You can now register rich metadata for a variety of record types in Metadata Manager using simple, guided workflows. The tool is used by many in our community to register grant and journal article records, and it has now been expanded to support books and chapters, reports, dissertations, and post-publication updates for journal content.
Metadata Manager makes it easier to capture identifiers for contributors and their affiliations, funding information, references, and more. Thanks to automated reference matching by Crossref, this offers greater visibility for the works, while the affiliations and funding information can serve as important trust signals for the community.
This year’s edition of the FORCE11 conference was hosted in June by Singapore Management University. Its title, âTo Go Far, Go Together: Advancing Scholarly Communication Across Boundaries and Disruptionsâ truly resonates with Crossrefâs truths; it takes a village! Crossref only works as long as the scholarly research community wants to work together globally, across all disciplines, for integrity and openness of the scientific record. The conversations were influenced by a genuinely diverse mix of librarians, researchers, open infrastructures, and service providers, and that mix shaped almost every interaction we had at the conference.
We have some rather unusual news to share: Crossref fees are going down again. At its meeting in Paris earlier this month, the Crossref Board approved two further recommendations from the Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability (RCFS) project: effective 1st January 2027, we will reduce the majority of Content Registration fees for all 25,000 members, and remove fees for back-year records altogether.
Content Registration fees haven’t increased in around 20 years, and this is the first significant change to them in that timeâdownwards. Since these fees account for the largest share of Crossref’s revenue (around 60%), and since every member registers DOI records, these changes reach further than anything we’ve announced under the RCFS project so far.
The infrastructure that registers and distributes Crossref metadata has been running and growing for more than two decades. It now does considerably more than it was built to do, and it shows: two large, tightly coupled monoliths (Content System and REST API), where a change in one place risks breaking something in another.
In its July meeting, the Crossref board approved the use of Crossref surplus funds for a three-year project to accelerate the redesign of the Crossref system. Our plan is to use $1.6 million a year for three years (~USD $4.9M in total) from our surplus funds, which will help us set up a modern infrastructure consisting of separate services for the different functionalities that the Crossref system offers.
Pending publication is a way of creating a DOI and depositing metadata for a content item any time after a manuscript has been accepted but before it is published online. This is possible for all standard record types (such as articles, books, conference proceedings).
Because a pending publication has not yet been published, its DOI will resolve to a publicly-available Crossref-hosted landing page. Once the work is published online, this same DOI will resolve to the URL for that content.
The pending publication record type serves as a temporary placeholder for your content - like a “coming soon” or preview of the great work to come. For a pending publication, you register basic metadata for your content item before registering all the formal metadata that comes with a version of record. Take care not to share a DOI before it has been deposited with us, or it will not resolve for your readers, and will lead to a failed resolution in your resolution report. Learn more about the pending publication consultation.
Use cases for pending publication
Before the pending publication record type existed, we recommended you to register DOIs at the time content was published online, or shortly after. As the communication needs of our members (researchers, funders, institutions, and publishers) evolve, we have created this new solution to aid you and your work, and allow you to register DOIs before content is published online. With pending publication:
Members can:
address timing issues related to press embargos
publicly establish scholarly precedence for their articles
meet the conditions in full for new funder policies and mandates, which focus on acceptance as a key event to report on
ensure that institutional repositories use the DOI to link to the member-stewarded copy
Researchers can provide formal evidence of all publications in employment and grant applications
Funders can fully track all publications funded by their research grants
Institutions can fully track the scholarly output of their faculty members
Technology vendors that support scholarly research management can account for all outputs
How does pending publication work?
When registering your publication as pending there are two things you need to do:
Register a subset of the metadata (as a minimum: member name, journal title, and accepted date) under the Pending Publication record type.
After you do this, the DOI will resolve to a Crossref-hosted landing page displaying your logo, a banner showing the manuscript has been accepted for publication, and the metadata youâve provided. As with all registered content, pending publication metadata will be publicly available in our XML API (and updated as you update your metadata records). Unfortunately, we do not yet support pending publications in our REST API.
Once your work is published, you need to register the full metadata for the work - this is not an automatic process. You must update the metadata for each pending publication DOI, so that each DOI will resolve directly to the content (and not the pending publication landing page).
Pending publication workflow diagram
Crossmark participants please note that you can deposit Crossmark metadata at any point, but during the Beta version of the pending publication rollout, the Crossmark badge will not be displayed to readers.
Fees for pending publications
Content Registration (metadata deposit) fees still apply, but there are no additional fees for using pending publication. So, youâll be charged once when you register the pending publication, but any subsequent updates, including the update on publication, are not charged.
History
Pending publication has been supported since 2019 and was designed in response to community feedback:
