The American Society for Microbiology (ASM) has earned recognition in Crossref’s Participation Reports for its exceptional metadata coverage among large publishing members––an achievement built on intentional change, technical investment, and collaborative work. In this Q&A, the ASM team shares what that journey looked like, the challenges they’ve tackled, and how centering metadata has helped them better connect research with the global scientific community.
The Crossref Board recently approved three recommendations for changes to our fees: introduction of a new lowest membership fee tier, removal of volume discounts for record registration, and normalisation of registration fees for peer reviews. The changes will be applied from January 2026.
This is the first outcome of the Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability (RCFS) program, launched in 2023, as a comprehensive effort to review all aspects of Crossref revenue and how we’re adapting to growth and the diversification of our membership. The program aims to make fees more equitable, simplify our complex fee schedule, and rebalance revenue sources.
En 2025, lanzamos los Premios Crossref a los Metadatos, con el objetivo de destacar el rol de nuestra comunidad en la gestión y el enriquecimiento del registro académico. En esta publicación, destacamos a la Universidad La Salle, Perú, ganadora del premio a la excelencia entre los nuevos miembros, y contamos con la participación de Yasiel Pérez, Responsable Técnico y Editor de la Revista, quien comparte sus ideas:
This June, we presented at the Beijing International Book Fair (BIBF) and connected directly with our growing community in China. With a surge of interest from Chinese publishers and partners, it was clear: there’s a strong and rising curiosity around how metadata plays a vital role in maintaining the integrity of the scholarly record.
Crossref and DOAJ share the aim to encourage the dissemination and use of scholarly research using online technologies and to work with and through regional and international networks, partners, and user communities for the achievement of their aims to build local institutional capacity and sustainability.
Both organisations agreed to work together in 2021 in a variety of ways, but primarily to ‘encourage the dissemination and use of scholarly research using online technologies, and regional and international networks, partners and communities, helping to build local institutional capacity and sustainability around the world.’ Some of the fruits of this labour are:
DOAJ added support for Crossref XML to make it easier for publishers to upload metadata
Closer collaboration between customer/member support at both organisations, making it easier for publishers and journal editors to navigate both service’s technologies
the launch of PLACE: ‘a ‘one-stop shop’ for information to support publishers in adopting best practices the industry developed’ (together with other partners)
a pilot gap analysis of the journals in DOAJ with the possibility of helping them start to use and resolve DOIs.
The new agreement, signed earlier this month, will slightly shift focus to build upon existing collaborations, particularly around metadata. One of the primary sections of the MOU is enhancing support for the least-resourced journals by:
Assigning DOIs and depositing the metadata with Crossref
Finding ways to improve their DOAJ application experience to help them become indexed
Collect and ingest their Crossref metadata into DOAJ
Help them to get preserved via JASPER or similar initiatives
Help identify other local partners, such as Crossref Sponsoring Organisations, to support their use of Crossref services
It’s great that we can further underpin what is already a good working relationship. Both Crossref and DOAJ are central to discovery so it’s a natural partnership. Helping journals meet better standards and become indexed to make them more discoverable on a global scale is at the heart of our strategy. This agreement opens up a new avenue that allows the community to really focus on supporting those journals and the research they publish.’
– Joanna Ball, Managing Director of DOAJ
‘The collaborations with DOAJ so far only reconfirmed our shared goal to help make the global scholarly communications system more equitable wherever we can. Our joint projects aim to seek out and devise support for resource-constrained journals in multiple ways. DOAJ’s work is essential in helping journals to develop good practice, while Crossref offers an open infrastructure to ensure all journals can be included and discoverable in the global scholarly record.’
– Ginny Hendricks, Director of Member and Community Outreach at Crossref
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About DOAJ
DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer reviewed journals. DOAJ deploys around one hundred carefully selected volunteers from the community of library and other academic disciplines to assist in curating open access journals. This independent database contains over 20,400 peer-reviewed open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts and humanities. DOAJ is financially supported worldwide by libraries, publishers and other like-minded organisations. DOAJ services (including the evaluation of journals) are free for all, and all data provided by DOAJ are harvestable via OAI/PMH and the API. See https://doaj.org/ for more information.
About Crossref
Crossref is a global community-governed open scholarly infrastructure that makes all kinds of research objects easy to find, assess, and reuse through a number of services critical to research communications, including an open metadata API that sees over 1.5 billion queries every month. Crossref’s ~20,000 members come from 155 countries and are made up of universities, publishers, funders, government bodies, libraries, and research groups. Their ~155 million DOI records contribute to the collective vision of a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organisations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society.
