Fees

Overview

We have different fees for different kinds of accounts including members of different sizes and kinds, and for non-member and member services. For all members, we also have fees for registering different content types such as journal articles, books, peer reviews, research grants, preprints, and so on.

Our Membership & Fees Committee regularly reviews the fees and makes recommendations to our Board. We haven’t increased the regular annual membership or Content Registration fees in over twelve years.

Fee principles

In July 2019 our board voted to approve the following principles to inform all future fee modelling and decisions.

Crossref’s fees should:

1. Enable us to fulfil our mission to make research outputs easy to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse
2. Encourage best practice and discourage bad practice, as our policies and obligations advise
3. Be non-discriminatory, encouraging broad participation from organizations of all sizes and types
4. Support the long-term persistence of our services and infrastructure, so long as relevant and valuable to the community
5. Deliver value to our members
6. Be transparent and openly available, recommended by the Membership & Fees Committee and approved by the board
7. Be the same for all, not discounted or negotiated individually, to ensure fairness
8. Be independent of our members’ own business models
9. Not always be necessary (e.g., new content types are not usually separate services)
10. Be based on providing services not metadata

Member fees

If you want to get a Crossref DOI prefix for your organization so you can create unique and persistent links and distribute metadata through us, you’ll need to become a member. You’ll be joining over 12k other members linking to each other using persistent links, your metadata will be distributed to thousands of other organizations in the scholarly communications world and you’ll be able to vote in and stand for our board elections. You’ll pay an annual membership fee (based on your organization’s revenue or spending), plus a one-time fee for each content item registered (or per metadata record deposit). We also have some other services for members that have separate fees.

Annual membership fees (non-funders)

All our members pay an annual fee at the beginning of each calendar year.

When you first apply to join Crossref, you’ll receive a pro-rated Membership Order for the remainder of that calendar year. So—depending on when you join—you’ll only pay for the remaining months of that year. Then, in the following January, you’ll receive an invoice for the whole of that calendar year, and will continue to receive invoices every subsequent January.

Our membership fees are tiered, depending on the revenue of your organization. Please select your tier from the table below, and use the higher number of either:

1. Total annual publishing operations expenses including hosting, outsourcing, consulting, typesetting, etc. Or
2. Total annual publishing revenue from all the divisions of your organization (the member is considered to be the largest legal entity) for all types of activities (advertising, sales, subscriptions, databases, article charges, membership dues, etc).

Annual membership fees (funders)

Since 2019, funders are able to register DOIs for the research grants they have awarded. The annual fees are lower than for all other members, but the grant registration fee is higher.

Content Registration fees

Content Registration (metadata deposit) fees are billed quarterly in arrears. They are one time fees for the initial registration of content with us. There are no fees for updating the metadata for registered content. We accept the following content:

• Journals and journal articles
• Books, book chapters, and reference works
• Conference proceedings and papers
• Preprints
• Peer Reviews
• Standards
• Technical reports and working papers
• Theses and dissertations
• Components (sub-items of journal, book, or conference content, such as figures, tables, graphs, data)
• Datasets and database entries
• Funding grants (including awards and use of facilities/equipment)

There are different fees for different content types and the fees are also different depending on the publication date of the content.

NB: “Current” content includes the current calendar year + the previous two calendar years (so publication/award dates of 2019, 2018, 2017). “backfile” is for grants awarded prior to that (so 2016 and older).

Some of our content types also have volume discounts.

Volume discounts: book chapters and reference works

If you’re depositing a lot of chapters or reference works for the same title in the same quarter year, the following discounts apply:

The higher tiers are for encyclopaedias, in case you’re wondering how a single title could possibly have 100,000 chapters!

Volume discounts: datasets and components

If you’re registering a lot of components or datasets for a single title in the same quarter year, the following discounts apply:

Similarity Check fees

Members are able to participate in Similarity Check. As a participant, you pay an annual fee to use Similarity Check plus a per document charge each time you check a document.

Similarity Check annual subscription fee

Members of Crossref can participate in Similarity Check. It is 20% of your annual membership fee.

Similarity Check per-document fees

Each document run through Similarity Check is charged at a per-document-checking fee, and there are volume discounts.

Crossmark fees

Crossmark allows members to register status updates to your published content such as corrections, retractions, and errata. It also enables you to put a button on both your html articles as well as on PDFs so readers can always know its status whether current, updated, or retracted. There is no annual fee for Crossmark, however there are fees for each record that is updated or corrected.

NB: “Current” content includes the current calendar year + the previous two calendar years (so retraction publication/award dates of 2019, 2018, 2017). “backfile” is for grants awarded prior to that (so 2016 and older).

Metadata Plus subscriber fees

If you want to get and use our metadata, you don’t need to be a Crossref member. We have various free public APIs available that you can use without contacting us. We also offer the Metadata Plus service for an annual subscription fee. You’ll receive an annual fee for this service each January - but if you initially sign up during the year, your fees will be prorated for the remainder of that calendar year.

The Metadata Plus service offers combined machine access to all available metadata in XML and JSON formats with additional features. This is also available openly via our Public APIs. The Plus service offers extra guarantees and features.

Please select your tier from the table below, using one of the following criteria:

1. For commercial organizations, the subscriber is considered to be the largest legal entity. The fee tier is selected based on the total annual revenue of all the divisions of your organization for all activities.
2. For government agencies, universities, and not-for-profits, the subscriber is considered to be the agency or department applying for the service. The fee tier is selected based on whichever is the higher between your total annual income, if any, or alternatively the total annual funding received.

You don’t have to tell us your total revenue/income/funding, just the category you are in. Let us know if you’re not sure.

Sponsoring Organization fees

If you’re an organization who works on behalf of groups of smaller organizations that want to register content with Crossref, you’ll be set up as a Sponsoring Organization. Sponsors work directly with us in order to provide administrative, technical and—if applicable—language support to the communities they work with.

The annual membership fee you pay as a Sponsor is based on the total annual publications revenue, income or funding of all the organizations you support, whichever is higher.

Each quarter you will also be sent an invoice for any content items that have been registered by the organizations that you sponsor. The charges are listed by each organization’s prefix on the invoice. There are different fees for different content types and the fees are also different depending on the publication date of the content. You will be asked to recategorize your annual fee at the end of every year, as the number of sponsoring members you represent grows.

Service Provider fees

Service providers such as hosting platforms pay an annual flat fee of $2,000.

How to pay us

We usually send out invoices by email to your named billing contact. The email will include full payment details including account numbers, but here are the basic payment methods. Please note, we can only accept payment in US dollars.

1. Credit card payments are made via our payment portal. If you don’t already have a username and password for our payment portal, please contact billing@crossref.org. Please note, your username and password for the payment portal is different from the username and password you use to register your content with us.
2. Bank transfers/wires and ACH (Automated Clearing House)
3. Checks from US banks. If you are sending payment from a USD account drawn on a foreign bank, please add $50 to your payment to cover processing fees. Please mail checks—with a copy of the invoice or with the invoice number referenced on the check—to: Crossref, 50 Salem Street, Building A, Lynnfield, MA 01940.

If you have not been receiving invoices, please contact us to update the email address. While we’d like to know who you are and what your name is too, we also advise you give us a generic departmental email such as accounts@company.org in order to mitigate against your staff turnover which leads to invoice emails bouncing back. Thank you!

Find out more about our billing process and please contact our member support team if you have any further questions.