Fees

Our membership fees for organizations who will be registering published research outputs are tiered depending on the publishing revenue or expenses of your organization. Please select your tier from the table below, and use the higher number of either:

1. 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). Or, if no publishing revenue then:
2. Total annual publishing operations expenses including (but not limited to) staff costs, hosting, outsourcing, consulting, typesetting, etc.

Since 2019, funders are able to register DOIs for the research grants they have awarded. Their annual membership fees are lower than for all other members, but their grant registration fees are higher. Funder fees are tiered depending on your annual award value.

Content Registration (metadata deposit) fees are one-time fees for the initial registration of DOI metadata records with us, and they are usually billed quarterly in arrears. If you are a member through a sponsor, your sponsor will pay registration fees on your behalf (but they may also charge you for their services - more here). If you are eligible for the GEM program, you will not pay registration fees - more here.

There are different fees for different record types, and some record types have discounts for older content - newer items are charged at the “current record” price, and older items are charged at the “backfile record” price. Some record types also have volume discounts available.

After the initial registration fee, there are no further fees for updating the metadata associated with existing records.

Content registration fees by record type

*Note: “Current record” prices are for content that was published (or awarded, in the case of grants) in the current calendar year + the previous two calendar years, and “Backfile record” prices are for content that is older than that. So for records registered with Crossref in 2025, current records are anything registered with publication/award dates of 2025, 2024, and 2023. Backfile is anything registered with publication/award dates of 2022 or before.

Volume discounts: peer reviews

If you register multiple peer reviews for the same article, then volume discounts apply. The prices and discounts are different depending on whether you are the publisher of the article being reviewed. Volume discounts don’t apply across reviews for different articles.

Registered by the title publisher

Registered by an organization who is not the publisher of the title being reviewed

Volume discounts: preprints and other posted content

Volume discounts: book chapters and reference entries for a single title

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. There is no difference in price between current and backfile records for datasets and components.

Members of Crossref can participate in Similarity Check. The service fee is 20% of your annual membership fee and is included in your annual membership fee invoice.

Each document run through Similarity Check is charged at a per-document-checking fee, and there are volume discounts. There is a separate invoice for Similarity Check document checking fees. This invoice is sent annually in January for the previous years’ usage.

If you want to get and use our metadata, you don’t need to be a member. We have a free public REST API that you can use without contacting us. Metadata Plus is a dedicated pool of servers and is a good option if you want a more predictable service level than we can support with the free API, and it comes with monthly snapshots of XML or JSON data dumps for you to do more flexible and customised analyses. There is an annual subscription fee which is payable each January or wll be pro-rated for the remainder of the calendar year.

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

The fee tier is selected based on whichever is the higher between

• your total annual revenue (including earned and fundraised, e.g. grants); or
• your annual operating expenses (including staff and non-staff, e.g. occupancy, equipment, licenses etc.).

The subscriber is always considered to be the largest legal entity, unless:

• you are a university, then the subscriber is considered to be the university department(s), school(s), or faculty(ies) that is using the service e.g. Department of Earth Sciences, School of Law, or Faculty of Medicine.
• you are a government body, then the subscriber is considered to be the agency(ies), department(s), or ministry(ies) that is using the service, e.g. Agence de l’Innovation Industrielle, Department of Energy, or Ministry of Consumer Affairs.

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 Sponsor. 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 record 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.