Sponsors on Crossref

Supporting Membership through the Sponsor Program

Susan Collins — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Sponsors make Crossref membership accessible to organisations that would otherwise face barriers to joining us. They also provide support to facilitate participation, which increases the amount and diversity of metadata in the global Research Nexus. This in turn improves discoverability and transparency of scholarship behind the works.

Growing number of sponsors

Our first sponsors joined in 2008, but the program started to grow rapidly between 2012-2014, with the addition of sponsors in South Korea, Türkiye, Russia, India, and Ukraine. In 2015, we welcomed our first South American sponsor from Brazil, followed by more sponsors in Latin America starting in 2016, and our first sponsor in Indonesia in 2017.

As of December 2024, Crossref works with 124 sponsoring organisations that support 12,195 sponsored members.

In 2021, we updated the criteria for organisations to be accepted as sponsors, raising the bar to ensure that potential sponsors accurately and successfully represent Crossref in the community. We also paused the acceptance of new Sponsors from regions where such organisations are already prolific. By doing so, we can focus on growing the program in areas with the greatest need.

In 2024, we added eight new sponsors to the program; these included our first sponsor in Bangladesh (our first GEM sponsor), as well as sponsors in China, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Türkiye, Tunisia, Iraq, and Kenya.

Our five largest sponsors, based on the number of members they support (as of the end of 2024) are:

Relawan Jurnal Indonesia, Indonesia - 3076 members
Associacao Brasileira de Editores Cientificos do Brasil (ABEC Brasil) - 1312
Tubitak Ulakbim DergiPark, Türkiye - 1248
NEICON ISP, Russia- 713
Kyobobook Center, South Korea - 419

The majority of sponsors are much smaller than this, looking after 25 or fewer Sponsored Members.

Each sponsor has specific criteria for what kind of organisations they work with. Some are dedicated to supporting organisations in a specific country or region, while others may be based on geography, language, subject area, or usage of a specific platform, e.g. OJS.

Our sponsors are distributed across all regions of the world, and we’re continuously working to forge networks with organisations in regions with the least coverage, to ensure scholarly communicators anywhere can join Crossref and contribute to the Research Nexus.

Asia Pacific: 22
Central and Eastern Europe: 29
Central and South Asia: 25
Latin America and the Caribbean: 24
North Africa and the Middle East: 3
Sub-Saharan Africa: 2
US and Canada: 5
Western Europe: 14

Currently, sponsored members represent 115 different countries, with the largest proportions from Latin America, South-eastern Asia, and Eastern Europe. Nearly two-thirds of sponsored members self-identify as universities, libraries, government agencies, foundations, scholar publishers, and research institutions.

To date, sponsored members have contributed 6.5 million works to the Research Nexus.

Importantly, the sponsored members have the ability to fully participate in Crossref – they are stewards of their records (even if some choose to delegate this activity to their sponsor), they can vote, stand in for elections to our Board of Directors, and collaborate with others in the Crossref community, just as any other member.

Sponsors are key partners for us in making participation easier for organisations in their communities. They work with us to provide administrative, billing, technical, and local language support to the members they work with. Depending on the financial model, they may charge members for their services.

Technical support they provide for members makes it more tailored and often quicker than the Crossref team could offer. For example, sponsors can provide service in their local language using their preferred method (helpdesk, WhatsApp, phone, email), which varies widely by region; or, where they charge any fees – they tend to collect those in the local currency. Some sponsors even take care of all the records registration for the members they support.

It’s important to note that sponsors can only support the participation of organisations that would otherwise be in the current $275 fee tier (or up to $500 for funders) if these organisations were to join independently. Regardless of the number of sponsored members, the sponsor pays one membership fee on behalf of them all, and then they also pay all the registration fees that are due on behalf of their sponsored members, which alleviates challenges related to paying in foreign currency. Overall, sponsors make Crossref membership more economical for the organisations that participate this way, and Crossref benefits from billing efficiencies.

In a recent survey of sponsored members (carried out in July 2023, with 204 responses from members working with 53 sponsors), the majority of sponsored members (88%) said that sponsors met their expectations and 85% are likely or very likely to recommend their sponsors to another organisation.

Respondents indicated that the aspects of working with a sponsor that were most valued are technical support (72%), financial assistance/no annual fee (37.3%), ability to pay in local currency (43%), and local language support (44%).

It’s important to note that sponsors often offer many non-Crossref services to members too, including anything from website design, copy editing, typesetting, set up of publishing platform, XML-JATS markup, to assistance with submitting content to third-party databases.

