Fees on Crossref

Reduction of Grant DOI registration fees: a boost for the Research Nexus

Ginny Hendricks — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce that—effective 1st January 2026—we have made two changes to grant record registration fees that aim to accelerate adoption of Crossref’s Grant Linking System (GLS) and provide a two-year window of opportunity to increase the number and availability of open persistent grant identifiers and boost the matching of relationships with research objects.

Launched in 2019 with close input from several funders and other infrastructure organisations, the GLS primarily offers the ability to create and steward Crossref Grant DOIs, along with several benefits such as dedicated grant/award metadata like funding type, value, contributors, and projects, as well as hosted landing pages, tools to create and update metadata, and of course both member-asserted and Crossref-automatic matching of relationships within the global corpus of 180 million other research objects. Essentially, we need to identify what research objects are produced as a result of the award, and these objects could be articles, preprints, data, code, blogs, posters, and more.

This connected network is what we call the Research Nexus, essential for exploring research activity in general, as well as evaluating reach and return on funding and other support like use of facilities/equipment.

A fee reduction and a two-year fee waiver pilot

Following a review by our Membership & Fees Committee, the Board met in December and passed two related motions:

Current-Year (CY) grant registration fee has been cut in half to match other record types: The board approved the adjustment of the Current-Year (CY) grant registration fee down from $2.00 to $1.00 USD, effective 1st January 2026.
Back-Year (BY) grant registration fee is waived through 2027: The board approved a time-limited fee waiver as a pilot for Back-Year (BY) grant registration fees, bringing that per-record fee down from $0.30 to $0.00 for 2026 and 2027.

We aim to boost registration of Back-Year (BY) records and accelerate the growth of the Research Nexus with millions more grant<->output matches. During the course of the two-year pilot, the Membership & Fees Committee and our fee project work that started in 2023 and also brought in other fee reductions, will consider more adjustments across BY registration fees for the benefit of members beyond just funders and beyond just grants.

All Board motions are publicly available and we encourage questions from the community about our governance processes and the decisions on our members’ behalf; email us via feedback@crossref.org anytime, or post on the forum.

Supercharging the Grant Linking System

Leading up to the GLS launch in 2019, we worked with a group of funders and metadata experts to inform the design and implementation of the new service, including a funder governance and fees working group. That was seven years ago, and our Funder Advisory Group now includes nearly 100 funding community representatives the GLS has grown to almost 50 funder members that have registered more than 185,000 open grant metadata records. But they are mostly research councils and agencies or charities from Europe and North America, and we know that for a truly comprehensive and interconnected Research Nexus, more needs to be done to include organisations from all parts of the world. The other key driver is simply to boost more metadata connections; the more grant metadata we gather, the better we can match it to all kinds of research outputs, and this metadata directly feeds thousands of services available in our community, from Dimensions and Scopus, to OA.Report and OpenAlex, as well as funders’ own analytics tools. See our recent report about the latest dataset and of course use api.crossref.org directly.

Relatedly, we just added a new Grant DOI field to our schema for all record types, to give our members a precise and accurate way of capturing funding metadata for all research outputs. With the new lower CY registration fee and a pilot waiver of BY fees for grant records, we hope to boost the creation of more Grant DOIs by more funders from more parts of the world—so that others also see and can build on the momentum and reuse the data in their own tools and services. All actors need to play their role, and Crossref’s part is in running the global linking infrastructure at scale, connecting research objects and making them openly available while ensuring that the barriers for the registration, use and reuse of metadata remain as low as possible.

We feel we’re at a tipping point that only needs a small nudge to truly scale the Grant Linking System.

By waiving BY fees entirely for two years, we’re hoping to see members fill in historical data and create more comprehensive grant<->outcome connections. There is often a long period of time between funding being awarded, and the resulting research objects being generated and communicated. That is why historical grant metadata is so important; we think that there will be many funding outcome relationships and insights just waiting to be uncovered!

Why give funders a fee break and not others?

