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 time—downwards. 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 December 2026, we plan to publish new Crossref Member Practices which will set out the standards we expect all Crossref members to meet. From August to October 2026 we are consulting with our members on a draft of these Member Practices. This blog provides the background to this, and explains how you can share your views.
The Crossref community in India is as diverse as the region that it represents, comprising 1605 members, 11 sponsoring organisations, and 5 ambassadors, who between them cover the length and breadth of this country. Between November 2025 and March 2026, we organised three webinars focused on supporting this community with best metadata and publishing practices. We collaborated with the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) to embed understanding of metadata’s role in the greater context of publishing integrity.
Guide for funders to support FAIR workflows & enable research tracking
Published in August 2023 as part of the Implementing FAIR Workflows project, this Guide is a joint publication by three open scholarly infrastructure organisations—Crossref, DataCite, and ORCID. It introduces the role of persistent identifiers (PIDs) and open metadata in facilitating open and FAIR research, and walks funders through concrete ways to engage: committing resources, enacting congruent policies, and providing support around grant application, management, and reporting.
Strategists
Understand why funder participation in the PID and metadata infrastructure matters.
Persistent identifiers and open metadata are what connect grants to the research outputs, people, and organisations they support—enabling assessment, discovery, and long-term stewardship of the record.
Decision-makers
See what policy and resourcing decisions align a funder with the wider ecosystem.
The Guide sets out recommendations funders can adopt—from PID and metadata requirements in grant conditions, to committing to the community-owned infrastructure that maintains those records.
Practitioners
Apply the recommendations across grant application, management, and reporting.
Concrete workflow guidance for embedding Crossref grant IDs, DataCite dataset/software IDs, and ORCID researcher IDs across the funder’s own systems and reporting pipelines.
What this guide covers
Why PIDs and metadata matter for funders—from grant lifecycle tracking to open-science impact assessment
The three infrastructure organisations’ complementary roles—Crossref for scholarly works and grant records, DataCite for data and software, ORCID for researchers and contributors
Policy recommendations funders can adopt to align with the wider open scholarly ecosystem
Practical workflow steps for grant application, management, and reporting
Community investment—how funders can support the community-owned infrastructure that makes end-to-end research tracking possible
About the Implementing FAIR Workflows project
Implementing FAIR Workflows is a three-year project delivering exemplar FAIR workflows in cognitive neuroscience research, built on the existing PID and metadata infrastructure. This Guide is one of the project’s community-facing outputs, developed by the DataCite project team in collaboration with Crossref and ORCID.
