Equity on Crossref

What does it mean to be a global remote team

Michelle Cancel — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve had a year full of growth and reached a milestone of 60+ team members; let’s take a moment to digest what that means for people operations. Hiring staff in 19+ countries is no easy task, but we are up for it, and I can honestly say it is the main reason why our culture is so great. That might sound biased coming from Crossref’s first Head of Human Resources, but hear me out.

One of our four strategic initiatives is to ‘foster a strong team—because reliable infrastructure needs committed people who contribute to and realise the vision, and thrive doing it.’ Prioritising the team isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s essential to our work.

Before 2025, Crossref did not need to grow the HR function beyond a single HR Manager. In 2024, we began expanding our workforce more globally and worked our way into a new organisational structure in an effort to become a more sustainable organisation that could meet the needs of our global community, well, forever. As we grew in all directions, it became clear that HR was evolving from mainly administrative to more strategic. We’ve had to tackle challenges around total rewards, policies, numerous local employment laws, systems, HR and payroll partners, leave management, and more.

So, what does it mean to be a global remote team? Great question. Let’s break it down into three categories: diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Diversity

My favourite one! Supporting a workforce so diverse is truly a joy. Think about it… bringing numerous cultures together to achieve our goals and strategic agenda is nothing short of phenomenal. As a Spanish-first speaker, I get to use my native language at work to support initiatives in Spanish-speaking countries. For example, I recently co-hosted our ¿Qué tan buenos son tus metadatos? webinar and supported our Ambassadors who did a live demo of our Metadata Manager tool. I even get to conduct new hire orientations in Spanish when the colleague is a native speaker too. We encourage our team members to make use of their known languages when possible. People with widely different backgrounds, intersectionalities, and career experiences are the main recipe for success. After all, we serve 25,000+ members from 167 countries, maintain 180+ million records, and handle 2 billion monthly metadata queries from thousands of tools across the research ecosystem.

This substantial growth in global membership and engagement pushed us to update our recruiting process. We used to collect applications via an email box, which was a time-consuming manual process. It was time to transition to an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) that could help us streamline our processes, manage applications, pipelines, and scorecards. We gathered feedback from hiring managers in order to create a consistent, fair, and unbiased recruitment process. Before going live with a job post, we need to do a lot of work. Once the job description is finalised, HR works with the hiring manager to develop the recruitment plan, including advertising, application questions, scorecard criteria, interview questions, and any exercises or assessments. For the last round of interviews, we share all questions and/or exercises with the candidates beforehand so everyone has the same opportunity and time to prepare. Research and HR guidance consistently frame this practice as a bias-reduction tool—when every candidate gets the same information and preparation time, the interview measures actual competence rather than who performs best under surprise conditions. As we strive to attract a diverse pool of candidates, this practice also supports inclusivity by considering diverse needs.

We work with an employer-of-record (EOR) partner in order to hire in countries where we do not have a locally registered entity. EORs are crucial to staying compliant with numerous payroll and tax regulations, benefits, and changing local employment laws. We need partners that can meet our budget needs and provide the visibility, reporting, and compliance support required to align with our internal controls and annual audits.

Leave management could no longer be a manual process. We needed a tool that could let us accommodate many different public holidays, carryover rules, seniority dates, and schedules while having reliable reporting and record-keeping of accruals. Vacation Tracker, our leave management platform, did a case study on the complexities of our diverse needs back in 2024.

On the training end, we rolled out two courses in 2024 that would nurture and enhance our multicultural workforce: unconscious bias and cultural competence. After completion of the courses, we ran an anonymous survey to collect feedback on their effectiveness and to reveal what areas needed more attention. We decided to make these two courses part of the new-hire onboarding process.

Equity

The most challenging part. How do you create equitable compensation, benefits, and policies across 19+ countries? We had to shift from local to globally minded approaches. As we are committed to meeting the POSI principles of transparent governance, we openly share our employee manual, policies and procedures. These detail our standards for compensation, benefits, paid time off, paid leaves, and others.

All countries have different statutory requirements for benefits. When statutory benefits are less than our standard offering, we will try to enhance the benefit, and when the benefits surpass our standards, we will have to plan and accommodate for them. All of our policies will run concurrently with local employment laws. Let’s look at an overview of:

Compensation: We went from location-based to location-agnostic compensation. This means we used to pay salaries based on local salary ranges and benchmarking, and now pay salaries based on internal salary ranges and benchmarking against global averages. For budgeting purposes, our internal salaries are USD-based, but we pay salaries in the currency of the country in which team members are based. We arrive at the local USD-equivalent salary by determining the average 5-year USD exchange rate, to stabilize currency fluctuations.