We’re not ruling out this kind of fee incentive in future for other members and other object types, but that needs more analysis (which we plan to do) and right now, the relatively small number of grant records, combined with a growing need for this kind of metadata, means the changes are small enough to have almost no impact on Crossref’s healthy financial position.

This decision is consistent with the goals of our Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability (RCFS) to review our fees to make sure they are equitable and clear, while ensuring Crossref retains a sustainable business model. Our fees can encourage or discourage the community to participate in Crossref. The RCFS project has also resulted in the creation of a lower membership fee tier for the very lowest-resourced members, and the tidying up of things like outlier volume discounts.

The BY fee waiver is positioned as a pilot to allow us to measure its impact over the next two years and feed into the Membership & Fees Committee and RCFS project. We will evaluate the pilot results (i.e. does it indeed supercharge funding metadata connections and adoption?) and consider additional adjustments to other BY registration fees and whether such fee incentives might be extended to other members.

We encourage all funders to take advantage of these reduced rates to contribute to the Research Nexus and help us build a more complete picture of the relationship between research funding and outcomes.

Take a look at the recent case studies from early GLS adopters FWF (Austria), NWO (The Netherlands), FCCN|FCT (Portugal), and Wellcome/EuropePMC, reach out to them or us with any questions, or peruse the GLS community forum!

Changing fees to increase equity and reduce complexity

Amanda Bartell — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Following two rounds of member surveys, feedback gathered from the community in polls, open discussions, and emails, the Membership and Fees (M&F) Committee (made up of 30+ representatives from members, service providers, sponsors, and community partners) discussed evidence and made the first round of recommendations to the Board this month. We’re very thankful for their time spent reviewing data and sharing their experiences to get to this point.

GOAL 1: More equitable fees

Our membership has changed over the years - members now tend to be less well-resourced, more likely to be based in Asia or Latin America, and more likely to be much smaller operations, some of which may not even be organisations but volunteer groups. We are seeing more universities join as members, and fewer members now consider themselves publishers first and foremost. With our mission of creating a complete global research nexus, this growing diversity is excellent news.

While new member growth is steady (2.3k members per year), over half join via a Sponsor (that makes membership more accessible both financially and technically), and close to 300 members have their membership revoked due to unpaid invoices each year, indicating that the current fee may be a barrier to participation for some.

Area of focus: Define a new basis for sizing and tiering members for their capacity to pay

Our annual membership fees are currently tiered according to the publishing revenue or expenses (whichever is higher) of each member. This enables each member to contribute to the community infrastructure according to their capacity to pay.

One of the first areas under consideration throughout 2024 was an option to change the basis of our membership fees from the publishing revenue (or expenses) of each organization to their overall organisational revenue (or expenses) instead.

Through surveys, discussions with the M&F committee, and at the Crossref 2024 Annual Meeting, we received strong feedback, particularly from those based at institutions and/or following a diamond open-access model, that making this change would put Crossref beyond their reach.

It became clear therefore that we should NOT change the basis for sizing and tiering members.

Instead, we will maintain the current basis for sizing and tiering members by considering their publishing revenue or expenses, whichever is higher. For non-publisher members, we advise taking ‘publishing’ to mean ‘producing’, so taking their cost of producing the works being registered with us, whether that is data, software, imagery, physical objects, etc.

Area of focus: Evaluate the USD 275 annual membership fee tier and propose a more equitable pricing structure, which might entail breaking this down into two or more different tiers.

We also looked into making our fees more equitable. It’s been long recognised that our lowest fee tier (an annual fee payment of USD 275 for all members with publishing revenue up to USD 1 million) represents a huge diversity of organisations operating within a range of financial contexts - over 95% of our non-sponsored members are in this category, and this is the category almost all new members join in. Throughout the project, we ran various surveys with our members to learn more about the makeup and factors affecting the capacity to pay for this group.

From January 2026, we will create a new annual membership tier for members whose publishing revenue/expenses (whichever is higher) is equal to or lower than USD 1,000 per year.