Sponsors represent Crossref in the community. They also assist us in connecting with their communities locally. In 2024, we collaborated with Biteca for an event in Bogotá, and Relawan Jurnal Indonesia for a two-day event in Jakarta. Both sponsors advised on venues, promoted the event to the members they support, coordinated local guest speakers, and provided translation services as needed. We also collaborated with Hipertexto-Netizen on engaging our community at the Guadalajara Book Fair. The success of these events was in part due to our collaboration with each sponsor.

Ensuring quality experience for our members

We try to make sure that every sponsor we work with will be able to commit to helping our members long-term. We offer training too, with an expectation that they can disseminate the learning to their members. The majority of sponsored members report receiving some training from their Sponsors (with 70% in our survey saying they’ve received adequate training on all services, while only 3% haven’t received any so far). Most recently we engaged sponsors with the Participation Reports to help them improve metadata completeness for their members.

In 2024, we’ve been meeting sponsors individually to review how things are going for them and their members – assessing member metadata quality, and additional services, as well as inviting their feedback about the program and suggestions for improvements that Crossref could make.

We’ve learnt a lot about practices related to record registration and training, business models and especially – a whole range of attitudes and approaches related to metadata completeness. Some sponsors register content for all or some of their members, while others provide technical support but do not register the content directly for members.

Members who used OJS often had higher scores because of the ease of use and availability of the plugins. Some sponsors noted that many journal editors are volunteers and don’t have the time or financial resources to collect extra metadata or update existing metadata records; they collect only what is required to register an item. Several sponsors also reported a barrier with authors’ mindset – they don’t tend to see the value of including ORCiDs or ROR IDs in their submissions. Somewhat surprisingly, we learned that not all members see the value in including references in their deposits or don’t wish to take the time to add them – this is a concern, as relationships created by references are a cornerstone of the Research Nexus, and markedly support discoverability of the content.

Sometimes, sponsors are unable to continue to provide services, or they are unable to meet the obligations of being a sponsor and their accounts are closed. In the cases where a sponsor account is closed, we will work with their members to find an alternative sponsor when possible.

Similarity Check is an external service provided in partnership with iThenticate, that’s available to Crossref members at a more competitive price, and it is in demand among the sponsored members too. Currently, 78 Sponsors offer Similarity Check to their members (however, not all sponsored members working with these sponsors have elected to use the service).

Sponsor LIBCOM Piotr Karwasinski was pleased that “All the rules of Crossref are unified. Everything is the same for everyone - the same for big publishers as well as small. Equal for everyone.”

Costs can sometimes be a concern; sponsors in India and Algeria both noted that $1USD is a lot of money for some. We mentioned the fee review being conducted with the RCFS project.

In summary

As we move toward realizing our vision of a connected Research Nexus, building a network for the global community must include input from all of the global community. When Crossref began 25 years ago our first members were mainly from the United States and Western Europe, but today our membership is much more global and diverse. Though our membership has grown to more than 22,000 organisations around the world, we are not seeing significant membership growth from all regions.

In the last few years, almost half of our members came from Southeastern Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America combined. However, there is much slower growth in other regions, mostly notably Northern and Sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of Central Asia, with only 5% of new member applications coming from these regions collectively. We know there are organisations in those areas contributing to the scholarly record, however, many continue to face financial, technical, and administrative barriers to become members.

The Sponsor Program is one of the avenues established to address and reduce barriers and to help facilitate membership and participation to all knowledge-sharing organisations worldwide. Ensuring it remains strong and successful requires collaboration, communication, and comprehensive training.

Refocusing our Sponsors Program; a call for new Sponsors in specific countries

Susan Collins — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Some small organisations who want to register metadata for their research and participate in Crossref are not able to do so due to financial, technical, or language barriers. To attempt to reduce these barriers we have developed several programs to help facilitate membership. One of the most significant—and successful—has been our Sponsor program.

Sponsors are organisations that are generally not producing scholarly content themselves but work with or publish on behalf of groups of smaller organisations that wish to join Crossref but face barriers to do so independently. Sponsors work directly with Crossref in order to provide billing, technical, and, if applicable, language support to Members.

Because Sponsors are important partners in facilitating membership there is a high bar to meet to be accepted as a Sponsor. To ensure that an organisation can accurately represent Crossref and has the resources to be successful we created a set of criteria that must be met to be considered.

Our Sponsors program has grown considerably over the last decade and has now become the primary route to membership for emerging markets and small or academic-adjacent publishing operations.