These changes require reliable data in the form of internal equity analytics and global salary benchmarking. We first analysed our internal equity when practicing a location-based approach and found that comp-ratios were consistent across teams and levels. This made the transition to a location-agnostic approach smoother. We’ve had to make adjustments to keep up with internal equity and also based on our annual average 5-year USD exchange analysis. After 3 years of practicing these principles, we are reassessing our compensation policy and it will be updated to reflect our growing needs.

Benefits: We have standards of what we offer our team members when it comes to medical, dental, vision, retirement, income protection, and life insurance benefits. Staff participate in these schemes either through statutory benefits or private premiums. These vary by location.

Paid Time Off: Most staff start with 25 days of PTO per year and add an extra day per anniversary year up to 30 days. In the US, staff start with 20 days of PTO per year, add 5 days at the 5th anniversary, and add another 5 days at the 10th anniversary, capping at 30 days. PTO is pro-rated based on start date and working hours per week. Public holidays are separate from PTO and from our unlimited sick time policy.

Paid family and medical leaves: Eligible employees receive up to 12 weeks of fully paid leave per benefit year—to bond with a new child within their first 12 months, or to care for their own or a family member’s serious health condition. Leaves vary by location and run concurrently with local entitlements.

As part of my 2026 goals, I am working on establishing HR controls that support our staffing operations across different countries, while maintaining the consistency needed to ensure equity and sustainability.

Inclusion

It’s how we work. If I could define our way of working in one word, I would go with inclusiveness. It takes a lot of intentionality to work this way and even more so in fully remote work environments. Systematically, we are inclusive by default when staffing across countries and maintaining globally minded policies. Culturally, we have to be intentional about how we work, communicate, and collaborate.

Having 13 different time zones with a spread of 12 hours has been a learning process. We’ve had to find out what days and UTC times work best for teams and all-staff meetings, sometimes accommodating multiple options or alternating between two times. We’ve come together and agreed on Slack best practices to help us navigate expectations around communication. One big area for us is being mindful of work-life balance and how we do not expect team members to reply or be available in Slack outside their local working hours. We also utilise Slack to stay connected in fun ways such as coffee-klatsches, quizzes, and channels on different topics. In our job adverts, we include a specific UTC time range as a required availability window for each role, which is dependent on the needs of each team. These are key aspects of working asynchronously.

In 2023, I facilitated our first psychological safety workshop and have continued to train our new hires on an annual basis. The workshop focuses on four areas: encouraging everyone to speak up, establishing norms for how we handle failure, creating space for new ideas, and embracing productive conflict. Together, we have defined what psychological safety means at Crossref. I love to advocate for it whenever I can as it is very impactful to our inclusive culture when we make it a priority. We added psychological safety sections to our annual development meetings and internal staff surveys.

We strive for cross-team collaboration, as every team member participates in at least one of our three program steering groups: Open and Sustainable Operations (OSO), Co-creation and Community Trends (CCT), and Contribute to the Research Nexus (CRN). Sharing ideas, contributions, updates, and project discussions across teams keeps everyone included, aligned, and informed. We also rolled out a new initiative to foster collaboration, curiosity, and connection between colleagues across different teams and levels in the organisation — the New Buddy and Curious Buddy programs.

We have partnered with training experts in areas that foster inclusiveness. CSCCE facilitated giving and receiving feedback workshops, and ICA:UK facilitated group facilitation methods and consensus-building workshops for team members in group-leading roles. This year, we have partnered with Caplor Horizons and are making cultural training a priority because of our growth spurt and the understanding that every team member contributes to our culture. This is a great opportunity to strengthen our inclusive culture and align on how we work.

In early 2026, Caplor Horizons conducted an anonymous cultural survey and internal interviews. After analysing the results, we planned for our first remote workshop and then a second workshop in person at our annual all-staff. This year, a record 53 people from 19 different countries attended the annual in-person all-staff in Ghent, Belgium. We plan all year for this event and put a lot of effort into making the most out of our time together with a one-week agenda that includes workshops, presentations, co-working time, birds of a feather (BoF) meetings, team lunches, dinners, city tours, a pub quiz, and other fun activities. This is the second year we have done a prioritisation session where everyone gets to vote on projects to prioritise for the following year by using strategic drivers as the baseline criteria — the results of this exercise are reflected in our roadmap. The projects are the result of a remote brainstorm session where everyone gets to participate and contribute.

Here you can see us hard at work—each dot represents a vote, and each colour represents a strategic driver. Team members who couldn’t make the in-person all-staff meeting could also vote remotely—all votes were accounted for!

We also enjoyed the strengths, trial-and-report, and team communication exercises facilitated by our Caplor Horizons trainers. We had a chance to show appreciation for our colleagues, gather feedback on our trial-and-report results, and reflect on the ways we communicate. The trial-and-report exercise was a result of our first remote workshop, where we all contributed ideas to have a positive impact in our main areas of improvement—our collective ideas turned into action as we tried new ways of working and tools for 8-10 weeks prior to the all-staff.

Here you can see us showing appreciation for each other during our strengths exercise—lots of happy faces.

So, what does it mean to be a global remote team?

Being a global remote team is not a checkbox but a living commitment that requires constant intention and care. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are the framework behind every policy we write, every hire we make, and every meeting we schedule across 13 time zones. Do we have it all figured out? Absolutely not. But we show up every day genuinely invested in getting it right — for our team members, for our members around the globe, and for the research community we serve. As we celebrate 60+ team members and look ahead, I am proud of how far we have come and even more excited about where we are going. The future looks bright — we are investing $4.9 million of our surplus in rebuilding the Crossref system and we will need people to help us get there. Be on the lookout for new job opportunities as we continue to grow.

The GEM program - Year Three and program expansion for 2026

Susan Collins — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

As Crossref membership continues to grow, finding ways to help organisations participate is an important part of our mission. Although Crossref membership is open to all organisations that produce scholarly and professional materials, cost and technical challenges can be barriers to joining for many.

Our Global Equitable Membership (GEM) Program aims to provide greater membership equity and accessibility to organisations in the world’s least economically advantaged countries. Eligible members pay no membership or record registration fees. Eligibility for the program is based on a member’s country. Seeing its effectiveness in increasing participation in the research nexus from previously underrepresented regions, this year we are expanding the GEM program to include 18 new countries.

Overview of the first 3 years of GEM

The program began in January 2023 with 214 existing members. By the end of 2025, we had 628 organisations under the GEM program. Of these, 535 are independent members, and 89 members work through one of our sponsors. To date, GEM program members have contributed approximately 334,000 works to the Research Nexus.

Global equitable membership	2023	2024	2025
New members joining	129	127	151
Total member count	327	458	628

Total number of Crossref GEM members by country until the end of 2025:

GEM country – alphabetically	Total no. of members	GEM country – alphabetically	Total no. of members
Afghanistan	29	Malawi	2
Bangladesh	167	Maldives	4
Benin	6	Mali	4
Bhutan	6	Marshall Islands	0
Burkina Faso	7	Mauritania	1
Burundi	3	Micronesia	0
Cambodia	14	Mozambique	2
Central African Republic	1	Myanmar	3
Chad	0	Nepal	60
Comoros	1	Nicaragua	2
Congo, Democratic Republic	24	Niger	0
Côte d’Ivoire	3	Rwanda	9
Djibouti	0	Samoa	0
Eritrea	0	São Tomé and Principe	0
Ethiopia	17	Senegal	7
Gambia	0	Sierra Leone	2
Ghana	38	Solomon Islands	0
Guinea	0	Somalia	10
Guinea-Bissau	0	South Sudan	0
Guyana	3	Sri Lanka	31
Haiti	2	Sudan	14
Honduras	3	Tajikistan	8
Kiribati	0	Tanzania, United Republic of	28
Kosovo	9	Togo	1
Kyrgyz Republic	27	Tonga	0
Lao, People’s Democratic Rep.	5	Tuvalu	0
Lesotho	0	Uganda	23
Liberia	1	Vanuatu	0
Madagascar	5	Yemen	37
		Zambia	8

Membership Density in GEM Program Countries until the end of 2025

Program expansion in 2026

Starting on 1st of January 2026, we’re excited to invite organisations from Angola, Belize, Cabo Verde, Cameroon, Republic of Congo, Dominica, Eswatini, Fiji, Grenada, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Timor Leste, and Uzbekistan to join Crossref and register their content and metadata with us without membership or record registration fees. There are 711 existing Crossref members based in these countries who are now eligible for the program, bringing the overall number of GEM members to 1339 across 77 countries (that’s close to 5% of all Crossref members).

In creating our eligibility list, we refer to existing sources. For the first three years of the program, our list was predominantly based on the World Bank’s International Development Association (IDA) classification. In 2026, we leveraged additional sources to curate our list, resulting in the inclusion of 18 new countries in the program. Following community feedback, we now refer to the IDA, the IDA Blend List, and the United Nations Least Developed Countries list. In our choices, we also keep abreast of the global situation and conversations about supporting equitability in scholarly publishing and in the future, we may consider other factors too.

We will review our lists and the eligibility criteria annually and note any changes on our website. Members whose country moves on or off the GEM Program will be notified of any upcoming fees (or the removal of fees) with adequate time to plan and budget accordingly. Although the GEM program reduces financial barriers, many small organisations may still need administrative, technical, and language support provided by our Sponsors, and we will continue working with suitable organisations to make participation in Crossref easier.

