We get some variation on this question fairly frequently: “can I buy DOIs without joining Crossref as a member?” “Our organization only publishes a few reports per year; can we just pay for a few DOIs without also paying for membership?” and so on.
I thought I’d zoom out to explain how Crossref is structured, why it’s structured that way, and what that means for you.
Crossref is a membership-based trade association. If you want to be fancy, our legal name is Publishers International Linking Association, Inc.; we are structured as a nonprofit association of members who are involved in various scholarly publishing activities.
In my primer on DOIs, I explained that DOIs were developed to combat broken links in the scholarly record. This is true, but it’s not the full story. Back before DOIs, publishers were signing bilateral contracts with one another essentially saying “When your articles are cited in our journals, we’ll include links to those articles as long as you include links to our articles when they’re cited in your journals.” That’s easy enough to do when you have only two publishers, but when you have many publishers, suddenly you have many individual contracts to sign, as each publisher must agree to these terms individually with every other publisher!
If DOIs tackle the problem of link rot, membership tackles the problem of needing to negotiate individual bilateral agreements between publishers. When a new member joins Crossref, they agree to adhere to our membership terms; among these terms is our reference linking clause (2.f) which stipulates that each member “shall embed the appropriate Identifier(s) within each reference citation appearing in the Member’s Content.” Now, members only need to execute a single agreement with Crossref, rather than with each of our 23,500 members. One imagines this saves everyone a little time!
Reference linking is only one of our membership stipulations. More broadly, our terms lay out expectations that each of our members deposit complete metadata in a timely manner and only for materials to which they hold the rights. The terms also compel members to continue supporting persistent access to their materials, either via continued updates to the URL associated with each DOI (if, for example, a journal moves from one domain to another), via the transfer of DOI ownership from one member to another (if a material is sold by one member to another), or via archiving in a long-term digital archive.
To return to the original question, it isn’t possible to simply “buy” Crossref DOIs piecemeal without also being a member. Even though you only pay once for each DOI you register, DOIs are not one-time purchases; they instead represent an understanding that the material referred to by the DOI will remain accessible under the stewardship of the member who registered the DOI. Think of it like this:
DOIs are a tool to persistently connect resources within the scholarly ecosystem and membership allows us all to share understandings and expectations of what this looks like practically. To be a Crossref member is to know that other Crossref members will act a certain way when it comes to how they handle metadata and linking in scholarly spaces. Without membership as a structuring framework, we would lack the mechanisms that we have now to ensure that DOIs are not simply abandoned willy-nilly and to ensure that duplicate DOIs are not willfully registered for identical materials.
If the cost of our annual membership fee is prohibitive for your organization, note that we’ve just introduced a new lower fee tier of $200 USD for organizations whose annual publishing revenue or expenses (whichever is higher) fall below $1,000 USD. Working with a sponsor is another option for members in certain areas, though sponsors may charge their own fees, so please be sure to reach out to any prospective sponsor about your specific organizational needs/budget. And of course, we also have our GEM Program, which offers fee-free access to Crossref tools and services for organizations based in the least economically advantaged countries in the world.
Ready to become a member of Crossref? You can apply here any time you like.
(Thanks to @epentz for the cat featured in today’s post!)