Crossref is made of tens of thousands of member organizations, among them commercial publishers, learned societies, universities, nonprofits, and even a farm! While new Crossref members abound, sometimes memberships close, either voluntarily (e.g., because the member ceased operation or publication) or through Crossref’s intervention (e.g., because the member failed to meet its financial obligations).
In most cases, it’s possible for a former member to rejoin Crossref to resume management of their existing DOI records and continue registration of new DOI records via their original DOI prefix. Every month, alongside the several hundred new members who join us are typically a handful of rejoining members.
There are a few special details to consider when rejoining Crossref:
Reapplying
If your organization used to be a member of Crossref, you may rejoin by reapplying for membership. As shown below, please indicate your original DOI prefix and/or billing ID (if you know them) in your application, as this will help us locate your original account in our records.
During the (re)application process, we will also update your account and contact details. We try to proactively confirm whether existing contacts should remain associated with your membership as additional trusted contacts or whether they should be removed, but any additional information you can share with us (“X has retired, please remove her from our membership”) is tremendously useful.
If your membership was revoked due to unpaid fees, we will confirm with our Billing team which outstanding fees are owed, and then we will need you to confirm your readiness to pay those fees (and all future fees) before we can proceed. We will then reissue those invoices to you along with a membership order for the current year’s annual membership fee; all of these invoices will need to be paid before you’re able to rejoin.
Resuming membership
One of the trickiest but most crucial parts of rejoining Crossref is ensuring that all of your organization’s original DOIs continue to function properly. Crossref’s membership terms apply from the point that a member first joined Crossref onward, even if there was a period of interruption. What this means is that it is your obligation to continue supporting access to works for which DOI records were registered via your membership. The only exception to this rule is if ownership of those DOIs has been transferred to another Crossref member.
The first step you should take upon rejoining Crossref is to review the existing DOI records already associated with your membership. You can easily do this via a simple API query like this one: https://api.crossref.org/prefixes/10.35195/works?select=DOI,container-title,title,resource (replacing the 10.35195 prefix with your own DOI prefix; more tips for using our REST API here). If you aren’t comfortable with API queries, you can also ask our Support team to send you a spreadsheet of all of your membership’s DOIs.
Once you know which DOIs are associated with your membership, the next step is to ensure that all of them properly resolve to the corresponding material. This is important, as the location of your work may have changed since the last time your organization was a member. DOIs exist in part to combat the problem of link rot in the scholarly space, and it’s up to you to ensure that your DOIs function as they should.
If your organization publishes journals and you host those journals via OJS, please follow these instructions to import your existing journal article DOIs into your OJS platform, then navigate to the Crossref DOI plugin (in OJS 3.3) or DOI menu (in OJS 3.4/3.5) and trigger a metadata redeposit for all the journal’s DOIs (Bulk Actions > Deposit DOIs).
For journal articles not hosted via OJS, and for all other types of publications, you can do a bulk resolution URL update to quickly update just the resolution URLs of your DOIs. More on this can be found here and here.
Of course, you can also update additional metadata in your DOI records as well. If you previously only submitted author names but not author affiliations, you can resubmit a DOI record’s metadata with the affiliation metadata added. You can use our Metadata Manager to do this easily but manually.
Once you have ensured that all of your membership’s original DOIs are functional, you can begin registering new DOIs for any materials that do not yet have DOIs. This also includes ensuring that any DOIs that were assigned and publicly displayed while your membership was revoked are properly registered. This frequently happens when members use a platform like OJS that assigns and registers DOIs automatically. These platforms will continue to assign DOIs even when the underlying Crossref membership is inactive, meaning that unregistered DOIs may be displayed with some of your articles. It’s important to review all publications from the date that your membership was suspended onward, to ensure that any DOIs that have been made public in any form are properly registered as soon as possible. Remember: displaying unregistered DOIs violates our terms of membership and creates gaps in the Research Nexus that only you as the publishing member can fill!
An example
I’ve spent many paragraphs speaking in hypothetical terms. Let’s consider what rejoining Crossref looks like in practice:
You represent a university. Your university first became a Crossref member in 2010, before you personally began working there. At that time, a new journal called University Humanities Journal was launched. Your university also published a second longer-running journal called Dentistry Studies of the University. Your predecessors at the university used their Crossref membership to register DOIs for both titles, as both journals were published by your university.
The Primary and Billing contact of your original membership was also the editor-in-chief of University Humanities Journal. In 2015, this EiC left the university suddenly. University Humanities Journal unceremoniously ceased publication, and the Crossref membership was eventually revoked because no one paid Crossref’s annual membership fee. The other journal, Dentistry Studies of the University, continues to be published; its OJS platform continues to assign DOIs on your university’s DOI prefix, but these DOIs cannot be registered because your membership’s DOI depositor credentials lost depositor access when your account was suspended and later revoked.
You joined the university library in 2022. The editors of Dentistry Studies of the University contact you about the unregistered DOIs from 2015 onwards in their journal; they want these DOIs to begin working! You apply for Crossref membership to rejoin.
We first establish continuity between the old membership and your application. Generally, this means seeking some confirmation from one of the contacts on the existing membership. While the EiC who served as the Primary/Billing contact may have left, perhaps the Voting contact is still working at your university and can approve the restoration of this membership.
We’ll confirm with our Billing team which outstanding memberships are owed by your university, then reissue these as applicable. Once paid, we’ll send you your own depositor credentials. You can now register DOI records again via your university’s existing DOI prefix!
You integrate your depositor credentials into Dentistry Studies of the University’s OJS platform, following the steps outlined here. You then trigger a redeposit of all the DOIs, both the DOIs registered for articles published through 2015 (to ensure that their metadata is up to date) and the unregistered DOIs for articles from 2015-2026. Now, all of the DOIs in Dentistry Studies of the University are properly functioning and the OJS platform should be able to automatically deposit new DOIs for newly published articles.
University Humanities Journal is a little more complicated. After this journal’s EiC departed the university, the Department of Humanities changed the articles’ domain. The existing DOIs no longer resolve properly, instead leading readers to a 404 error. Additionally, volume 1 of the journal from 2010 seems to have been lost entirely; it is not hosted on the Department of Humanities’ website anywhere.
Luckily, you are able to locate the volume 1 articles via the Archive.org Wayback Machine at their original URLs. You restore all articles to the Department of Humanities website and then submit a bulk resolution URL deposit to update the DOI records for all University Humanities Journal from 2010-2015. Whereas none of the DOIs were previously functional, you have now restored access to all the corresponding materials and fixed a gap in the scholarly ecosystem!
You can also use your university membership to register DOIs for any new journals published by your university.
If you have any questions about how to get restarted as a Crossref member, please don’t hesitate to ask!