Supporting Membership through the Sponsor Program

Susan Collins — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Sponsors make Crossref membership accessible to organisations that would otherwise face barriers to joining us. They also provide support to facilitate participation, which increases the amount and diversity of metadata in the global Research Nexus. This in turn improves discoverability and transparency of scholarship behind the works.

Growing number of sponsors

Our first sponsors joined in 2008, but the program started to grow rapidly between 2012-2014, with the addition of sponsors in South Korea, Türkiye, Russia, India, and Ukraine. In 2015, we welcomed our first South American sponsor from Brazil, followed by more sponsors in Latin America starting in 2016, and our first sponsor in Indonesia in 2017.

As of December 2024, Crossref works with 124 sponsoring organisations that support 12,195 sponsored members.

In 2021, we updated the criteria for organisations to be accepted as sponsors, raising the bar to ensure that potential sponsors accurately and successfully represent Crossref in the community. We also paused the acceptance of new Sponsors from regions where such organisations are already prolific. By doing so, we can focus on growing the program in areas with the greatest need.

In 2024, we added eight new sponsors to the program; these included our first sponsor in Bangladesh (our first GEM sponsor), as well as sponsors in China, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Türkiye, Tunisia, Iraq, and Kenya.

Our five largest sponsors, based on the number of members they support (as of the end of 2024) are:

Relawan Jurnal Indonesia, Indonesia - 3076 members
Associacao Brasileira de Editores Cientificos do Brasil (ABEC Brasil) - 1312
Tubitak Ulakbim DergiPark, Türkiye - 1248
NEICON ISP, Russia- 713
Kyobobook Center, South Korea - 419

The majority of sponsors are much smaller than this, looking after 25 or fewer Sponsored Members.

Each sponsor has specific criteria for what kind of organisations they work with. Some are dedicated to supporting organisations in a specific country or region, while others may be based on geography, language, subject area, or usage of a specific platform, e.g. OJS.

Our sponsors are distributed across all regions of the world, and we’re continuously working to forge networks with organisations in regions with the least coverage, to ensure scholarly communicators anywhere can join Crossref and contribute to the Research Nexus.

Asia Pacific: 22
Central and Eastern Europe: 29
Central and South Asia: 25
Latin America and the Caribbean: 24
North Africa and the Middle East: 3
Sub-Saharan Africa: 2
US and Canada: 5
Western Europe: 14

Currently, sponsored members represent 115 different countries, with the largest proportions from Latin America, South-eastern Asia, and Eastern Europe. Nearly two-thirds of sponsored members self-identify as universities, libraries, government agencies, foundations, scholar publishers, and research institutions.

To date, sponsored members have contributed 6.5 million works to the Research Nexus.

Importantly, the sponsored members have the ability to fully participate in Crossref – they are stewards of their records (even if some choose to delegate this activity to their sponsor), they can vote, stand in for elections to our Board of Directors, and collaborate with others in the Crossref community, just as any other member.

Sponsors are key partners for us in making participation easier for organisations in their communities. They work with us to provide administrative, billing, technical, and local language support to the members they work with. Depending on the financial model, they may charge members for their services.

Technical support they provide for members makes it more tailored and often quicker than the Crossref team could offer. For example, sponsors can provide service in their local language using their preferred method (helpdesk, WhatsApp, phone, email), which varies widely by region; or, where they charge any fees – they tend to collect those in the local currency. Some sponsors even take care of all the records registration for the members they support.

It’s important to note that sponsors can only support the participation of organisations that would otherwise be in the current $275 fee tier (or up to $500 for funders) if these organisations were to join independently. Regardless of the number of sponsored members, the sponsor pays one membership fee on behalf of them all, and then they also pay all the registration fees that are due on behalf of their sponsored members, which alleviates challenges related to paying in foreign currency. Overall, sponsors make Crossref membership more economical for the organisations that participate this way, and Crossref benefits from billing efficiencies.

In a recent survey of sponsored members (carried out in July 2023, with 204 responses from members working with 53 sponsors), the majority of sponsored members (88%) said that sponsors met their expectations and 85% are likely or very likely to recommend their sponsors to another organisation.

Respondents indicated that the aspects of working with a sponsor that were most valued are technical support (72%), financial assistance/no annual fee (37.3%), ability to pay in local currency (43%), and local language support (44%).

It’s important to note that sponsors often offer many non-Crossref services to members too, including anything from website design, copy editing, typesetting, set up of publishing platform, XML-JATS markup, to assistance with submitting content to third-party databases.

