Latest blog posts
Amanda Bartell
2025 May 11

Notice of amendments to Crossref membership terms and bylaws

In its March 2025 meeting, the Crossref board unanimously voted to update both the Crossref bylaws and the Crossref membership terms to:

  • Provide more clarity and alignment between our bylaws and membership terms, where they had become out of sync over the years.

  • Reflect previous board motions and bring both documents up-to-date with current processes for suspending and revoking membership, and reviewing those decisions.

  • Work towards being more explicit about what “Member Practices” should look like in terms of preserving the integrity of the scholarly record.

...Find out more
Kornelia Korzec
2025 May 07

Meet six winners of the first ever Crossref Metadata Awards

Marking our 25th anniversary, we launch the Crossref Metadata Awards to emphasise our community’s role in stewarding and enriching the scholarly record.

We are pleased to recognise Noyam Publishers, GigaScience Press, eLife, American Society for Microbiology, and Universidad La Salle Arequipa Perú with the Crossref Metadata Excellence Awards, and Instituto Geologico y Minero de España wins the Crossref Metadata Enrichment Award. These inaugural awards highlight the leadership of members who show dedication to the best metadata practices.

...Find out more
Patricia Feeney
2025 May 02

Metadata Advisory Group call for applications

We’ve been accelerating our metadata development efforts and recently released version 5.4 of our metadata schema, and are planning to release version 5.5 (including support for multiple contributor roles and the CRediT taxonomy) this summer. We will also extend our grants schema based on the Funders Advisory Group work, and make progress on other changes as set out on our new metadata development roadmap.

As we work towards the vision of the rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organizations, people, things, and actions, dubbed the Research Nexus, our schemas need to change to accommodate the evolving landscape of research processes and communications.

...Find out more
Johanssen Obanda
2025 April 29

Reflections from Crossref Accra 2025 - Strengthening open science and partnerships in Ghana

Crossref is a membership organisation, and it’s the global community of members that creates the Research Nexus together. Meeting our community locally is a highlight and an important learning experience. This year, we started by connecting with a growing community in Accra, Ghana - our first in-person event in the country included in our GEM program. From 14 members in 2023 to 31 in 2025, our community in Ghana is blooming.

At its core, Crossref Accra 2025 was about showing up for the community in Ghana - listening, learning, and building together. On the 20th of March, we welcomed 66 participants: journal editors, university staff, librarians, and researchers. People who are doing the real work of making scholarly publishing happen in the region.

...Find out more
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Member Practices

We often refer to a member being “in good standing”, and that means meeting their membership obligations set out in the membership terms, such as displaying DOIs correctly and as links everywhere, linking references, only registering works for which they have the appropriate rights, and paying fees on time.

We have been working with the community to understand what is considered good member practices in relation to the integrity of the scholarly record (ISR).

In March 2025, the Crossref Board voted to create a more specific set of standards for what constitutes reasons to revoke membership ‘for cause’”’ and what ‘harm to the Crossref community’ means in practice. Clause 2) a) of our July 2025 membership terms asks members to comply with Member Practices, i.e. this page. This Member Practices page will be fleshed out by a dedicated community group of research integrity experts (currently being formed) and will be used to guide decisions about suspending and revoking/terminating membership ‘for cause’.

As ever, Crossref’s first response to problems with member activity will always be to work closely with the member to solve these problems where possible, and suspension or revocation remains an absolute last resort. The responsibility for revoking membership remains a Board decision, but we need more guidance and clearer processes, especially given the range and volume of members (22,000 organizations from 160 countries and over 200 new members joining each month) so we need help to hone the processes, and ensure that we are playing our part in preserving the integrity of the scholarly record.

Page owner: Amanda Bartell   |   Last updated 2025-May-12