You should assign Crossref DOIs to and register content for anything that is likely to be cited in the scholarly literature.
What types of resources and records can be registered with Crossref?
We are working to make our input schema more flexible so that almost any type of object can be registered and distributed openly through Crossref. At the moment, members tend to register the following:
Conference proceedings: information about a single conference and records for each conference paper/proceeding.
Datasets: includes database records or collections.
Dissertations: includes single dissertations and theses, but not collections.
Grants: includes both direct funding and other types of support such as the use of equipment and facilities.
Journals and articles: at the journal title and article level, and includes supplemental materials as components.
Peer reviews: any number of reviews, reports, or comments attached to any other work that has been registered with Crossref.
Pending publications: a temporary placeholder record with minimal metadata, often used for embargoed work where a DOI needs to be shared before the full content is made available online.
Preprints and posted content: includes preprints, eprints, working papers, reports, and other types of content that has been posted but not formally published.
You pay a one-time content registration fee for each content item you register with us. content registration fees are different for different types of content and sometimes include discounts for back-year material. You don’t pay to update an existing metadata record. It’s an obligation of membership that you maintain your metadata for the long term, including updating any URLs that change. In addition, we warmly encourage you to correct and add to your metadata, and there is no charge for redepositing (updating) existing metadata. Learn more about maintaining your metadata, and managing existing DOIs.
Your content registration fees are billed quarterly in arrears. This means you’ll usually receive a bill at the beginning of each quarter for the content you registered in the previous quarter. The only exception is if you’ve only registered a small number of DOIs.