Sponsors represent Crossref in the community. They also assist us in connecting with their communities locally. In 2024, we collaborated with Biteca for an event in Bogotá, and Relawan Jurnal Indonesia for a two-day event in Jakarta. Both sponsors advised on venues, promoted the event to the members they support, coordinated local guest speakers, and provided translation services as needed. We also collaborated with Hipertexto-Netizen on engaging our community at the Guadalajara Book Fair. The success of these events was in part due to our collaboration with each sponsor.

Ensuring quality experience for our members

We try to make sure that every sponsor we work with will be able to commit to helping our members long-term. We offer training too, with an expectation that they can disseminate the learning to their members. The majority of sponsored members report receiving some training from their Sponsors (with 70% in our survey saying they’ve received adequate training on all services, while only 3% haven’t received any so far). Most recently we engaged sponsors with the Participation Reports to help them improve metadata completeness for their members.

In 2024, we’ve been meeting sponsors individually to review how things are going for them and their members – assessing member metadata quality, and additional services, as well as inviting their feedback about the program and suggestions for improvements that Crossref could make.

We’ve learnt a lot about practices related to record registration and training, business models and especially – a whole range of attitudes and approaches related to metadata completeness. Some sponsors register content for all or some of their members, while others provide technical support but do not register the content directly for members.

Members who used OJS often had higher scores because of the ease of use and availability of the plugins. Some sponsors noted that many journal editors are volunteers and don’t have the time or financial resources to collect extra metadata or update existing metadata records; they collect only what is required to register an item. Several sponsors also reported a barrier with authors’ mindset – they don’t tend to see the value of including ORCiDs or ROR IDs in their submissions. Somewhat surprisingly, we learned that not all members see the value in including references in their deposits or don’t wish to take the time to add them – this is a concern, as relationships created by references are a cornerstone of the Research Nexus, and markedly support discoverability of the content.

Sometimes, sponsors are unable to continue to provide services, or they are unable to meet the obligations of being a sponsor and their accounts are closed. In the cases where a sponsor account is closed, we will work with their members to find an alternative sponsor when possible.

Similarity Check is an external service provided in partnership with iThenticate, that’s available to Crossref members at a more competitive price, and it is in demand among the sponsored members too. Currently, 78 Sponsors offer Similarity Check to their members (however, not all sponsored members working with these sponsors have elected to use the service).

Sponsor LIBCOM Piotr Karwasinski was pleased that “All the rules of Crossref are unified. Everything is the same for everyone - the same for big publishers as well as small. Equal for everyone.”

Costs can sometimes be a concern; sponsors in India and Algeria both noted that $1USD is a lot of money for some. We mentioned the fee review being conducted with the RCFS project.

In summary

As we move toward realizing our vision of a connected Research Nexus, building a network for the global community must include input from all of the global community. When Crossref began 25 years ago our first members were mainly from the United States and Western Europe, but today our membership is much more global and diverse. Though our membership has grown to more than 22,000 organisations around the world, we are not seeing significant membership growth from all regions.

In the last few years, almost half of our members came from Southeastern Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America combined. However, there is much slower growth in other regions, mostly notably Northern and Sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of Central Asia, with only 5% of new member applications coming from these regions collectively. We know there are organisations in those areas contributing to the scholarly record, however, many continue to face financial, technical, and administrative barriers to become members.

The Sponsor Program is one of the avenues established to address and reduce barriers and to help facilitate membership and participation to all knowledge-sharing organisations worldwide. Ensuring it remains strong and successful requires collaboration, communication, and comprehensive training.

The GEM program - Year Two 2024

Susan Collins — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We began our Global Equitable Membership (GEM) Program to provide greater membership equitability and accessibility to organisations in the world’s least economically advantaged countries. Eligibility for the program is based on a member’s country; our list of countries is predominantly based on the International Development Association (IDA). Eligible members pay no membership or content registration fees. The list undergoes periodic reviews, as countries may be added or removed over time as economic situations change.

The program began in January 2023 with 214 existing members; and 131 more joined throughout the year. In 2024, we saw 127 organisations joining via the GEM program, bringing the total number of participants to 458. We welcomed our first-ever members from Sierra Leone and Honduras, as well as our first Sponsor in Bangladesh (Sponsors are organisations that work with us to provide administrative, billing, technical, and local language support to the members they work with).

Of 458 organisations participating in the GEM program, 380 are independent members, 77 are sponsored, and there is one sponsoring organisation. To date, these members have contributed over 279,000 works to the Research Nexus, our concept of a fully connected global scholarly ecosystem.

Though we have Sponsors based elsewhere, working with members who are in GEM countries (e.g. PKP), we will continue to consult with our ambassadors and other partners to identify potential new sponsors that are based in GEM countries.