Based on survey data, we expect 30-60% of our current members in the current USD 275 tier to move to this new category. This new membership fee tier will be set at USD 200 in 2026, which is 27% lower than the current 275 membership fee. We will monitor the uptake in this category, with a view to identify necessary adjustments in future years. As a result, we expect a decrease in revenue of between USD 174k (if 30% of current lowest tier members move into the new tier) and USD 348k (if 60% of those members move into the new tier).

Our Membership team will reach out to help qualifying members change to the new tier well before January 2026. If your publishing revenue or expenses are equal to or lower than USD 1,000 per year, look out for our email in the next couple of weeks to help you transition to the lower USD 200 tier.

GOAL 2: Simplify complex fees

Area of focus: Address and adjust volume discounts for Content Registration

We currently offer volume discounts for several of our record types. These are calculated at the end of each quarter.

In order to reduce the complexity of our pricing, we will eliminate all volume discounts.

They are underused, accessible only to a small percentage of members, and the financial impact of making the change is small. These discounts contribute to complexity in our billing process and block our ability to offer members a running total or provide leaving members with a timely final invoice.

Having consulted with affected organisations, we’re reassured that the change will not adversely affect their ability to register their works with us. We appreciate their understanding of the overall positive impact of this change for Crossref and their support for our sustainability.

Area of focus: Reduce complexity in peer review fees

Finally, prompted by feedback from our members, we looked into normalising fees for peer review registration. We currently have two sets of fees for peer reviews based on whether the review is registered by the owner of the item being reviewed. There is a charge for the first review for a specific article, and a different charge for subsequent reviews for the same article by the same member. This charge for the subsequent reviews also varies depending on who registered the review. Very few members register peer reviews for records that they do not own, so having a separate, higher set of fees just adds complexity to the fee schedule with no financial or strategic benefit.

Starting from January 2026, we will consolidate all peer review fees, regardless of who registers it, to USD 0.25 for the first review for an article, and free registration for any subsequent reviews of that same record by the same member.

Area of focus: Address and adjust back-year discounts for record registration

Another recommendation, related to the removal of back-year discounts for select record types (conference proceedings, technical reports and working papers, theses and dissertations, and posted content/preprints) due to under use, hasn’t been approved yet. Based on feedback from the board, more research will be conducted on trends related to specific record types, such as theses and dissertations, so we can better understand potential unintended consequences of such changes.

We’re looking to retain back-year discounts for record types where they continue to be well-used, including those for journal articles and book titles. We’re also looking to retain back-year discounts for grants, as these are at an early stage of adoption, and new funders coming on board naturally start with a backlog of grants to register in the Grant Linking System.

What happens next?

The Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability (RCFS) initiative is very broad, and in the coming months and years you can expect progress with other aspects of our fees and resourcing. There is more work to come, including the rebalancing of revenue from the use of our metadata, the future of fees for our funder members, and further changes to record registration fees.

We’re glad to see the first changes progressing to implementation, and would like to thank our Membership and Fees Committee and all members who took part in the consultations so far for your continued support.

Update on the Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability research

Kornelia Korzec — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We’re in year two of the Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability (RCFS) research. This report provides an update on progress to date, specifically on research we’ve conducted to better understand the impact of our fees and possible changes.

Crossref is in a good financial position with our current fees, which haven’t increased in 20 years. This project is seeking to future-proof our fees by:

Making fees more equitable
Simplifying our complex fee schedule
Rebalancing revenue sources

In order to review all aspects of our fees, we’ve planned five projects to look into specific aspects of our current fees that may need to change to achieve the goals above. This is an update on the research and discussions that have been underway with our Membership & Fees Committee and our Board, and what we’ve learned so far in each of these areas.

Goal 1: More equitable fees.

To ensure our fees going into the future are more equitable, we’re carrying out two parallel projects: evaluation of the lowest membership tier, and the review of the basis for deciding the membership tiers and distribution of membership across them.

Project 1: Evaluate the lowest membership tier and propose a more equitable pricing structure.