The program began in 2012 with four Sponsors, based primarily in South Korea and Turkey, representing fewer than 100 members. In the next stage of development, the program covered Brazil, India, and Ukraine, and nearly 1300 members. At the end of 2022, the program had grown to over 100 sponsors from 45 countries representing over 11,000 of our members.

Though the program continues to expand, there are still regions where we lack Sponsors, while having an abundance in others. We are working with members, ambassadors, and the community to help identify organisations that may be a fit with the Sponsor program and based in those regions where coverage is lacking.

This January we announced our Global Equitable Membership (GEM) Program which offers relief from membership and content registration fees for members in the least economically-advantaged countries in the world. Eligibility for the program is based on a member’s country on our curated list.

Though the GEM program reduces financial barriers to becoming a member, many organisations still require technical assistance and local language support. Working with a Sponsor would help organisations overcome these burdens. However, there is little or no Sponsor coverage for organisations located in most GEM-eligible countries. That means that in places like Bangladesh, Nepal, and Senegal, where we’ve seen a lot of growth, more organisations could join us if a suitable local Sponsor could support them.

We have made the decision to pause accepting new Sponsors from regions where Sponsor numbers are already very high or not based in a GEM region. By doing so we can focus on growing the program in areas where there is the greatest need.

We are also going to focus on how best to support our current 100+ Sponsors and work with them to evaluate ways to improve the program. We will bolster the training and resources, outreach activities, and solicit feedback on additional ways we can help.

We would love to hear from organisations based in GEM countries who might consider becoming a Sponsor. But our invitation for Sponsors is not limited to the support for the GEM program. There are countries where the GEM program won’t apply, but where growth is high and no Sponsor is present. In particular, we seek support in the following countries where member numbers are growing but could be better supported.

Country/state	Region	No. Crossref members
Nigeria	Sub-Saharan Africa (Western)	99
Philippines	South-eastern Asia	81
Kenya	Sub-Saharan Africa (Eastern)	40
Egypt	Northern Africa	26
Sri Lanka	Southern Asia	13

If your organisation is based in one of these regions and supports or provides services to scholarly publishers in one of the above countries —please take a look at the criteria set out on our website and do get in touch to start the conversation if you think you can meet them. We’re excited to hear from you!

Meet the members, Part 3 (with INASP)

Christine Cormack Wood — Wed, 20 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Next in our Meet the members blog series is INASP, who isn’t a direct member, but acts as a Sponsor for hundreds of members. Sioux Cumming, Programme Specialist at INASP tells us a bit about the work they’re doing, how they use Crossref and what the future plans for INASP are.

Can you tell us a little bit about INASP?

INASP is an international development organisation working with a global network of partners in Africa, Latin America and Asia. We have a vision of research and knowledge at the heart of development, so are working to support individuals and institutions to produce, share and use research and knowledge, which can transform lives.

Our work includes strengthening research communication, which we do via AuthorAID (supporting researchers, especially early-career researchers, in getting their research published); improving information access (supporting library consortia with access to international journals and other online resources); supporting evidence use in policy making; working with higher-education institutions to improve critical thinking skills; improving gender equity in research systems; and my area, which I’ll talk more about below, supporting academic publishing in the Global South.

INASP’s approaches are based on the core pillars of capacity development, convening, influencing and working in partnership. INASP promotes equity by actively addressing the needs of both men and women across all our work and addressing issues of power within the research and knowledge system.

What’s your role within INASP?

I’m a Programme Specialist and since I started at INASP 15 years ago I’ve been responsible for our academic publishing work. This work supports increased visibility, accessibility and quality of peer-reviewed journals published in developing countries so that the research outputs that are produced in these countries can be found, shared and used more effectively.

We recognize two big challenges for Southern journals in playing their part in global research systems. The first is awareness of Southern journals, many of which were until recently only available in print. Supporting editors and national organisations to put their journals online on central platforms (the Journals Online platforms) has helped increase their visibility.

We have also provided support to the local management teams in communicating about the platforms, the journals and the research they publish, and we recently published a Handbook for Journal Editors - www.inasp.info/editorshandbook. This is intended to be a free resource for editors worldwide that can be used as a stand-alone handbook or as an accompaniment to the journal quality online course that we are currently developing.

The second challenge is supporting publishing quality and enabling Southern journals to demonstrate their quality so they will be regarded as credible. In the early days, this, for me, was largely about providing training and mentoring for journal editors and Journals Online platform managers about standard publishing practices.

More recently, as local handover progressed, our role shifted towards helping journals to demonstrate their credibility. Last September INASP and African Journals Online launched our Journal Publishing Practices and Standards (JPPS) framework for assessing the quality of Southern publishing processes. This has been really well received by the international publishing sector and by the journal editors we work with.