Number of Crossref GEM members by country:

GEM Country (Alphabetically)	Total No. of Members
Afghanistan	17
Bangladesh	120
Benin	5
Bhutan	6
Burkina Faso	4
Burundi	2
Cambodia	8
Central African Republic	1
Congo, Democratic Republic	15
Ethiopia	13
Ghana	27
Guyana	2
Haiti	1
Honduras	1
Kosovo	8
Kyrgyz Republic	23
Lao, People’s Democratic Republic	2
Madagascar	4
Malawi	2

GEM Country (Alphabetically)	Total No. of Members
Maldives	3
Mali	3
Mauritania	1
Mozambique	2
Myanmar	1
Nepal	50
Nicaragua	2
Rwanda	7
Senegal	7
Sierra Leone	1
Somalia	9
Sri Lanka	14
Sudan	19
Tajikistan	4
Tanzania, United Republic of	21
Togo	1
Uganda	17
Yemen	30
Zambia	5

Number of Crossref members in GEM Program Countries

We are excited about our in-person event taking place in a few weeks in Accra, Ghana, as a direct result of the increasing participation and interest in Crossref from the region.

We can see a clear connection between outreach activities conducted by us and our Ambassadors and the increase in awareness and the number of members joining from related countries. These were Bangladesh, Nepal, Uganda, and Tanzania in 2023, and Ghana, Zambia, Sri Lanka, and Tanzania in 2024.

From our Ambassadors’ activities in the GEM countries, some recurring questions emerged highlighting barriers to joining Crossref. It’s important to recognise that many institutions struggle with funding and technical expertise. It’s no surprise that they are often concerned with the maintenance of their membership over the long term. We emphasize that GEM is a sustained measure to accommodate knowledge-sharing organisations from the regions of financial strain. Whilst the program addresses the costs of membership and content registration, our Ambassadors can assist further, offering technical support with record registration, metadata best practices, and integrating Crossref services with existing systems, including Open Journal Systems (OJS); and discuss how registering metadata improves research visibility.

We are grateful to our Ambassadors for directly supporting the GEM program within their countries through webinars and presenting in person at conferences: Shaharima Parvin and MD Jahangir in Bangladesh, Richard Bruce Lamptey in Ghana, Niranjan Koirala in Nepal, Oumy Ndiaye in Senegal, Lasith Gunawardena in Sri Lanka, and Baraka Manjale Ngussa in Tanzania.

The GEM program - year one

Susan Collins — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In January 2023, we began our Global Equitable Membership (GEM) Program to provide greater membership equitability and accessibility to organisations located in the least economically advantaged countries in the world. Eligibility for the program is based on a member’s country; our list of countries is predominantly based on the International Development Association (IDA). Eligible members pay no membership or content registration fees.

The list undergoes periodic reviews, as countries may be added or removed over time as economic situations change. Sri Lanka was added to the GEM program in March 2023 as they were recategorised to the IDA classification by the World Bank.

When the program launched, we had 214 existing members eligible for the program who then were no longer charged for membership or content registration. Since the program began, we have welcomed an additional 131 new members into the program, including our first members from Cambodia and Togo.

Country	As of 1/1/2023 (start of GEM)	Additions in 2023 (end of first year of GEM)	Total
Afghanistan	6	4	10
Bangladesh	56	33	89
Benin	1	1	2
Bhutan	4	2	6
Burkina Faso	2	0	2
Burundi	1	0	1
Cambodia	0	2	2
Central African Republic	1	0	1
Congo, Democratic Republic	1	11	12
Ethiopia	4	6	10
Ghana	14	7	21
Guyana	1	1	2
Haiti	1	0	1
Kosovo	2	2	4
Kyrgyz Republic	22	3	25
Laos	1	0	1
Madagascar	1	1	2
Malawi	1	0	1
Maldives	1	0	1
Mali	2	0	2
Mauritania	1	0	1
Myanmar	1	0	1
Nepal	20	18	38
Nicaragua	1	0	1
Rwanda	4	1	5
Senegal	3	3	6
Somalia	2	2	4
Sri Lanka	13	5	18
Sudan	9	2	11
Tajikistan	5	1	6
Tanzania	9	7	16
Togo	0	1	1
Uganda	3	6	9
Yemen	16	12	28
Zambia	5	0	5

With help from our ambassadors based in GEM countries, we organised and co-hosted several webinars to introduce the program, along with an introduction to Crossref, and the benefits of including all kinds of research objects in the Research Nexus.