All Crossref members pay an annual membership fee. These fees are tiered, and different members pay a different fee depending on the annual publishing revenue that their organisation receives (or publishing expenses if they don’t receive any publishing revenue).

We entered into this project recognising that we have too many membership tiers and the definition we use to size members is not consistent and can be confusing (e.g. different basis for funders than other organisations, and both are different still from subscribers to our Metadata Plus service). The idea of the membership tiers was to use publishing revenue as a proxy for “ability to pay”. We really want to develop proposals for a more equitable pricing structure. However we don’t know enough about our members’ capacity to pay to be able to model an alternative approach.

Our current lowest fee tier is $275 (USD) for any organisation with annual publishing revenue (or publishing expenses where the organisation doesn’t receive publishing revenue) of $0 to $1 million, and this is the tier where we focus our attention in our first project of the RCFS program. The difference between an organisation with revenue or expenses of USD 0, and an organisation with revenue or expenses of USD 1 million, is huge. Hardly any new members have joined in any other tier in the past several years. Of the 21,000 active members, more than 20,000 fall into the USD 275 tier - either directly (as an independent member) or indirectly (through a sponsor, where their fees would be lower). A fee structure that would fit better with the realities of our community might entail breaking our current $275 fee tier down into two or more more granular tiers.

At the moment, the majority of Crossref’s revenues come from the bottom membership tiers; 65% of membership revenues come from organisations in the USD 275 tier. We also know that many of those members (86%) are paying more in membership dues than in content registration, whereas other members have the inverse relationship between annual dues and content registration. Overall, the members in the USD 275 tier contributed 34% of Crossref’s revenue last year, and the members in the >USD 50 million tier – contributed 29%.

Members’ survey

Between April and May this year, we surveyed all independent members in the USD 275 tier. We asked questions about their operating size, how they’re funded, and how Crossref’s fees affect them. At the time of the survey, there were 8,027 members in this category. We received 1,054 responses; with a 13% response rate and broad representation globally, we are confident in the sample size. One-third of respondents said they were part of a larger organisation (such as a department or a library in a research institution).

Chart 1: Organisation revenue or funding The majority of respondents in this category (65%) have annual revenue or expense of less than USD 100,000; with 48% operating with less than USD 10,000.

Chart 2: Sources of funding When asked about the sources of funding (as an indicator of how stable these organisations might be and how readily accessible their funding is) the most frequent answer was public or government funding, and then article processing charges. If organisations relied on two sources of funding, the most common combination was public funding and article processing charges, and it was relatively rare for these organisations to have multiple sources of funding.

Chart 3: What percentage of expenses do you spend on Crossref fees?

The majority (61%) of respondents spend less than 5% of their expenses on Crossref fees. However, we have also learnt that for some volunteer-run publications, Crossref fees might be some of the only expenses they incur. Interestingly, the percentage of expenses spent on Crossref is fairly consistently spread across the continents.

Project 2: Review the basis and distribution of membership tiers

This project examines options for how we define the capacity to pay, how members are distributed across tiers, and the right levels of member fees.

There are currently a range of prices for our annual fees, based on an organisation’s ability to pay. We have used the metric of annual publishing expense or revenue as an indicator of that ability, but in some cases it doesn’t apply. As per our fee principles, we have not differentiated between organisation types. Nonprofit and commercial entities pay the same price (caveat: research funders still have a separate fee schedule, but that was intended to be temporary).

We conducted a review of other annual fee models to benchmark our approach against six like-minded organisations working in the context of scholarly communications and infrastructure. We looked at whether these organisations based their fees on one more more of the following:

Volume: e.g., research output, # of journals
Budget: e.g., total annual revenue or expenses
Relevant budget: e.g. publishing revenue
Organisation type: e.g. variance in fee based on publisher, institution, or funder
Country-level economic data: e.g., discounting based on World Bank classification, discounting based on purchasing power calculation.

Chart 4: Annual fee schedules comparisons between Crossref and CORE, DOAJ, Dryad, OA Switch-board, OpenCitations and ORCID.