Tell us a bit about who you support, and how you support them

We support others communicating their research and finding out about the research of others.

The five Journals Online platforms that were handed over to local management at the end of March collectively host 397 journals from Bangladesh, El Salvador, Honduras, Mongolia, Nepal, Nicaragua and Sri Lanka.

These platforms help the research from these countries to become even more integrated in the global research community. Some fascinating and valuable research is published in the journals on these platforms. You can see some examples of this research in this article about a small piece of work we did with these platforms to commission and disseminate press releases of some of the research.

What’s your participation level with Crossref?

INASP has been a Crossref Sponsor for the Journals Online platforms since 2008 and all articles on the sites have DOIs assigned to them (approximately 50,000 articles). All the in-country training sessions for journal editors publishing via the JOL platforms have included sessions to explain how DOIs work and why they are important. We have also trained editors on how to find and include the DOIs for the references of their articles. More recently, in 2015, we provided access to the Crossref Similarity Check service to editors, which enabled them to improve the quality of their submissions by identifying instances of plagiarism before the articles were published.

What trends are you seeing in your part of the scholarly communications community?

Demonstrating credibility of journals is an important part of journal publishing today. There are so many journals worldwide and it is a tough challenge for authors and readers to navigate this sector – a challenge that we often see through the discussions in our AuthorAID network. But it is important that researchers don’t simply turn to the handful of well-known publishers in the Global North that have dominated scholarly discourse to date.

To really tackle global issues and increase equality in global research we need to work towards levelling the playing field and including all voices – and this challenge needs to be embraced across the global research and knowledge system. We have seen encouraging signs over the past couple of years of magazines, blogs, conference organizers and industry groups in the Global North approaching us to help bring in more global perspectives to scholarly discussions. However, there is plenty more to be done and we are particularly focusing on equity in our new areas of work.

Collaboration with Crossref over the past few years has been one of a number of ways that we have been able to connect small, scholar-led titles in the Global South with the latest global standards and approaches in scholarly publishing. This is important as it all helps to level the playing field.

Including DOIs in papers is one of the criteria for being awarded a JPPS star and thus the journals are incentivized to understand and use them more.

What are INASP’s plans for the future?

INASP has recently completed a major five-year programme of work with a significant focus on strengthening organisations in the countries we have been working in and handing over responsibility for managing things like the Journals Online platforms. We are now in a new phase of work, building on what has gone before but with a particular emphasis on improving equity both within and between research systems.

Many challenges remain – the global research system still tends to be biased towards the Global North. From an academic publishing perspective this is apparent both in terms of awareness of journals and also in terms of impressions of credibility. JPPS is intended to tackle the latter challenge but it is still early days – we only announced the first badges awarded a few months ago. Over the next few years we will be building on and strengthening this work and ensuring that it is an important part of the processes for journal editors and for authors and readers.

Thank you Sioux for your participation in our Meet the members series. If your organisation would like to feature in this series, please get in touch.

Are you having an identity crisis?

Amanda Bartell — Fri, 23 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

We work with a huge range of organisations in the scholarly communications world—publishers, libraries, universities, government agencies, funders, publishing service providers, and researcher services providers—and you each have different relationships with us.

Some of you are members who create and disseminate your own content, register it with us by depositing metadata, and help steer our future by voting in our annual board elections. Some of you don’t vote in our board elections but do play a vital role by registering content on members’ behalf.

And some of you make use of the metadata provided by our members and so perform a key service by getting their published works out into the world, but don’t vote in our board elections.

After a recent review we realized our Member Types weren’t completely clear, and may in fact have led to a bit of confusion. With this in mind, we put some thought into their revision and have now given them the clarity they were missing. Over the course of this year we’ll be checking that everyone is in the right group and getting the appropriate support based on your Member Type.

Former Member Type name	New Member Type name
Publisher	Member
Sponsoring Publisher	Sponsoring Member
Represented Member	Sponsored Member
Sponsoring Entity	Sponsoring organisation
Sponsored Member	Sponsored organisation
Affiliate	Metadata User
Service Provider	(No change to Member Type name)

So, what’s different?

The changes we’ve made help to differentiate if you’re a voting member (and therefore have a say in our future direction), or not. If you are a voting member, you’ll now have the word “Member” in your title—and if you’re not—you won’t, as the diagram below indicates.