In April, our team, together with ambassador Binayak Raj Pandey, provided an overview of Crossref for members and organisations in Nepal.
Our team and ambassadors, Dr Md Jahangir Alam and Shaharima Parvin hosted two webinars in May for members and organisations in Bangladesh. The first webinar provided an introduction to Crossref, our services, and the GEM Program. The second webinar focused on the methods to register content and how to add and update metadata.
In September, ambassador Baraka Manjale Ngussa joined us for an introductory webinar aimed at organisations in Tanzania
In November, CARLIGH (the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Ghana), Crossref, and EIFL co-hosted a webinar for librarians and journal editors in Ghana with a discussion on the GEM program and Crossref services.

In 2024, we will continue to collaborate with our ambassadors and other members of the community to offer more opportunities for organisations in GEM-eligible countries to learn about the program and the benefits of membership for content discovery.

The program was initially met with scepticism by some organisations in GEM-eligible countries, who wanted to be certain that it wasn’t a free trial, that there are no hidden fees, or that they would be required to pay later for other services. Others expressed concern that Crossref would introduce fees after a year or two. Though we were able to clarify these aspects of the program, we understand the concerns and are working to ensure we provide clarity and transparency about the program. Additionally, we will be conducting a complete review of our fees in 2024, and we will ensure that GEM-eligible members will have input.

Although the program offers relief from fees, many organisations require technical assistance and language support. The GEM program would benefit from an increase in local Sponsors to facilitate membership and provide support, particularly In countries with the highest growth, such as Bangladesh, Nepal, Yemen, Kyrgyz Republic, and Ghana. Though we have Sponsors working with members who are in GEM countries (e.g. PKP), we do not yet have any Sponsors who are based in a GEM country.

We will be working with relevant like-minded organisations, such as PKP, DOAJ, INASP, OASPA, EIFL, and others, to help identify suitable candidates for new Sponsors in underserved regions and engage them proactively. Additionally, we will consult with our ambassadors in GEM countries to help identify potential Sponsors. We are beginning the year by making the most of the momentum created in African countries (Uganda, Ghana, Tanzania) and looking to develop new networks in other parts of the world in Q2-Q4 of this year.

Refocusing our Sponsors Program; a call for new Sponsors in specific countries

Susan Collins — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Some small organisations who want to register metadata for their research and participate in Crossref are not able to do so due to financial, technical, or language barriers. To attempt to reduce these barriers we have developed several programs to help facilitate membership. One of the most significant—and successful—has been our Sponsor program.

Sponsors are organisations that are generally not producing scholarly content themselves but work with or publish on behalf of groups of smaller organisations that wish to join Crossref but face barriers to do so independently. Sponsors work directly with Crossref in order to provide billing, technical, and, if applicable, language support to Members.

Because Sponsors are important partners in facilitating membership there is a high bar to meet to be accepted as a Sponsor. To ensure that an organisation can accurately represent Crossref and has the resources to be successful we created a set of criteria that must be met to be considered.

Our Sponsors program has grown considerably over the last decade and has now become the primary route to membership for emerging markets and small or academic-adjacent publishing operations.

The program began in 2012 with four Sponsors, based primarily in South Korea and Turkey, representing fewer than 100 members. In the next stage of development, the program covered Brazil, India, and Ukraine, and nearly 1300 members. At the end of 2022, the program had grown to over 100 sponsors from 45 countries representing over 11,000 of our members.

Though the program continues to expand, there are still regions where we lack Sponsors, while having an abundance in others. We are working with members, ambassadors, and the community to help identify organisations that may be a fit with the Sponsor program and based in those regions where coverage is lacking.

This January we announced our Global Equitable Membership (GEM) Program which offers relief from membership and content registration fees for members in the least economically-advantaged countries in the world. Eligibility for the program is based on a member’s country on our curated list.

Though the GEM program reduces financial barriers to becoming a member, many organisations still require technical assistance and local language support. Working with a Sponsor would help organisations overcome these burdens. However, there is little or no Sponsor coverage for organisations located in most GEM-eligible countries. That means that in places like Bangladesh, Nepal, and Senegal, where we’ve seen a lot of growth, more organisations could join us if a suitable local Sponsor could support them.

We have made the decision to pause accepting new Sponsors from regions where Sponsor numbers are already very high or not based in a GEM region. By doing so we can focus on growing the program in areas where there is the greatest need.

We are also going to focus on how best to support our current 100+ Sponsors and work with them to evaluate ways to improve the program. We will bolster the training and resources, outreach activities, and solicit feedback on additional ways we can help.

We would love to hear from organisations based in GEM countries who might consider becoming a Sponsor. But our invitation for Sponsors is not limited to the support for the GEM program. There are countries where the GEM program won’t apply, but where growth is high and no Sponsor is present. In particular, we seek support in the following countries where member numbers are growing but could be better supported.

