It’s the first Membership Ticket of the Month of the year!* 2026 sees all sorts of changes related to Crossref’s fees:
- We added 18 new countries to our GEM program, entitling members in these countries to fee-free access to Crossref membership and DOI registration.
- We removed complicated volume discounts which applied only to certain content types above certain thresholds within certain timeframes (e.g., for members registering DOIs for over 10,000 book chapters in a single quarter).
- We initiated a fee-reduction and two-year pilot program for grant DOIs, lowering the price to register a current-year grant from $2 to $1 and eliminating fees for back-year grants throughout 2026 and 2027.
- We added a new lower fee tier for our members with limited annual publishing revenue and expenses.
This last point is the focus of today’s ticket of the month.
Crossref is a membership organization and you, our members, will generally pay two types of fees:
- Annual membership fees, which grant you access to Crossref tools and services as well as a stake in our governance
- Content registration fees, which are charged only once when a DOI is first registered
There are different membership fee tiers depending on whether you will be registering DOIs for published content with us, or whether you are a funder and will be registering DOIs for your grants. These fees are tiered, depending on your publishing revenues or expenses (whichever is higher), or the value of the grants that you award.
Previously, our lowest publisher member fee tier was $275 USD/year and this tier applied to all members whose annual publishing revenue or expenses were anywhere beneath $1 million USD. Our new lower $200/year tier applies to all members whose annual publishing revenue or expenses are $999 USD or lower (which you can read more about here).
You’ll note that we consider two values when determining your annual membership fee tier: your organization’s annual publishing revenue and your organization’s annual publishing expenses. The higher of these two values determines which fee you will pay.
This is true across all ten of our fee tiers and it’s predicated on members’ capacities to pay. All of our members have a hand in supporting Crossref’s infrastructure in an equitable way.
Okay, but what constitutes publishing revenue? What counts as a publishing expense?
Your publishing revenue figure would include all types of publishing revenue and income: advertising, sales, subscriptions, databases, article processing charges (APCs), membership dues, grant funding, donations, etc. for the most recent whole year period. Your expenses figure would include total annual publishing operations expenses, like website hosting, domain name registration, outsourcing, consulting, typesetting, staff remuneration, support costs, volunteer stipends, etc.
In both cases, we are not looking for total organizational expenses if your organization is also involved in activities other than publishing. For example, if you represent a university, we are not concerned with your university’s full operating budget; we only need to know the expenses and income related to your publishing operations.
Newer members and recent applicants will note that we’ve begun collecting both of these values (revenue, expenses) on our membership applications. This data will help us to continue to evaluate our fee tiers over time to ensure that fees are distributed in a way that is tenable for all our members.
If you have questions about determining your fee tier, let me know in the comments. I also recommend checking out our Billing team’s FAQs if you have specific questions about paying any of your fees.
Happy new year!
*If you surreptitiously ignore the December ticket that I posted very late.