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.
Why metadata matters for research integrity and jow to contribute
Some aspects of research integrity depend on accurate, complete, and connected metadata. This joint guide from Crossref and DataCite sets out the metadata elements most critical for assessing research integrity—and how all stakeholders can contribute to and benefit from a richer, more trustworthy scholarly record.
Strategists
Understand why metadata is infrastructure for research integrity.
Why completeness, accuracy, and openness across the scholarly record matters for systemic trust in research.
Decision-makers
Know which metadata elements to require, check, and act on.
A practical resource for publishers, funders, and institutions making metadata-related policy decisions.
Practitioners
Learn how to deposit, enrich, and query research integrity metadata.
Step-by-step guidance using Crossref and DataCite services and open APIs.
What this guide covers
This guide walks through the key metadata elements that enable research integrity assessment, and explains how to contribute them via Crossref and DataCite:
Contributors and their roles—identifying who did what
Affiliations—linking researchers to institutions
Dates—submission, acceptance, publication, and update dates
Funder, funding, and grant information—transparency on who paid for the research
Versioning—tracking how a work has changed over time
Retractions, corrections, and updates—keeping the record accurate
Abstracts and descriptions—what the work is actually about
Clinical trials—registration and reporting
References—connecting works to what they cite
Peer reviews—when and how work was reviewed
Publisher and steward—accountability for the record
Record and resource types—what kind of object is this?
Relationships and related identifiers—linking datasets, preprints, articles, and more
Rights, licences, and access—how the work can be used
The guide also sets out a call to action for each stakeholder group: how to enrich your records, query existing metadata via APIs, and report inconsistencies.
Amdekar, M., Chen, X., Cousijn, H., El-Gebali, S., Feeney, P., Hendricks, G., & Stathis, K. (2026, April). Why metadata matters for research integrity and how to contribute. Zenodo. https://doi-org.pluma.sjfc.edu/10.5281/zenodo.19695957