There are three consistent themes among our peers: the total annual revenue and volume levels are the most common basis for membership fees among other organisations, and almost all offer discounted fees to accommodate country-based economic circumstances, utilising World Bank’s data (this is currently achieved at Crossref via the GEM program, which we have full intention of incorporating into our future fees whatever other decisions we might take). Only one other organisation uses publishing revenue or expenses as a basis for annual fees, while the potentially more transparent and less ambiguous data point of the total revenue factors in three other annual fee models.

For subscribers to our Metadata Plus service, the fee tier is selected based on whichever is the higher between their total annual revenue (including earned and fundraised, e.g. grants) or annual operating expenses (including staff and non-staff, e.g. occupancy, equipment, licences etc.). At present, we have limited understanding of the budgets of our members and how this may compare to their publishing revenues or expenses. We are looking to learn more about this as part of our annual membership data checking process, where we email all our members to ask them to confirm contact details for their organisation and the staff involved in managing their Crossref account. This year, we’re also asking all members about their organisation’s annual operating budget (or planned annual expenses) to help inform our discussions. In our case, the volume of outputs (in this case the number of items and associated metadata registered with Crossref) is recognised by the registration fees mechanism.

Consulting with organisations outside Crossref membership

To help us inform how our fees can be more equitable, it’s important to invite voices of organisations that may currently be unable to join us - due to fees or technical barriers. We hope that learning more about their circumstances will help us make sure that we improve accessibility of Crossref membership to all organisations that publish scholarly and professional works. We commissioned Accucoms to carry out a consultation on our behalf.

So far, from a handful of interviews with publishers from Nigeria, DRC, Canada and USA, we’ve learnt that while virtually all offer open access to their publications, the majority has no publishing income, and where the income is derived via APCs it’s modest and only applicable in rare circumstances. Through institutional funding and/or grants, these organisations have modest operational budgets, yet our respondents lacked clarity over the particulars. In terms of participation in professional networks and international publishing organisations, only one of the organisations we interviewed participates in DOAJ, and another is a member of OASPA, in both cases their participation is free. Among the interviewees, two organisations were interested in Crossref membership in the past but encountered technical barriers to joining.

With only five interviews to date, the consultation is still open and we’re keen to hear from more organisations that are not Crossref members but have considered our membership at some point.

Goal 2: Simplify complex fees

Projects 3 & 4: Review volume and back-year discounts for Content Registration

Along with our membership fees, our members also pay usage-based registration fees for records (scholarly works and grants) they register with us. Different content types render different costs for our members, and the fees are subject to discounts related to the age of publication and volume of registrations. Records for items older than two years have a lower fee associated with them, to help incentivise registration of such ‘back-year’ materials with great gains for the Research Nexus. There are also discounts related to the volume of transactions – which again depend on the content types.

These discounts are intended to encourage certain behaviours, specifically encouraging members to register older records in large quantities to better complete the scholarly record. Not all content types have back-year or volume discounts, and the rate of discount varies. This creates quite a complex system of fees. To the extent that the discount is successful in encouraging this behaviour, we want to preserve it, but in many cases these discounts see little to no activity.

Following the discussions of the Membership and Fees Committee, chaired by Vincas Grigas, Vilnius University, we are preparing to consult with the small number of members who currently receive volume discounts to discuss what the impact would be if we removed them.

We plan to identify and preserve the well-used back-year discounts, which encourage registration of old content, such as books, journal articles, grants. However, there are types of discounts that are hardly ever used and we are considering removing these to simplify the fees. This work will focus on the technical implications of removing some of the underused back-year discounts from the billing code and consulting with members to understand any impact .

Goal 3: Rebalance revenue sources

Project 5: Reflect increase in metadata usage and perceived shift of value toward metadata distribution

All Crossref metadata is made freely and openly available to everyone. However, some organisations may be looking for a service level agreement in delivery of the metadata, plus more regular snapshots and priority service/rate limits. For those organisations, we have an optional Metadata Plus service.

