Tl;dr: If you are an independent member of Crossref and you wish to either a) cancel your Crossref membership or b) move your membership under a Crossref sponsor, you must let us know before the due date on your annual membership fee invoice or you will still need to pay your annual membership fee for the current year.
If your organization deposits metadata/registers DOIs with us, you are probably either an independent member of Crossref or a sponsored member of Crossref. Independent members pay annual membership fees and content registration fees to Crossref directly. Sponsored members, meanwhile, operate as members of Crossref through third-party organizations (sponsors). These sponsors handle the direct payments to Crossref and may or may not register DOIs on behalf of their sponsored members (each sponsor has a different relationship with the organizations they sponsor).
If your organization is an independent member, your Billing contact will have received an annual membership fee order in early January. This order covers your membership for the new year and should be paid promptly before its due date in mid-February.
Sometimes, organizations decide they no longer wish to be members of Crossref. Perhaps your organization has been acquired by another organization. Perhaps your funding has been cut or maybe you joined Crossref but never actually published any materials and registered any DOIs. These things happen!
Alternatively, perhaps you decide to switch from working with Crossref as an independent member to working with us through a sponsor.
In either case, the question often arises: does my organization still owe an annual membership fee for the new year if we will be cancelling our membership or moving our membership under a sponsor?
The short answer is no, but only if you tell us early enough. If you do not proactively tell us that you wish to cancel your membership or move to sponsorship before the due date on your annual membership fee invoice then you will still owe your current year’s membership fee.
Failure to tell us that you will be cancelling your membership can have adverse effects for your account later on. For example, if you do not tell us you wish to cancel before the due date on your annual membership fee invoice, then you will need to pay that fee later if you decide to rejoin Crossref. If you ask us to cancel your membership before the due date, this will not be true; you will be able to rejoin in future years without owing the membership fee for the year that you cancelled your membership.
Likewise, if you don’t proactively contact us to cancel your membership soon enough and you later wish to transfer DOIs for a journal/book/etc. to another member, either you or the receiving member will need to pay the outstanding fees before we are able to complete the transfer. If you alert us promptly of the membership cancellation, we will be able to close your account without outstanding membership fees, meaning that you will be able to transfer any of your journals and their DOIs without additional charges in the future!
What this means is that if you are considering closing your membership, please contact the Membership team as soon as possible to let us know. Likewise, if you are considering moving under a sponsor, don’t delay! Begin reaching out to sponsors now if you have not done so already, and tell us right away that you wish to cancel your independent membership.
Most independent members will also receive a content registration fee invoice in early January. This invoice will cover fees incurred for DOI records registered in the previous year. Members subscribed to Similarity Check may also receive an annual Similarity Check usage fee in January for document checks they performed in the preceding year. Even if you will be moving to sponsorship or cancelling your membership, you will still need to pay both of these fees as they relate to services which your organization has already used.
In short: you must tell us before the due date on your annual membership fee invoice that you will be cancelling your membership or transitioning to sponsored membership to avoid paying the annual membership fee. If you will be cancelling your membership it is also important to consider what will happen with your existing DOIs.
One final note: the due date on your membership invoices is probably 15 February but we will give a little extra time for members to cancel, as we realise not all members may realise they need to cancel until they receive our automated chaser emails reminding them that their membership invoice is now overdue. That is to say: if you had not realized that you need to tell us by 15 February to cancel your membership, please tell us now (before the end of February) and we can still write off your annual membership fee invoice for this year.
Got any questions about moving under a sponsor or cancelling your membership? As always, let us know here or by contacting us directly.
Postscript 1: You can always let us know well in advance if you will be cancelling your membership or moving under sponsorship next year. If you know, for example, that your business will be closing next year or that your organization is moving under sponsorship as of 1 January, you can tell us this at any point in the current year and we will schedule the change to take place in early January for you. Alerting us of these changes beforehand will also allow us to prevent you from even being sent an annual membership fee invoice for next year.
Postscript 2: This is getting very in the weeds but it’s worth saying: Crossref’s billing cycles can sometimes produce seemingly unexpected final invoices. The way our billing system works means that content registration fees are assessed quarterly and billed to the owner of a prefix only at the end of the quarter or at the end of the year if the accrued fees are less than $100 USD.
What does this look like in practice? Let’s say you are a member who publishes one monthly journal. You publish 20 articles across two issues (January and February) and register DOIs for them on your DOI prefix. In late February, your journal is purchased by another organization. You tell us before the due date on your annual membership fee invoice that you will no longer need your membership and we confirm that you have paid any outstanding content registration fees from last year. We close your account, write off your current year’s annual membership fee, and transfer your journal and its existing DOIs to the new member who begins publishing and registering DOIs on their own prefix from the March issue onward.
Do you spot the gap here? If you registered a total of 20 newly published journal article DOIs in January and February, your organization’s Q1 invoice will total $20 USD (less than the $100 threshold for that invoice to actually be issued at the end of March). You won’t amass any new content registration fees throughout the rest of the year since the new publisher is registering DOIs for new articles they publish. What this means is that you won’t receive your final invoice of $20 until January of next year. This $20 relates to DOIs you registered during the period that your membership was active, so you are still obligated to pay this final invoice. We try to warn members about this quirk of our billing system but it still surprises some folks each year. Members beware! Your final content registration fee invoice may not arrive until next January!