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.
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.
Following up on his earlier post (which was also blogged to CrossTech here), Leigh Dodds is now [Following up on his earlier post (which was also blogged to CrossTech here), Leigh Dodds is now]3 the possibility of using machine-readable auto-discovery type links for DOIs of the form
These LINK tags are placed in the document HEAD section and could be used by crawlers and agents to recognize the work represented by the current document. This sounds like a great idea and we’d like to hear feedback on it.
Concurrently at Nature we have also been considering how best to mark up in a machine-readable way DOIs appearing within a document page BODY. Current thinking is to do something along the following lines:
which allows the DOI to be presented in the preferred Crossref citation format (doi:10.1038/nprot.2007.43), to be hyperlinked to the handle proxy server (<a href="http://dx.doi.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.1038/nprot.2007.43">http://dx.doi.org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.1038/nprot.2007.43</a>), and to refer to a validly registered URI form for the DOI (info:doi/10.1038/nprot.2007.43). Again, we would be real interested to hear any opinions on this proposal for inline DOI markup as well as on Leigh’s proposal for document-level DOI markup.
(Oh, and btw many congrats to Leigh on his recent promotion to CTO, Ingenta.)