The final project is looking at the fees for this service. We are interested in making sure that Crossref metadata is available and used by the community where it can contribute to their objectives – related to discovery, analysis, integrity, and more. The optional paid service we offer aims to support the external tools that facilitate business and scholarly processes for the community. We are heartened to see that the appetite for the use of metadata seems to be growing, and the value of open research information is increasingly and widely recognised. We want to ensure that the users of metadata contribute proportionally to the maintenance of the records created and curated by our members.

Conclusion

At this point, most projects generate a lot of questions and the work is underway to deliver answers related to capacity to pay, discounts as well as available metadata usage, and barriers faced by organisations in our community.

What we have found so far is that two of our goals – simplification and equity – are often at odds with each other, and this is especially true with the $275 tier.

We welcome comments, suggestions and questions.

Seeking consultancy: understanding joining obstacles for non-member journals

Ginny Hendricks — Wed, 01 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Crossref is undertaking a large program, dubbed 'RCFS' (Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability) that will initially tackle five specific issues with our fees. We haven’t increased any of our fees in nearly two decades, and while we’re still okay financially and do not have a revenue growth goal, we do have inclusion and simplification goals. This report from Research Consulting helped to narrow down the five priority projects for 2024-2025 around these three core goals:

Scope of the RCFS Program 2024-2025

GOAL: MORE EQUITABLE FEES

Project 1: Evaluate the USD $275 annual membership fee tier and propose a more equitable pricing structure, which might entail breaking this down into two or more different tiers.
Project 2: Define a new basis for sizing and tiering members for their capacity to pay

GOAL: SIMPLIFY COMPLEX FEES

Project 3: Address and adjust volume discounts for Content Registration
Project 4: Address and adjust back-year discounts for Content Registration

GOAL: REBALANCE REVENUE SOURCES

Project 5: Reflect the increasing value of Crossref as a metadata source, likely increasing Metadata Plus fees

Work to date

As part of the RCFS program, we are working closely with our Membership & Fees Committee to discuss insights, gather feedback, and make recommendations to the Board. As a first step, we have surveyed and received responses from around 1000 of the current 8000 Crossref members in our lowest membership fee tier (USD $275). We are now starting to distill that data and will discuss it on our community call on May 8th and subsequently with the M&F Committee to inform recommendations for fee changes that may going into effect in 2025 or 2026.

Request For Information (RFI) about community consultation project

While we have useful data from existing Crossref members, we know that there are many thousands of journals that are not (yet) members, and we need to understand this group better, in particular, to document and address the financial obstacles as well as the technical or social challenges.

We are looking for community facilitation expertise, with multiple language skills, to conduct a series of focus groups with non-member journals, with a summary and insights report (in English) provided by the end of June 2024.

All the data and documentation will be available publicly on the dedicated RCFS Program website

As well as designing, conducting, and summarising the results of some focus groups (participants for which will be gathered via our own contacts and those of partners such as DOAJ, EIFL, and the Free Journal Network) we would like the consultant to review work such as the DIAMAS institutional publishing report, and identify data relevant to Crossref’s fee model.

If you would like to respond, please provide the following information and send it to Kora Korzec at feedback@crossref.org by 15th May:

Your consultancy organisation and your role within it
Examples of similar market research undertaken
Languages spoken within your team
Confirmation that the timeline is workable
Approximate fee, likely range, or structure/basis for your fee

Equally, if you represent a journal or group of journals, such as Diamond Open Access journals, and are not yet using Crossref, please get in touch and we can include your group in the research.

Thank you!

Introducing our new Global Equitable Membership (GEM) program

Susan Collins — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

When Crossref began over 20 years ago, our members were primarily from the United States and Western Europe, but for several years our membership has been more global and diverse, growing to almost 18,000 organisations around the world, representing 148 countries.

As we continue to grow, finding ways to help organisations participate in Crossref is an important part of our mission and approach. Our goal of creating the Research Nexus—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—can only be achieved by ensuring that participation in Crossref is accessible to all. Building a network for the global community must include input from all of the global community.

