In January 2026, our new annual membership fee tier takes effect. The new tier is US$200 for member organisations that operate on publishing revenue or expenses (whichever is higher) of up to US$1,000 annually. We announced the Board’s decision, making it possible in July, and––as you can infer from Amanda’s latest blog––this is the first such change to the annual membership fee tiers in close to 20 years!
The new fee tier resulted from the consultation process and fees review undertaken as part of the Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability program, carried out with the help of our Membership and Fees Committee (made up of representatives from member organisations and community partners). The program is ongoing, and the new fee tier, intended to make Crossref membership more accessible, is one of the first changes it helped us determine.
It has been 18 (!) years since Crossref last deprecated a metadata schema. In that time, we’ve released numerous schema versions, some major updates, and some interim releases that never saw wide adoption. Now, with 27 different schemas to support, we believe it’s time to streamline and move forward.
Starting next year, we plan to begin the process of deprecating lightly-used schemas, with the understanding that this will be a multi-year effort involving careful planning and plenty of communication.
Scholarly metadata, deposited by thousands of our members and made openly available can act as “trust signals” for the publications. It provides information that helps others in the community to verify and assess the integrity of the work. Despite having a central responsibility in ensuring the integrity of the work that they publish, editorial teams tend not be fully aware of the value of metadata for integrity of the scholarly record. How can we change that?
Crossref was created back in 2000 by 12 forward-thinking scholarly publishers from North America and Europe, and by 2002, these members had registered 4 million DOI records. At the time of writing, we have over 23,600 members in 164 different countries. Half of our members are based in Asia, and 35% are universities or scholar-led. These members have registered over 176 million open metadata records with DOIs (as of today). What a difference 25 years makes!
In our 25th anniversary year, I thought it would be time to take a look at how we got here. And so—hold tight—we’re going to go on an adventure through space and time1, stopping every 5 years through Crossref history to check in on our members. And we’re going to see some really interesting changes over the years.
The depositor report is used for checking basic info about your DOI registrations.
Depositor reports list all DOIs by member and title for journals, books, and conference proceedings. We currently have depositor reports for journals, books, and conference proceedings (but not for other record types). The index page is updated weekly. Title-level reports are updated as your metadata is updated with us.
Each title-level report lists all DOIs registered for the title as well as (for each DOI) the owning prefix, the deposit timestamp, the date the record was last updated, and the number of Cited-by matches. To view each title-level report, select the member name then the appropriate title.
Field/missing metadata report: You can also see what basic bibliographic metadata fields are populated for your journal articles - click on the green triangle to the right of each member name to view a field / missing metadata report.
DOI crawler: We crawl a broad sample of journal DOIs to make sure the DOIs are resolving to the appropriate page. For each journal crawled, a sample of DOIs that equals 5% of the total DOIs for the journal up to a maximum of 50 DOIs is selected. You can access the crawler details for a given journal by selecting the linked date in the ‘last crawl date’ column.
Click on a member name in the report, and you will see a list of that member’s titles below the name. Click on any publication title to open a text file which list all DOIs for that title.
The initial view shows:
Name: name of the member. Members with more than one prefix will appear multiple times
Journal/Book/Conf Proc count: number of journal, book, or conference proceeding titles associated with the member
Total DOIs: total number of DOIs deposited for the selected title
Field report: shows missing metadata fields for each member, select the icon to view
The expanded view shows:
Name of each journal, book, or conference proceeding with DOI names deposited by the member
DOIs: Total number of DOIs registered for each journal, book, or conference proceeding deposited by the member
Last crawl date: date of last crawler report (if available)
Depositor report title view
Select a journal, book, or conference proceeding title to retrieve a list of DOIs for the title (DOI), the owner prefix of the DOI (OWNER), the timestamp value for the DOI (DEPOSIT-TIMESTAMP) the date the DOI was last updated (LAST-UPDATED), and the number of Cited-by matches for the DOI:
Title-level depositor report data may also be retrieved using format=doilist - learn more about retrieving DOIs by title.
Page maintainer: Isaac Farley Last updated: 2024-July-19
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