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Crossref pricing, features, company info, and alternatives
A factual product page for Crossref as open scholarly metadata infrastructure with a REST API.
Last updated April 2026 · Pricing and features verified against official documentation
Pricing
Current public pricing tiers on file for Crossref, last verified Apr 17, 2026.
Public REST API
$0
No sign-up is required to use the public REST API, and metadata use is free.
Member tier 1
$200 / year
For organizations with under $1,000 in annual publishing revenue or expenses.
Member tier 2
$275 / year
For organizations with $1,000 to $1 million in annual publishing revenue or expenses.
Member tier 3
$550 / year
For organizations with $1 million to $5 million in annual publishing revenue or expenses.
Member tier 4
$1,650 / year
For organizations with $5 million to $10 million in annual publishing revenue or expenses.
Member tier 5
$3,900 / year
For organizations with $10 million to $25 million in annual publishing revenue or expenses.
Member tier 6
$8,300 / year
For organizations with $25 million to $50 million in annual publishing revenue or expenses.
Member tier 7
$14,000 / year
For organizations with $50 million to $100 million in annual publishing revenue or expenses.
Member tier 8
$22,000 / year
For organizations with $100 million to $200 million in annual publishing revenue or expenses.
Member tier 9
$33,000 / year
For organizations with $200 million to $500 million in annual publishing revenue or expenses.
Member tier 10
$50,000 / year
For organizations with more than $500 million in annual publishing revenue or expenses.
Metadata Plus
Contact sales / year
Tiered annual subscription for predictable service levels and monthly XML or JSON snapshots.
What You Can Do With It
The main capabilities that shape how people use Crossref today.
Register and steward DOI-linked metadata for scholarly outputs, including provenance, funding, license, and relationship data.
Query the public REST API for works, journals, members, funders, prefixes, types, and licenses.
Access bibliographic metadata that includes ORCID and ROR identifiers, post-publication updates, and abstracts where available.
Use the open metadata network to support discovery, analytics, and downstream research workflows.
Best For
Who Crossref is most clearly built for.
Publishers and scholarly organizations that need DOI registration and metadata stewardship.
Developers building research infrastructure on top of DOI-linked records.
Teams that need open scholarly metadata for discovery, enrichment, or analytics.
Platforms
Where you can use Crossref today.
Web
API
Monthly XML/JSON snapshots
Privacy Notes
Publicly stated data-handling notes that matter when evaluating Crossref.
Crossref says it uses Matomo for site analytics and that Matomo does not hold onto your data.
The privacy notice says personal data provided to Crossref may be transferred to the United States.
Membership sign-up data is stored in CRM and email systems for member operations.
Compliance
Public compliance or enterprise-governance signals we found for Crossref.
POSI
Access
How to integrate or build around Crossref.
Public API
Yes
Docs
Available
Alternatives
Other tools worth considering alongside Crossref.
Open research catalog and API for scholarly works, authors, institutions, and related metadata.
Linked research-data platform for discovery, analytics, and research-security workflows.
Free AI-powered research tool for scientific literature search and discovery.
Free biomedical literature database for searching citations, abstracts, and linked full text.
Product Snapshot
Crossref is a nonprofit scholarly metadata registry and DOI infrastructure service. It lets members register and steward metadata, and it exposes that metadata through a public REST API.
What You Can Do With It
- Register DOI-linked metadata for scholarly content and keep provenance, funding, license, and relationship data attached.
- Query the public REST API for works, journals, members, funders, prefixes, types, and licenses.
- Use the metadata in discovery, analytics, enrichment, and downstream research workflows.
- Retrieve public metadata without sign-up, or subscribe to Metadata Plus for higher service levels and monthly data snapshots.
Why It Stands Out
It is built as shared scholarly infrastructure: the value is the metadata network itself, not a standalone search UI.
Tradeoffs To Know
- Publishers and other content stewards need membership to create and register metadata.
- The public API is free, but the service is not a consumer product and the fee structure is tiered.
- Metadata Plus is subscription-based, so predictable high-volume access still requires a commercial conversation.
Sources
- crossref.org/fees
- crossref.org/membership
- crossref.org/about
- crossref.org/about/history
- crossref.org/news/2000-06-05-crossref-goes-live-journal-reference-linking-service-membership-roster-grows-to-33-publishers
- crossref.org/documentation/retrieve-metadata/rest-api
- crossref.org/operations-and-sustainability/privacy