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.
Our LIVE Annual Meeting is back in North America for the first time since 2015, and with just 10 days to go, there’s a lot going on in preparation. As you’d expect with a How good is your metadata? theme—the two-days will be entirely devoted to the subject of metadata—because it touches everything we do, and everything that publishers, hosting platforms, funders, researchers, and librarians do. Oh, and it’s actually super awesome too—and occasionally fun.
Metadata is what is used to describe the story of research: its origin, its contributors, its attention, and its relationships with other objects. The more machines start to do what humans cannot—parse millions of files through multiple views—the more we see what connections are missing, and the more we start to understand the opportunities that better metadata could offer.
We love metadata so much that we’re producing an 8-foot-high depiction of the ‘perfect’ record, in both XML and JSON, for people to gape at and annotate in person. Sneak preview:
The perfect metadata record is eight feet tall.
SchemaSchemer
Both days feature plenary-style talks, insights from ourselves and guests who will regale us with tales of metadata woes and wonders.
Lisa will be there at the end of Day 1 to update everyone on some recent and potential governance changes, and—the reason we started these gatherings—to reveal the results of our 2018 board election, the second contested election we’ve held, and already with twice the voters from 2017.
Our amazing guest speakers are too brilliant and too experienced to highlight in just one blog. But check out the LIVE18 schedule to see what they’ll be talking about:
Patricia Cruse, DataCite
Ravit David, University of Toronto
Clare Dean, Metadata 2020
Paul Dlug, American Physical Society
Kristen Fisher Ratan, CoKo Foundation
Stefanie Haustein, University of Ottawa
Bianca Kramer, Utrecht University
Graham Nott, Freelance developer (eLife/JATS)
Jodi Schneider, University of Urbana-Champaign
Shelley Stall, American Geophysical Union
We’ll be taking over the entire second floor of the Toronto Reference Library, whose three rooms will house a bunch of conversational sessions as well as some more formal talks:
Rally is the main room where we’ll have the plenary-style talks, a corner for Unscheduled Maintenance offering live support for your questions about billing or tech for Ryan, Shayn, Isaac, Jason, Chuck, & Mike. Running down the whole left side of this room is also the You-are-Crossref wall where the community will showcase their work with metadata through posters - feel free to bring one along and find Patricia to get the sticky tack.
The LIVE Lounge is where you can eat, drink, rest, and chat and where you’ll likely find Rosa as she laises between the caterers, the venue, AV, and all of us. The Lounge is also where we’ll gather for much-needed post-election refreshments at the end of Tuesday.
The Bigger Ambitions Room is where a lot of the Unplugged sessions will take place. This room will feature three separate stations:
R&D & Product where you can chat with Geoffrey, Esha, Jennifer L, Patrick, and Christine about your big ideas for us, and what we’re working on already.
Metadata discussions and annotations of the perfect record (previewed above) with Patricia, together with space to ideate around metadata principles.
Uses and users of metadata where Jennifer K will help us understand just how far Crossref metadata can reach, and who and what people are doing with it.
We cannot wait to show you what else we have planned :-)
For those of you not able to attend, recordings of the presentations will be made available on the event page directly soon after.