Although Crossref membership is open to all organisations that produce scholarly and professional materials, cost and technical challenges can be barriers to joining for many organisations. To address some of these challenges, we created our Sponsors Program, which provides technical, financial and local language support. We also collaborate with the Public Knowledge Project on the Open Journals Platform to develop plugins for OJS users.

Additionally, we had a limited ‘fee assistance’ program to waive the content registration fees for members working under specific Sponsor arrangements, including INASP, and African Journals Online (AJOL). Learning from the experiences of such successful partnerships, starting in January 2023, we are expanding this program to provide greater membership equitability and accessibility to organisations located in the least economically-advantaged countries in the world through our Global Equitable Membership (GEM) Program. This new scheme now encompasses the annual fee as well as the content registration fees.

Eligibility for the program is based on a member’s country. We have curated the list, predominantly based on the International Development Association (IDA) list and excluding anywhere we are bound by international sanctions. From January 2023, organisations based in countries listed in our GEM program will be eligible to join Crossref and contribute with their metadata to a robust scholarly record at no cost. This also applies to 187 existing members in eligible countries who will no longer be charged for Crossref membership or content registration.

Existing Crossref members in GEM-eligible countries

Bangladesh (54)	Burundi (1)	Kiribati (0)
Kyrgyz Republic (20)	Central African Republic (1)	Lesotho (0)
Nepal (19)	Democratic Republic of the Congo (1)	Liberia (0)
Ghana (15)	Guyana (1)	Marshall Islands (0)
Yemen (10)	Haiti (1)	Mauritania (0)
Sudan (7)	Honduras (1)	Micronesia (0)
Tanzania (7)	Laos (1)	Mozambique (0)
Afghanistan (6)	Madagascar (1)	Nicaragua (0)
Ethiopia (5)	Malawi (1)	Niger (0)
Zambia (5)	Maldives (1)	Samoa (0)
Bhutan (4)	Myanmar (1)	Sao Tome and Principe (0)
Rwanda (4)	Cambodia (1)	Sierra Leone (0)
Tajikistan (4)	Chad (1)	Solomon Islands (0)
Kosovo (3)	Comoros (1)	South Sudan (0)
Senegal (3)	Cote d’Ivoire (1)	Togo (0)
Uganda (3)	Djibouti (1)	Tonga (0)
Burkina Faso (2)	Eritrea (1)	Tuvalu (0)
Mali (2)	Gambia (1)	Vanuatu (0)
Somalia (2)	Guinea (1)
Benin (1)	Guinea-Bissau (1)

The list of countries will undergo an annual review, to follow the latest guidance from IDA, which uses the somewhat simplistic World Bank income classifications but applies a more granular blend of criteria for economic health, thereby allowing for greater nuance, such as indicating countries where the gap between rich and poor is very wide.

The program results from our experience working with and knowing the communities through Sponsors and working with past members who have struggled to pay. It aims to bring us closer to our vision of building an inclusive, rich and open network of relationships underpinning the scholarly record. With the support of the Membership and Fees Committee, the launch of the program was confirmed with the recent unanimous vote of our Board to evolve our fee assistance program into a more expansive scheme. GEM presents a more comprehensive and equitable solution than our former arrangements. It involves an opportunity to join Crossref and contribute scholarly metadata to our global community on a zero-fee basis for membership and content registration. This offering will be applied by default to organisations based in all eligible countries, irrespective of joining through any specific Sponsor, or independently.

While the GEM Program will alleviate financial barriers, and we hope to see the numbers above grow significantly, the GEM program will not necessarily help ease technical or administrative burdens. We still need our valued Sponsors for that and we seek new Sponsors in the above locations. We would love to hear from organisations based in GEM countries who might consider becoming a Sponsor or otherwise support local colleagues in building experience of metadata and working with global open scholarly infrastructure systems like Crossref. Please reach out to me to discuss ideas or with any other questions or comments.