Hi there, it’s Collin from the Membership team!
Sometimes we get questions about graduate or undergraduate research journals: are articles published in these types of journals eligible for DOIs?
The short answer is yes! The way we tend to think about whether an item is eligible for a DOI and metadata record is to consider if it either a) cites other materials or b) is likely to be cited itself. If either of these is true then the digital object in question fits somewhere within the scholarly ecosystem and is eligible to have its metadata deposited with Crossref! Articles in undergraduate and graduate journals are no exception.
If you are part of an editorial team for an (under)graduate journal and you are considering registering DOI records for articles you publish, here are a few things to consider before joining Crossref and during the course of your membership.
Should I join Crossref independently or work with my larger university account?
Crossref is a membership organization; in order to register DOI records, you need to be a member. Membership is open to organizations but not to individuals. Membership can also be granted to individual journals in cases where there is no parent publishing organization.
Members pay two types of fees: an annual membership fee for access to Crossref tools and services, and a per-DOI content registration fee. The lowest membership fee tier is $275 USD, billed each January. The cost to register a DOI for a newly published article is $1 USD.
If your university already holds a Crossref membership, we recommend working with them via their existing account/DOI prefix to register DOI records for your (under)graduate journal. There are several benefits to this:
- Because there is only one membership, only one annual membership fee needs to be paid.
- Depending on the kind of academic/library publishing operation your university may already have set up, you may be able to take advantage of centralized access to journal-hosting platforms like OJS, Digital Commons, or Scholastica already in use by your university. Librarians or other staff may also be able to help you deposit your metadata records with Crossref and/or provide you with hands-on training about crafting and submitting complete metadata records.
- There is inherently a high turnover rate for any student publication, since students tend to graduate (we hope!). Working with an existing university membership should increase the continuity of your Crossref membership and the likelihood that your articles remain accessible online and your metadata remains up-to-date.
This last point is especially important. DOIs are intended to be persistent, but if no one is maintaining access to your journal website then the site will go offline, links will rot, and your DOIs will cease to send readers where they should. Working with a university account, especially one based in your university’s library, can help ensure that works are archived somewhere stable and their metadata are continually being updated as needed by university staff with greater longevity than their student-publisher counterparts.
If you don’t know if your university already holds a Crossref membership, feel free to reach out to us at member@crossref.org to ask. Checking with the research librarians on your campus may also be a good place to start.
If your university is not a Crossref member and does not wish to become one, or if you wish to go it alone for any other reason, then you may apply for membership here. If your journal is published by a particular entity (e.g., the Undergraduate Humanities Research Club at Whatever College) then you should apply under that name. If there is no publishing entity behind your journal then you can simply apply under the journal’s name itself.
Which contacts should I list in my application? How do I update contact details?
When you fill out the Crossref membership application, we ask you to submit the details of account contacts who will fill five roles: Primary, Voting, Technical, Metadata Quality, and Billing. A more detailed breakdown of what each contact type does is here.
We ask that you name at least two individuals across at least three different email addresses for your contacts. Generally, we believe that the more people associated with your account the better, in case one person leaves suddenly or loses access to their email address. Oftentimes, though by no means always, the Primary and Voting contact will be the same person, the Technical and Metadata Quality contact will be a second person, and the Billing contact will be a third.
It’s also possible to designate a secondary Technical contact and a secondary Billing contact. In line with the point about continuity above, it may be useful to assign one or more of these roles to a persistent contact with a steady email address at your university in case your journal has complete staff turnover. This will ensure the next editorial team has a way to recover the account even if it is not properly handed over (see below).
It’s also possible to designate “Other member contacts” to your account. These are contacts with no particular roles but who are otherwise authorized to make decisions about your membership. While there is no specific space for this type of contact on the application, you may request to add one at any point during the application process or after you become a member. It may also be useful to designate a shared journal-wide email address as one of your contacts since ideally this email account would also change hands year-to-year and would allow an additional insurance against fully losing access to your membership.
Please also think about passing the baton: if journal leadership will be changing with the graduating class, you should email us at member@crossref.org as soon as you know who the new contacts will be. Incorporating this step into your year-to-year operational documentation is crucial so you do not experience a disruption of service. This is also critical as you may lose access to your institutional email address over time, and we cannot accept requests to update contact information except from trusted account contact addresses. That is to say: if you are registered on your Crossref membership under the name collin@whatevercollege.edu, we can’t accept a request to update your account contacts or other details from collin@hotmail.com.
I’m a member…now what?
Once you’ve joined Crossref you may simply start registering DOIs like any other member. We have extended documentation about how to do this here and we will send you further instructions directly once you join. We also encourage you to deposit the references your articles cite as part of your metadata records; this creates a reciprocal citing:cited-by connection within the metadata between articles in your journal and the works they cite.
It’s also worth mentioning that we strongly recommend that you connect with your national ISSN Centre to request an electronic ISSN (and print ISSN, if applicable) for your journal. However, if you do not (yet) have an ISSN, it is still possible to register DOIs for your journal. You will first need to register a journal-level DOI which will be used as the title record identifier for your journal, and you will need to include this journal-level DOI with each subsequent metadata deposit. If you later register an ISSN for your journal then you can include both identifiers, journal-level DOI and ISSN, with your deposits. (We also suggest you go back and add this ISSN into any previously deposited records too.)
My journal has ceased publication. What should I do now?
The most important question to ask is who will be responsible for the long-term stewardship of your journal contents and metadata records. It’s possible to transfer ownership of DOIs and their metadata records from one publisher to another, so the best option may be to find an academic library prepared to host and manage your backfile publications in perpetuity. If your university has a Crossref account separate from your own membership then they would be the obvious first and best choice, but other universities, especially those with robust publishing programs, may also be able to assist. Once you have identified a publisher ready to host and steward your materials, you will need to initiate the transfer with us by emailing member@crossref.org.
If you have successfully transferred ownership of your DOIs and metadata records to another publisher and you will no longer be using your membership, you should email us at member@crossref.org to cancel it. We will confirm that all of your outstanding fees have been paid and then close your account so you no longer receive recurring invoices from us.
Want to learn more?
A few excellent resources for (under)graduate journals include:
- “Adopting DOI in Legal Citation: A Roadmap for the Legal Academy” by Valeri Craigle - specifically targeted towards law journals but offers a helpful and practical overview applicable to any university-based publication.
- “Zombie Journals: Designing a Technological Infrastructure for a Precarious Graduate Student Journal” by Daniel O’Donnell et al. - thinks through challenges of persistence for graduate journals. Note that in this article the authors opted to rely on DOIs from Zenodo for their publication; while Zenodo’s DOIs are valid and functional, they are registered via our sibling registration agency DataCite and are thus not interoperable with Crossref DOIs and metadata, nor can they be transferred to other publishers in the event of a journal’s publication ceasing.
I hope this has been useful! Please let me know if you have any questions.