As we finish celebrating our 25th anniversary, we can look back on a truly transformational year, defined by the successful delivery of several long-planned, foundational projects—as well as updates to our teams, services, and fees—that position Crossref for success over the next quarter century as essential open scholarly infrastructure. In our update at the end of 2024, we highlighted that we had restructured our leadership team and paused some projects. The changes made in 2024 positioned us for a year of getting things done in 2025. We launched cross-functional programs, modernised our systems, strengthened connections with our growing global community, and streamlined a bunch of technical and business operations while continuing to grow our staff, members, content, relationships, and community connections.
Crossref turned twenty-five this year, and our 2025 Annual Meeting became more than a celebration—it was a shared moment to reflect on how far open scholarly infrastructure has come and where we, as a community, are heading next.
Over two days in October, hundreds of participants joined online and in local satellite meetings in Madrid, Nairobi, Medan, Bogotá, Washington D.C., and London––a reminder that our community spans the globe. The meetings offered updates, community highlights, and a look at what’s ahead for our shared metadata network––including plans to connect funders, platforms, and AI tools across the global research ecosystem.
In my latest conversations with research funders, I talked with Hannah Hope, Open Research Lead at Wellcome, and Melissa Harrison, Team Leader of Literature Services at Europe PMC. Wellcome and Europe PMC are working together to realise the potential of funding metadata and the Crossref Grant Linking System for, among other things, programmatic grantee reporting. In this blog, we explore how this partnership works and how the Crossref Grant Linking System is supporting Wellcome in realising their Open Science vision.
In January 2026, our new annual membership fee tier takes effect. The new tier is US$200 for member organisations that operate on publishing revenue or expenses (whichever is higher) of up to US$1,000 annually. We announced the Board’s decision, making it possible in July, and––as you can infer from Amanda’s latest blog––this is the first such change to the annual membership fee tiers in close to 20 years!
The new fee tier resulted from the consultation process and fees review undertaken as part of the Resourcing Crossref for Future Sustainability program, carried out with the help of our Membership and Fees Committee (made up of representatives from member organisations and community partners). The program is ongoing, and the new fee tier, intended to make Crossref membership more accessible, is one of the first changes it helped us determine.
The new Metadata Manager tool (previously known as the record registration form) can be used to deposit metadata for your records. You do not need any knowledge of XML to use it. The tool currently supports journal articles and grants, but we are planning to add support for additional record types in future.
Select the type of record you wish to create, then enter the metadata associated with your record in the corresponding fields. Some fields are required to be filled out in order to submit your record, while others are optional. If you are registering a journal article, you can find links to our documentation in the form for more information on what each field means.
Journal article metadata also includes some information on the journal and, optionally, the issue and/or volume that the article was published in. To help avoid common errors with journal titles, you can auto-fill the journal metadata by choosing from a list of titles you have previously deposited into. You can search the list by title or by ISSN. Note that an ISSN is currently required to use the new Metadata Manager for registering journal articles.
Submit your record
After filling out the required fields as well as any optional metadata you want to deposit, check that everything looks correct and then click Submit at the bottom of the form. The submission will be made immediately and a success message will appear on the screen.
From the success page, you can download a .json file of your record to your local computer as a template for future submissions. For grant records, this file is named after the funder name and award number; for journal article records, it is named after the journal’s e-ISSN (or p-ISSN if no e-ISSN is available) and article title.
You can also choose to start another submission. If you have registered a journal article, you can choose to repeat the process for another article in the same journal and/or journal issue, which will pre-fill the form with the appropriate metadata so you don’t have to re-enter it.
If there is a problem with your submission, you will see an error message appear instead of the success page. Go to the documentation for tips on how to troubleshoot common errors from our deposit system.
Edit an existing record
Metadata can change over time, and the new Metadata Manager tool allows you to update your records to reflect this.
Choose Edit Record from the landing page or the sidebar navigation to see a list of the journal article and grant records you have previously registered using this tool, the web deposit form, or the deprecated legacy Metadata Manager.
You can search for a DOI, scroll through the list of previously registered records, or filter it by the date when the record was last updated. Find the record you are looking for and click Edit to access a form page with the record’s current metadata filled in. Simply make any changes and submit the record again to register the updated metadata.
Page maintainer: Lena Stoll Last updated: 2025-December-10