Where there are two organisations with a sponsorship arrangement in place (with a sponsoring party and a sponsored party), one of you will always be the voting party, and the other will be non-voting. These partnerships will therefore always contain one “Member” and one “organisation”.

We’ve also stopped using the word “Publisher” in our Member Types as not all our members consider themselves to be publishers — sometimes you’re libraries, funders, scholars, repositories, etc. As it says in one of our truths “Come one, come all: we define publishing broadly. If you communicate research and care about preserving the scholarly record, join us.”

How do you know if you are a voting member?

Voting members fall into three Member Types: Members, Sponsoring Members and Sponsored Members.

This means you are organisations who create and disseminate content, and therefore contribute to the scholarly record. Some of you register your content directly with us and some via a third party, but the key thing is that you’re adding to our metadata records, and as such can have a say in the future direction of Crossref. Voting members can also take metadata out of our system — and many of you do — however, your key relationship with us is as a member who is contributing to the scholarly record.

It also means you have obligations to keep your records up-to-date, and maximize links with other Crossref members.

What’s the difference between the voting categories?

Members
As a Member (formerly known as Publishers), you create and disseminate content, register your own content with us (usually under a single prefix), and are able to vote in our board elections. You pay an annual fee based on your publishing revenue, plus Content Registration fees for all new DOIs.

Sponsoring Members
As a Sponsoring Member (formerly known as a Sponsoring Publisher), you do everything a standard member does, but as well as registering your own content under your own DOI prefix, you also register content on behalf of other, smaller publishers (ideally using separate DOI prefixes so the metadata is accurate and can be reported on separately and relied upon downstream).

When you vote, you vote on behalf of the organisations that you sponsor. You pay an annual fee based on your publishing revenue/expenses plus the publishing revenue of your sponsored organisations, and you also pay Content Registration fees for all new metadata records registered. You look after deposit billing for the organisations you sponsor, and provide technical and language support for them.

Some of our larger members may be thinking that you should be in this Member Type - and you’re probably right! During the course of 2018 we’ll be working with you to transition you over to Sponsoring Membership. If you are a Member who is thinking of becoming a Sponsoring Member, please get in touch.

Sponsored Members
As a Sponsored Member (formerly known as a Represented Member), you create and disseminate content, but you don’t register your content directly with us—this is done by your Sponsoring organisation. Because of this it’s you, the one who creates and disseminates the content and thus contributes to the scholarly record, who can vote.

How do you know if you are a non-voting member?

If you haven’t spotted yourself yet, you may be one of the non-voting organisations we work with — these fall into four Member Types: Sponsoring organisations, Sponsored organisations, Service Providers and Metadata Users.

As a non-voting organisation, you may still register content with us, but you either don’t create and disseminate the content yourselves, or you’re already represented by a voting organisation. Non-voting organisations also include those whose only relationship with us is to make use of our metadata.

What’s the difference between the non-voting categories?

Sponsoring organisations
As a Sponsoring organisation (formerly known as a Sponsoring Affiliate), you don’t create and disseminate content yourself, but you do register content with us on behalf of your Sponsored Members — preferably using distinct DOI prefixes for each member. You also often look after their administrative, technical, billing and language support needs. You’ll pay us an annual fee based on the publishing revenue of all your members, and Content Registration fees for all new DOIs. You might charge the members you work with for this service. You also provide support and promotion of our services and activities.

Sponsored organisations
As a Sponsored organisation (formerly known as a Sponsored Member), you do create and disseminate content yourself, but you don’t register your own content. This is done by a Sponsoring Member, and as they have the member vote, you can’t have one too. For this reason, we’ve removed the word “Member” from your title, to make your voting position clearer. Of course, your Sponsoring Member needs to represent your needs too when voting, so make sure you make them known!

Service Providers
As a Service Provider you work closely with our members to collect and/or host and/or deposit metadata on their behalf. Unlike a Sponsoring organisation however you don’t get involved with administrative, technical, billing or language support for the members you work with, but you’re a key partner in helping them deposit quality metadata and contribute effectively to the scholarly record. During 2018 we’ll be working more closely with you to help you collaborate with us more effectively.

Metadata Users
Metadata Users (formerly known as Affiliates), you are the organisations who don’t register content with us, but you do make use of it through our free and open APIs and search interfaces, or our paid-for Metadata Plus service, giving you access to a premium version of both the REST API and OAI-PMH. Of course all members can get metadata out of our systems as well, but if the only thing you do with us is get metadata out, then you’re a Metadata User.

Don’t know which Member Type you are?

We’re hoping these new names make it clearer, but if you’re still confused, please get in touch with our membership specialist