In the course of reviewing new membership applications, our team sometimes encounters journals whose publishers offer to register DOI records as an additional add-on for articles published in those journals, usually for an extra fee.
Is this behavior from the publisher proper? Let’s break the question into its parts and address each:
- Can publishers offer DOI records as an optional add-on for materials they publish?
- Can publishers charge an additional fee for DOI registrations?
To the first question: no, publishers cannot offer DOI records for some articles they publish and not for others. By registering DOI records, Crossref members help to build the Research Nexus, a rich and reusable open network of organizations, people, things and actions: a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society. Excluding certain published outputs creates gaps in the scholarly record. We think this is so important that our terms of membership, to which all our members are bound, stipulate that
“The Member shall assign an Identifier to each of its Content items” (2.e). Optionally offering DOIs violates this obligation, as it leaves some articles without DOI records and absent from the record.
A Crossref DOI is not just an identifier, but instead represents an agreement between the publisher and every other Crossref member that they, the publisher, will continue to support access to the published materials. All Crossref members commit to Reference Linking (membership term 2.f), and failing to create DOI records for all your published content removes the option of researchers and other members linking to your content in a persistent way. Beyond failing to meet the obligations of membership set forth in our terms, inconsistent DOI assignment raises questions about potentially inconsistent commitment from the publisher towards ensuring persistent access to their published materials.
Now, to the second question: can a publisher charge for DOI registration? This is not up to Crossref to decide; a publisher may charge its authors for DOI registration as part of a larger article processing charge (APC), so long as this charge is not an optional add-on as outlined above. Crossref charges our members a one-time content registration fee for each new DOI they register, and publishers sometimes pass this cost along to their authors if doing so is part of their business model. For reference, the exact amount that Crossref charges its members for each new DOI registration can be reviewed here.
In short: it’s fine if a publisher charges its authors to register their article’s DOI, but it violates our terms of membership if this charge and the DOI registration is optional. Ultimately, the onus is on the publisher, not the author, to support DOI registration in a consistent, sustained, and persistent manner.
If you spot a publisher engaging in the practice of inconsistent, pay-per-article DOI registration, please contact us to let us know so that we can speak with the member in question.