You can now register rich metadata for a variety of record types in Metadata Manager using simple, guided workflows. The tool is used by many in our community to register grant and journal article records, and it has now been expanded to support books and chapters, reports, dissertations, and post-publication updates for journal content.
Metadata Manager makes it easier to capture identifiers for contributors and their affiliations, funding information, references, and more. Thanks to automated reference matching by Crossref, this offers greater visibility for the works, while the affiliations and funding information can serve as important trust signals for the community.
This year’s edition of the FORCE11 conference was hosted in June by Singapore Management University. Its title, “To Go Far, Go Together: Advancing Scholarly Communication Across Boundaries and Disruptions” truly resonates with Crossref’s truths; it takes a village! Crossref only works as long as the scholarly research community wants to work together globally, across all disciplines, for integrity and openness of the scientific record. The conversations were influenced by a genuinely diverse mix of librarians, researchers, open infrastructures, and service providers, and that mix shaped almost every interaction we had at the conference.
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 its July meeting, the Crossref board approved the use of Crossref surplus funds for a three-year project to accelerate the redesign of the Crossref system. Our plan is to use $1.6 million a year for three years (~USD $4.9M in total) from our surplus funds, which will help us set up a modern infrastructure consisting of separate services for the different functionalities that the Crossref system offers.
You can now register rich metadata for a variety of record types in Metadata Manager using simple, guided workflows. The tool is used by many in our community to register grant and journal article records, and it has now been expanded to support books and chapters, reports, dissertations, and post-publication updates for journal content.
Metadata Manager makes it easier to capture identifiers for contributors and their affiliations, funding information, references, and more. Thanks to automated reference matching by Crossref, this offers greater visibility for the works, while the affiliations and funding information can serve as important trust signals for the community.
While all these record types have long been supported through our web deposit form, updated Metadata Manager simplifies the workflow, reduces complexity, and enables metadata updates for registered records. This gives our members the option to register these records along with rich metadata efficiently, without needing to work directly with XML files. We encourage existing web deposit form users to switch to Metadata Manager and the good news is that they can use their existing Crossref credentials to log in.
This is the latest step in expanding Metadata Manager to support more of the record types our members register daily. We retired the legacy Metadata Manager at the end of 2025 partly because it could not be extended to support other record types besides journal content. In contrast, we built the new Metadata Manager in a schema-driven way which makes it adaptable to all parts of our input schema, as well as any future schema changes.
And registering a DOI record doesn’t have to be the end of the story. Metadata Manager makes it easier to manage metadata after registration, allowing members to edit existing metadata directly in the helper tool—without having to re-enter the full record. Updating your records is free, and this new editability makes stewarding your metadata simpler.
In this update, our team focused on the record types members use most often. Our goal was to make DOI registration easier and more accessible.
We are currently working on adding support for registering conference proceedings and conference paper records in Metadata Manager; you can expect to see this next update in the coming weeks.
Why this update matters
Making it easier to register books and chapters, reports and working papers, dissertations, and other research outputs helps ensure more of the scholarly record is described with rich metadata. Better metadata strengthens the links between research outputs, contributors, organisations, grants, and other research objects, supporting the Research Nexus and making scholarly information easier to discover, cite, connect, and reuse. And given the importance of clarity about post-publication updates, such as corrections and retractions, for the integrity of the scholarly record, the Metadata Manager will better support our members to adopt industry best practices that enable self-correcting mechanisms in research.
The new functionality is available to use right away. If you’ve never used the new Metadata Manager, just log in to the tool with the same Crossref credentials you use elsewhere and start exploring the workflow.
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