Hi there
Thank you for your interest in Crossref membership. Here is some general information on membership, and on how to apply.
Background information
You need to be a member of the Crossref organization in order to get a DOI prefix so you can create Crossref DOIs and register content. Membership of Crossref is open to organizations who publish scholarly content - if your content is likely to be cited in the scholarly ecosystem, then you are eligible to join. You need to apply in the name of your parent publishing organization, rather than in the name of your individual journal or conference. You’ll then be able to use this single member account to register DOIs for all the content that your organization publishes.
As a member, you have obligations to your fellow members and the wider scholarly community - these include registering your content with us (so registering a DOI, a resource resolution URL, and a lot of other metadata), keeping that metadata up-to-date, and displaying your DOIs on the landing page for your content items. The landing page needs to include a full bibliographic citation for the content you are registering and a way to access the full text of the content. You also need to ensure that you use DOIs in your article references. When you join, you agree to the membership terms outlined on our website here.
In return, you join a community of publishers who are all linking to each other persistently through their references. Your metadata is shared with hundreds of organizations in the scholarly ecosystem, and you are able to take advantage of Crossref services (content registration, the Funder Registry, Similarity Check, Cited-by and Crossmark). And, of course, you’re able to create a persistent identifier for each citable object that you publish.
Fees
There’s an annual membership fee, which varies depending on your publishing revenue. As a guide, the lowest tier is USD 275 per year for organizations with publishing revenue lower than USD 1 million. If you don’t have revenue for your publishing, we look at publishing expenditure. The fees are the same for commercial and not-for-profit publishers.
In addition to your annual membership fee, we also charge content registration fees in the form of a one-off fee for each DOI you register with us. These fees vary depending on the type of content you register and whether the publication date is current or backfile but, as a guide, the cost to deposit a current journal article (published this year or in the two previous calendar years) is USD 1. These content registration fees are usually billed quarterly in arrears. Once an item is registered, there’s no further charge to update the metadata associated with it.
You can find full details of the annual membership fee and content registration fees on our website.
How to join and what happens next
There are a few steps to joining and it usually takes a week or so to complete the process, depending on how many extra questions we have to ask you after receiving your application. We send you a pro-rated membership invoice to cover your membership fee for the remaining months of the current year. Once you have paid your prorated membership fee, we provide you with a DOI prefix. You then use this prefix to create full DOIs for your journals and articles, and register them with us by providing the URL for the content and a lot of other metadata. This can be done via an online form, or by submitting XML - you can read more about the options here.
To apply, please complete the membership application form on our website.
Do let us know if you have any further questions.
Thank you
Sal