Country/state	Region	No. Crossref members
Nigeria	Sub-Saharan Africa (Western)	99
Philippines	South-eastern Asia	81
Kenya	Sub-Saharan Africa (Eastern)	40
Egypt	Northern Africa	26
Sri Lanka	Southern Asia	13

If your organisation is based in one of these regions and supports or provides services to scholarly publishers in one of the above countries —please take a look at the criteria set out on our website and do get in touch to start the conversation if you think you can meet them. We’re excited to hear from you!

Introducing our new Global Equitable Membership (GEM) program

Susan Collins — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

When Crossref began over 20 years ago, our members were primarily from the United States and Western Europe, but for several years our membership has been more global and diverse, growing to almost 18,000 organisations around the world, representing 148 countries.

As we continue to grow, finding ways to help organisations participate in Crossref is an important part of our mission and approach. Our goal of creating the Research Nexus—a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organisations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society—can only be achieved by ensuring that participation in Crossref is accessible to all. Building a network for the global community must include input from all of the global community.

Although Crossref membership is open to all organisations that produce scholarly and professional materials, cost and technical challenges can be barriers to joining for many organisations. To address some of these challenges, we created our Sponsors Program, which provides technical, financial and local language support. We also collaborate with the Public Knowledge Project on the Open Journals Platform to develop plugins for OJS users.

Additionally, we had a limited ‘fee assistance’ program to waive the content registration fees for members working under specific Sponsor arrangements, including INASP, and African Journals Online (AJOL). Learning from the experiences of such successful partnerships, starting in January 2023, we are expanding this program to provide greater membership equitability and accessibility to organisations located in the least economically-advantaged countries in the world through our Global Equitable Membership (GEM) Program. This new scheme now encompasses the annual fee as well as the content registration fees.

Eligibility for the program is based on a member’s country. We have curated the list, predominantly based on the International Development Association (IDA) list and excluding anywhere we are bound by international sanctions. From January 2023, organisations based in countries listed in our GEM program will be eligible to join Crossref and contribute with their metadata to a robust scholarly record at no cost. This also applies to 187 existing members in eligible countries who will no longer be charged for Crossref membership or content registration.

Existing Crossref members in GEM-eligible countries

Bangladesh (54)	Burundi (1)	Kiribati (0)
Kyrgyz Republic (20)	Central African Republic (1)	Lesotho (0)
Nepal (19)	Democratic Republic of the Congo (1)	Liberia (0)
Ghana (15)	Guyana (1)	Marshall Islands (0)
Yemen (10)	Haiti (1)	Mauritania (0)
Sudan (7)	Honduras (1)	Micronesia (0)
Tanzania (7)	Laos (1)	Mozambique (0)
Afghanistan (6)	Madagascar (1)	Nicaragua (0)
Ethiopia (5)	Malawi (1)	Niger (0)
Zambia (5)	Maldives (1)	Samoa (0)
Bhutan (4)	Myanmar (1)	Sao Tome and Principe (0)
Rwanda (4)	Cambodia (1)	Sierra Leone (0)
Tajikistan (4)	Chad (1)	Solomon Islands (0)
Kosovo (3)	Comoros (1)	South Sudan (0)
Senegal (3)	Cote d’Ivoire (1)	Togo (0)
Uganda (3)	Djibouti (1)	Tonga (0)
Burkina Faso (2)	Eritrea (1)	Tuvalu (0)
Mali (2)	Gambia (1)	Vanuatu (0)
Somalia (2)	Guinea (1)
Benin (1)	Guinea-Bissau (1)

The list of countries will undergo an annual review, to follow the latest guidance from IDA, which uses the somewhat simplistic World Bank income classifications but applies a more granular blend of criteria for economic health, thereby allowing for greater nuance, such as indicating countries where the gap between rich and poor is very wide.

The program results from our experience working with and knowing the communities through Sponsors and working with past members who have struggled to pay. It aims to bring us closer to our vision of building an inclusive, rich and open network of relationships underpinning the scholarly record. With the support of the Membership and Fees Committee, the launch of the program was confirmed with the recent unanimous vote of our Board to evolve our fee assistance program into a more expansive scheme. GEM presents a more comprehensive and equitable solution than our former arrangements. It involves an opportunity to join Crossref and contribute scholarly metadata to our global community on a zero-fee basis for membership and content registration. This offering will be applied by default to organisations based in all eligible countries, irrespective of joining through any specific Sponsor, or independently.

While the GEM Program will alleviate financial barriers, and we hope to see the numbers above grow significantly, the GEM program will not necessarily help ease technical or administrative burdens. We still need our valued Sponsors for that and we seek new Sponsors in the above locations. We would love to hear from organisations based in GEM countries who might consider becoming a Sponsor or otherwise support local colleagues in building experience of metadata and working with global open scholarly infrastructure systems like Crossref. Please reach out to me to discuss ideas or with any other questions or comments.